Suchergebnisse

Youth in Catalonia are caught in the middle of a hotly contested political conflict over the region's possible independence from Spain. Focusing on a large sample of secondary school students (n = 1550; 24.6% immigrants) from 30 schools, we use multilevel modelling to investigate identification with competing national identities and their implications for xenophobia. The larger social context is reflected in native students viewing Catalan and Spanish identifications as incompatible with one another, whereas this is not the case for immigrant students, who are much more likely to identify as both Catalan and Spanish, albeit at a lower level. Investigating the perceived basis of what makes someone Catalan, native students viewed their national identity to be a matter of both ascription (e.g. birth, legal status) and practice (e.g. embracing traditions, personal feelings), whereas the identifications of both Muslim and non-Muslim immigrants were exclusively based on viewing Catalan identity as a matter of practice. Conceiving of Catalan identity as a matter of practice was also linked to lower levels of xenophobia. Our findings are consistent with the conception of Catalan national identity as cosmopolitan and welcoming to immigrants, in line with outreach of the Catalan independence movement seeking to attract support.

In a Europe based on the idea of equal membership, where there is an ongoing collective institutional attempt at creating a shared European identity in multiregional Europe, it is considered vital to understand the attitudes of youth toward this shared identity in order to obtain clues about future attitudes, and thus, future cohesion of the European Union. This article presents results from a survey of 1709 students aged 15-16, attending 30 Catalan high schools, in which participants are asked questions about their identification (or lack thereof) with Europe and, indirectly, their interest in whether or not they would like to continue to form part of the current supranational structure. This article takes into account a number of sociodemographic variables, relevant in the international literature, regarding European Union identification and its continuance. Moreover, given that it is currently an intriguing time to delve into youth attitudes in Catalonia, the particularities of the Catalan political situation in 2014 are briefly elaborated on and taken into consideration in the data analyses in some measure. The discussion centers on comparing the findings of the survey with those of other studies in different European contexts and proposes new areas of inquiry for future research.