The paper deals with the discursive and multimodal resources employed to construct the EU configuration of positions in relationship to ‘Europeanness’. It mainly focuses on the description and examination of the various communicative modalities and practices used by the EU to form and further a pan-European identity. We have paid particular attention to the communicative strategies adopted by the EUROPA website. In many ways, these persuasive and self-legitimating strategies are amongst the most traditional of rhetorical devices, but as so often, the medium is the message: the adoption of new communicative technologies is shown to be both an appropriate and powerful way of creating the new spaces, sets of values and voices on which new identities are necessarily based.