Suchergebnisse

"What do we imagine when we think about a united Europe? According to the Eurobarometer, which recurrently puts this question to a sample of citizens from all the countries of the Union, 'freedom to travel, study and work anywhere in the EU': this is the reply given, year after year, by the majority of the interviewees. It is not the Euro, nor democracy, nor peace among nations, but free movement which epitomizes the European Union in the minds of Europeans. Ettore Recchi describes the free movement regime of the EU in terms of both its policies and the experiences of the people involved - that is, mobile European citizens. With a particular focus on their integration paths, political participation and identifications, this book draws on large cross-national surveys of this specific population carried out between 2004 and 2012, as well as in-depth interviews and aggregate statistical data from a plethora of sources. Based on an unprecedented wealth of empirical information, but also on a thorough examination of the historical and legal underpinnings of free movement rights in the EU, this is essential reading for scholars and practitioners of migration, EU studies, international relations and politics. But it offers food for thought to social and political theorists as well, helping to assess the extent to which this unique frontierless migration regime bolsters denationalization and spearheads a cosmopolitan order in the making"--

This report presents the findings of a three-year research project titled The Europeanisation of Everyday Life: Cross-Border Practices and Transnational Identities among EU and Third-Country Citizens (EUCROSS) funded by the European Commission as part of the 7th Framework Programme. Between 2011 and 2014, the project has carried out an extensive collection of sociological data in six EU member states: Denmark, Germany, Italy, Romania, Spain, and the UK. These data have two main sources. First, a large-scale, systematic and independent CATI survey (the EUCROSS survey) of 8500 interviews to nationals of these six countries and immigrants from Romania and Turkey. Second, a set of follow-up in-depth face-to-face interviews with 160 respondents (the EUMEAN survey).
These datasets advance existing studies on sociological Europeanisation by going beyond conventional data, such as Eurobarometer, and by taking its findings deep into a detailed breakdown of the changing everyday life and social practices of Europeans. Moreover, the project extends the realm of research on the internationalisation of European societies that has mostly been charted in social theoretical speculation rather than empirically established findings.
At a very general level, we address the theme of the sociological foundations of European integration. We tackle an argument that resonates strongly in the public discourse but is also echoed in much social science on the subject: namely, that European integration is 'an elite process' (Haller 2008). This argument has two strands. The first one, less problematic, holds that the EU (and its former institutional incarnations from the 1950s onwards) has been designed and advanced by a very small slice of the European population. By itself this should not be surprising: all new political regimes tend to be elite creations (Higley and Burton 2006). However, the second strand is much more contentious, even dangerous, and affects the chances of future European unity. It maintains that 'Europe' has become part of the life of the upper classes and a privileged segment of those classes who most directly benefit from European integration, while the rest of the populace is increasingly alienated from it. 'Elites and citizens live in different worlds', insists Haller (2008) – and only elites have a Europe-wide horizon. With some nuances, Fligstein reaches a similar conclusion in his book Euroclash (2008) – the EU population is split between a minority of Europeanized citizens and a majority of non-Europeanized ones, with national middle classes wavering in between.
The EUCROSS project sets out to test this argument: that is, discover more about the degree of 'horizontal Europeanisation' (Mau and Verwiebe 2010) of EU citizens, as well as an indicative sample of third country nationals, the Turkish. The project assumes that cross-border practices of all kinds, both physical and virtual, are the crucial aspect of the Europe in the making. Their spread or not across social categories – classes, cohorts, gender and nationalities – defines the degree of 'social exclusivity', so to speak, of sociological Europeanness. If low, the elite argument holds; if not, it doesn't. As committed empirical scholars, members of the EUCROSS team (from six different research institutions across Europe), endeavour to test to what extent such a cleavage divides Europeans in their everyday life.
The project focuses on practices (i.e., behaviour) but does not downplay the relevance of subjective dimensions of Europeanisation – a European 'identification' or, in a broader meaning preferred by EUCROSS researchers, 'sense of belonging' (Savage et al. 2005), as well as values, whether national or cosmopolitan. Indeed, broadly speaking, we expect that cross-border practices do indeed diffuse a sense of transnational belonging, in line with the 'transactional thesis' put forward initially by Karl Deutsch (Deutsch et al. 1957). But, again, this is submitted to empirical testing. Moreover, European belonging is unpacked into three different facets: a sense of cultural-territorial belonging to 'Europe', support and participation to the political project embodied by the EU, and solidarity with fellow Europeans.

Gli studi sulle migrazioni possono essere divisi in due grandi filoni a seconda del loro oggetto precipuo: da un lato, la mobilità delle persone; dall'altro, la loro incorporazione nei luoghi di destinazione. Questa seconda tematica è preponderante, sia nel dibattito teorico e pubblico che nella ricerca empirica degli ultimi decenni. La mia attenzione si concentra invece piuttosto sulla pri-ma, sviluppando una sociologia della mobilità umana. Analiticamente, lo stu-dio della mobilità può assumere due prospettive distinte ancorché convergenti – una centrata sugli attori sociali, l'altra sui sistemi di regolazione. In questa nota, rendo conto in maniera sintetica delle ricerche da me promosse sulla re-golazione globale della mobilità transnazionale, e in particolare sulle condi-zioni di ottenimento dei visti di ingresso e sulla natura delle frontiere interna-zionali terrestri. I risultati di queste ricerche offrono nuove evidenze sulla di-visione del pianeta in un Nord e un Sud e mostrano ulteriori sfumature nella distribuzione delle chance di mobilità transnazionale e della libertà di circola-zione di cui godono gli individui su scala mondiale.

Does the experience of intra-EU mobility under the aegis of the free movement regime bolster a stronger European identification? This paper tries to address this question by framing it into a theoretical discussion of collective identity formation on the basis of social-psychological tenets. In particular, it outlines a 'culturalist' and a 'structuralist' model as most likely – and complementary – avenues of attachment to territorial-political entities. Applied to the EU, the structuralist model echoes Karl Deutsch's 'transactionalist thesis', according to which cross-border individual practices are expected to create a sense of belonging to the overarching political unit. Using different indicators and surveys, the model is corroborated empirically. Not only do EU movers tend to feel more European than the general population, but all types of cross-border practices are found to feed into a more likely identification with Europe. In addition, among EU movers, European identification is significantly more frequent, the longer the period they have spent living abroad. Intra-EU migration is accompanied by the presence – and perhaps the maturation – of an identitarian bond unknown in the majority of the population. However, the limited demographic spread of free movement experiences reduces their overall capacity to uphold the legitimacy of the Union decisively. Free movement is an engine of Europeanness, but its horsepower is not sufficient to be a locomotive of further integration.

AbstractEquality in life‐chances of nationals and immigrants is a sensitive issue on which there is more debate than systematic evidence. To evaluate this condition across European societies, the concept of integration as "migration neutrality" is introduced. "Migration neutrality" is defined as the irrelevance of national citizenship as a predictor of key social attainments. Odds ratios are used to measure the relative risk of non‐national as compared with national citizens in the attainment of relevant resources. While this indicator cannot control for compositional differences in the populations at stake, it represents a straightforward benchmark that can be used in different domains to describe and compare foreign citizens' position relative to nationals. In this article, we calculate it across EU member states through Eurostat data. In particular, the focus is on migration neutrality in the risk of social exclusion. Country variations are found to be hardly amenable to established classifications of integration types. Moreover, the relationship between "migration neutrality" levels and pro‐immigrant policies (as measured by the Mipex index) is found to be weak, suggesting that these policies do not consistently target the reduction of the gap between nationals and non nationals.

"Space, Mobility and Legitimacy" published on by Oxford University Press.

This brief paper locates the EUCROSS project within the field of studies on European identity, sharpens its theoretical underpinnings and outlines policy scenarios in line with its general hypotheses. In the broad literature on European identity, a basic distinction between speculative research on civilisational identities and empirical social science research on collective identifications must be drawn. Focusing on the latter, to which the EUCROSS project belongs, it is argued that there are two distinct logics underlying existing inquiries. These are grounded in models of collective identity formation that stress either cultural messages inscribed in discursive processes or practices situated in socio-spatial relations. They are called respectively, the 'culturalist' and the 'structuralist' models of identification. The first one considers identity as a direct outcome of the exposure to content-specific messages; the second, as an emerging property of socio-spatial interactions that are content-free of identity references. The EUCROSS project adopts and advances the second and less developed research tradition which studies the effects of transnational practices on European identification. This paper discusses the potential of this approach from a policy-oriented perspective. In this last respect, it is held that the culturalist model encourages the development of narratives 'selling' the Union to its citizens, while the structuralist model suggests a content-neutral emphasis on the facilitation of cross-border practices.

An investigation into the reasons why certain young Italians pursue party politics, when these politics are generally unappealing to the majority of young Italians, shows that political interest is often accompanied by a desire for a political career. A political career, however, is often impossible without the aspirant having access to a certain level of wealth, education, political connections within the family, & the ability to acquire high social capital, conditions that make it an unlikely, & therefore uninteresting, pursuit for most young Italians. Party youth officers (N = 115) were interviewed to establish their psychological & background characteristics compared to a control group (N = 322). The predicted differences among the militant group, such as social centrality, were not found to be significant. 1 Table, 2 Graphs. Adapted from the source document.