European Outliers? Rethinking Europeanisation and Euroscepticism in Britain and Denmark

ABSTRACT

In the light of Brexit and ongoing doubts about the future of a united Europe, have Britain and Denmark really been outliers to the collective European project, as suggested by their political positioning towards the EU? Despite the Euroscepticism expressed in referenda and public attitudes, we question whether these two countries are inherently less Europeanised, sociologically speaking, than other member states habitually seen as closer to the European project. Using data from the EUCROSS survey about the transnational practices and identifications of ordinary European citizens in five member states, we show that Britain and Denmark have been positioned close to Germany in terms of the degree and type of European cosmopolitanism and transnationalism found in these countries, and are more transnational societies than Spain and Italy. Moreover, in other ways, Britain and Denmark have been exemplary European societies, embodying the EU's cosmopolitan ‘normative power' agenda. We suggest that the marked divide between the ‘everyday Europeanisation’ of these societies and their political hostility to the EU is a paradox that lies at the heart of the democratic crisis of the continent, a schism that may now be directly corrosive to the longer term cosmopolitanism fostered by European integration.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented with the title ‘Irrational Nationalism’ at the annual meeting of the European Union Studies Association in Miami, May 2017. We thank in particular Jason Beckfield, Theresa Kuhn and Kalypso Nikolaidis for comments at that meeting that helped in the paper’s further development, as well as our EUCROSS colleagues, Ettore Recchi and Albert Varela, and anonymous referees of this journal.

2 Our survey sample was found to be slightly skewed with respect to education and age, when checked against administrative population data from Eurostat. We, therefore, correct with weighting the descriptive estimates in all analyses; age and education are controlled for in the multivariate regression (Table 5). The Stata 14.2 survey (svy) routine was used based on a one-stage cluster design with countries as strata. Since the EUROSTAT data is restricted in terms of age range, we opted here to exclude respondents older than 74 (9.3% of total N) in all analyses using weights resulting in an analytical sample of 4529 observations.

3 Cronbach’s alpha, the scale reliability coefficient, for this index is .51. While this value is below conventional levels, we find it acceptable for this theoretically derived scale. Furthermore, sensitivity analyses with an alternative index based on factor scores derived from a principal component factor analyses (PCA) for discrete data using the Stata ado ‘polychoric’ (for details see Kolenikov and Angeles, 2004) very closely mirrored our descriptive as well as multivariate analyses (available on request) which is why we chose to present the simpler additive index.

4 We chose the value 70 of the ISEI scale since occupations placed at this level and higher typically correspond to higher level professionals (see Ganzeboom and Treiman 1996, 221-237).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission 7th Framework Programme of Research (FP7-SSH-2010-2; project number 266767).

Notes on contributors

Adrian Favell

Adrian Favell is Chair in Sociology and Social Theory and director of the Bauman Institute at the University of Leeds. He is the author of many works on immigration politics, intra-EU migration, the sociology of the EU, citizenship and cosmopolitanism.

David Reimer

David Reimer is Professor of Educational Sociology at Aarhus University. His research focuses on processes of social stratification in education as well as other domains of society – often in a comparative perspective. His articles have appeared in journals such as European Sociological Review, Social Science Research and Sociology.