INTEGRATION – WHAT INTEGRATION?

ABSTRACT

Since the founding of the European Union, religion has become an increasingly important aspect in shaping European identity and thereby social cohesion in Europe. Social cohesion depends to a high degree on a successfully established distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Religion became one important marker of such boundaries. However, religion works both as an individual-level and an EU-level property. In order to take religion into consideration on the level of individual religiousness and as an institutionalised framework, we combine an analysis of key documents of the European Commission with a quantitative analysis of individual attitudes towards Europe. This combination of methods enables us to track the ‘discovery of religion’ by the European Commission as a means for social cohesion and the potential of religion to create Europeanness among the EU-citizens. We focus on the crucial period between 1990 and 2000 in which the major system transformation from EEC to EU took place. The quantitative analysis is conducted as a multi-level analysis on the basis of the European Value Survey 1990 and 2000. The data reveal that in fact over a 10-year period, the European integration project has begun to evolve towards an identity project with religion as a key factor on both levels.

Keywords:

• European integration
• religion
• multi-level modelling
• EVS

Notes

¹The EC regards ‘religion’ as a policy field and resource for integration rather than an individual belief-system.

²Throughout the article, we use the social cohesion and integration interchangeable. We are aware that both concepts refer to different scientific debates.

³Here, we focus on the EC as the only EU-level actor because it is the main executive body of the EU with the right to initiate legislation and supervise its compliance.

⁴Besides the Single European Act, the Charter of Fundamental Social Rights (COM(89)248 final) guarantees the social dimension of the integration project.

⁵Title XIV, Article 130, especially 130b, of the Treaty on European Union (1992) and the Social Cohesion Reports which are presented by the EC every 3 years reporting the progress in economical and social cohesion. The first report was published in 1996.

⁶Simultaneously, the EC published the First Social Cohesion Report (1996) in which the EC proposed to create social cohesion through social dialogue with civil society. The initiative ‘A Soul for Europe’ is one such method.

⁷Without intending to go too deeply into the debate, we assert that different notions of secularisation are discussed: According to Weber's (2006 [1922]) thesis of the ‘enchantment of the world’, secularisation refers to the replacement of religious explanations by scientific ones in modern societies. An alternative notion claims that secularisation refers to the progressive differentiation detaching religion from other functional systems of society (e.g., Luhmann 1977). Secularisation, thirdly, is understand as a lack of religious answers to the stable and constant demand for transcendence (Stark and Bainbridge 1987) or, according to Casanova (1994), as the syndrome of decline of membership, decline of influence of churches and religious communities in the public sphere and as a decline of religious values. Secularisation as well is seen as a trend towards privatisation and individualisation of religious beliefs and practices (e.g., Davie 2001).

⁸The EVS has been criticised for its quality. We cross-checked the size of the denominations from the EVS 2000 with data from Fox (2004) and the ISSP-data on religion from 1998 and found some differences that might be due to differences in data collection procedures. Nevertheless, these differences rarely exceed 5 percentage points. A cross-check for the EVS data from 1990 was not justified since ISSP 1991 and EVS 1990 comprise different countries. Additionally, the results for the individual-level control variables are in line with other research. We therefore consider the EVS as a trustworthy data set.

⁹The countries included: France, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Malta, and Slovenia. Although all countries were considered potential members, not all of them were part of the EEC/EU in 1990 or 2000. Additionally, the transformation process of the eastern European countries was not completed in 1990. Empirically, however, neither membership nor being a country in transformation shows any significant impact on the individual confidence.

¹⁰Research in other areas provides evidence that single-item questions are not necessarily inferior to more complex item batteries (e.g., Nagy 2002). Additionally, our results on the decline of trust during the 1990s are very much in line with research using other data. Therefore, we consider the EVS data as trustworthy.

¹¹Odds higher than 1 indicate that the probability of positive attitudes exceed the probability of negative attitudes; odds lower than 1 indicate the opposite.

¹²All items are measured on a 10-point scale and are thereby treated as approximately quantitatively measured variables. A check for multicollinearity indicates correlations not higher than ±0.1.

¹³Depending on the research question, religiousness is operationalised as ‘religious commitment, religious tradition and religious salience’ (Nelson et al. 2001: 196), as ‘church membership’ (Jagodzinski 2009) or as ‘belonging to a religious orthodoxy and practicing religious rites on one hand and on the other, experiencing religious feelings, experiences and meanings’ (Davie 1990, 2001).

¹⁴This is captured by an index out of eight questions on transcendental issues that is standardised between 0 and 1; with 0 indicating no salience and 1 meaning ‘high salience’ (Cronbach's α=0.907).

¹⁵We do not explicitly refer to the content of different religions or to the functional or substantial dimensions of religion (for such differentiation: Berger 2001).

¹⁶All country-level data are displayed in the Appendix.

¹⁷Tables are not reported.

¹⁸An ANOVA analysis showed that the between-group variance of denominations concerning trust in the EEC/EU is significantly larger than the within-group variance. Additionally, we found that the loss in Europeanness among Catholics between 1990 and 2000 is significantly lower than among members of other denominations. results of the analysis are not reported here.

¹⁹‘Ideational’ components of social cohesion apply to the identification and affiliation of the members with the group. In contrast, the ‘relational’ dimension refers to the relations between individuals (Moody and White 2003: 104).