Measuring the Europeanization of Everyday Life: Three New Indices and an Empirical Application

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to conceptually clarify the measurement of Europeanization from a transactional perspective. Following Karl Deutsch, we regard cross-border practices and sense of community as constitutive for an emerging European society. But we critically reassess how this approach has been put into empirical practice by contemporary scholars. Typically, too much attention is paid to absolute Europeanization, and too little to relative Europeanization. In order to properly investigate the European society as situated between the nation-state and the world society, we argue that Europeanization involves both national openness (the salience of Europe compared to the nation-state) and external closure (the salience of Europe compared to the world). Three indices are suggested to capture relative Europeanization and its major components. Recent Eurobarometer and European Values Study data on practices and attitudes of EU citizens is used to illustrate our approach empirically. The results demonstrate that external closure adds a new layer of information for understanding everyday life Europeanization. We also find a bifurcation between practices for which Europe is the more relevant reference frame (as compared to the world) and attitudes for which it is not.

Key words:

• European society
• Europeanization
• globalization
• transnationalism
• transactions
• European identity

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Jan Lorenz for his advice on the mathematical properties of Europeanization indices and to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. All remaining errors are our own.

Funding

This research is part of the project ‘Cross-border Interactions and Transnational Identities’, which is supported by the German Science Foundation (DFG) within the framework of the DFG research unit FOR-1539 ‘Horizontal Europeanization’. For more information, see http://www.horizontal-europeanization.eu/en.

Notes

1. No information on domestic travel is provided for Luxembourg, Sweden, Ireland, Cyprus, Malta and Slovenia. Consequently, for traveling these countries are not included in our computations.

2. For instance, an aggregate NO-score of .5 for travel could mean that all EU-25 citizens who did travel traveled both domestically and European, or that half of the travelers made domestic trips only, while the other half made European trips only. The latter situation would correspond to a split between locals and cosmopolitans, to use Merton's (1949) famous terms.

3. If N_family were smaller than our guesstimate of 94% (e.g. 75%), family* would only move closer to mobility intention on the x-axis and very likely stay in the cluster.

Additional information

Funding

Funding: This research is part of the project ‘Cross-border Interactions and Transnational Identities’, which is supported by the German Science Foundation (DFG) within the framework of the DFG research unit FOR-1539 ‘Horizontal Europeanization’. For more information, see http://www.horizontal-europeanization.eu/en.

Notes on contributors

Jan Delhey

Jan Delhey is Professor of Sociology at Jacobs University Bremen, School of Humanities and Social Sciences (SHSS). He holds a diploma in Sociology from Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg and received his doctoral degree from Free University Berlin. His research interests include cross-national differences in subjective well-being, trust and social cohesion, and sociological aspects of European integration. He is currently leading the project ‘Cross-border Interactions and Transnational Identities’, which is funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG) and part of the DFG research unit ‘Horizontal Europeanization’.

Emanuel Deutschmann

Emanuel Deutschmann is a Research Associate at Jacobs University Bremen and an Affiliated PhD Fellow at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences. He holds a BSc in Social Sciences from the University of Cologne and an MSc in Sociology from Nuffield College, University of Oxford. His research interests include social networks and transnational social interaction, with a regional focus on Africa, Europe, and Latin America.

Timo Graf

Timo Graf is a regular PhD Fellow at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences. He holds a BA in Integrated Social Sciences from Jacobs University Bremen and an MA in Politics from the University of Cambridge. His research interests include civilizational identity and intergroup conflict; state failure; and China-EU relations.

Katharina Richter

Katharina Richter is a Research Associate at Jacobs University Bremen. She holds a BA in Integrated Social Sciences from Jacobs University Bremen and an M.Soc.Sci in Ethnic Relations, Cultural Diversity, and Integration/Sociology from the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include social transnationalism, transnational sense of community, and denationalization, especially with respect to the European integration process.