How to think in a new way about “European identity”? This contribution proposes to consider Europe as a “fractured identity”, drawing the attention on the concept of “fracture”, a metaphor used in the historical and political studies on the national unification processes, then adopted in sociology. The aim of the work is to focus on the heuristic and interpretative potentialities of the concept of fracture in the European identity analysis, considering it not as an ontological data, but as a construction process that must be continuously aroused and renewed. A perspective «historical rooted» because «any construction perforce takes place in time, and therefore in history».