Wounded Collective Identity in Europe: Trauma, Religiosity, Modernization and Visions of the Future Based on Empirical Studies of Thirty-Eight European Countries

Abstract

Máté-Tóth (2015, 2022) uses the concept of woundedness and the theory of wounded collective identity to describe the collective self-understanding of the Central and Eastern European region. An international study by the Századvég Foundation in 2022, based on 38,000 respondents (1,000 per country), provided an opportunity to test the theory on a European sample. This study sought to answer the question of the prevalence of a wounded collective identity in Hungary and other European countries, and whether the theory has any region-specific relevance. The results show that regional in-betweenness can be considered to be a determining factor for wounded collective identity.