Conference Paper

Despite the advocates of the common EU identity, many people and scholars do believe that the EU will not ultimately prevent them from being French, German, Polish, and so on. It is almost impossible to avoid recognition of the opposing phenomenon of common identity, growing ethnocentrism, particularly when the EU is seen from the perspective of the smaller countries and cultures. Many of them seem sincerely concerned about the prospects of the effective preservation of their cultural specifics within the EU common socio-cultural context, if ever fully established. We argue that contemporary corporate management theory and practice can offer several concepts and cases that can lead to the desired achievement of a common identity, while not suppressing the individual goals, values and cultural identity of the EU member states. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the project of future Europe, by presenting an insight into the set of best-practices in the cross-cultural management within a selected group of big corporations, that can almost in their original form be transposed onto the areas of social life and politics.