EU identity visions and narratives of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in European Schools

ABSTRACT

In ‘European Schools’, created for children of EU officials, narratives of European identity among students could match EU visions. Yet, students’ individual narrations of their identities are more complex. The study systematises these narratives of Europeanness: cosmopolitan, multinational and transnational notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Qualitative thematic analysis provides perspectives on what ‘being (not) European’ means for EU, European Schools and teachers – and most importantly, it disentangles identity narratives of European School students. Based on interviewing 101 students across three schools, the analysis shows that EU and European School propositions of a multinational European identity differ from teachers’ and students’ cosmopolitan and transnational narratives. At the EU level, Europeanness implies an ‘out-group’ of a nationalist, war-torn past. Students contradict EU visions by widening teachers’ antinationalist narrative and excluding people within Europe. They exclude intolerant and narrow-minded, but more generally people who are more national and less mobile than their ‘in-group’. Systematically comparing European identity narratives thus helps to uncover these contradictions. Not all narratives about Europe are available to everyone and individual opportunities to partake in mobile, multilingual Europeanness need reconsideration.

KEYWORDS:

• European identity
• European Schools
• narratives
• transnationalism
• cosmopolitanism
• us/them

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Two to three focus groups in each school with 7–14 participants and 35 individual in-depth interviews (11-14 in each school). Interviews lasted 15–30, focus groups 25–45 min.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Judith Rohde-Liebenau

Judith Rohde-Liebenau is a postdoctoral researcher at the Hertie School, Berlin's University of Governance, and research fellow at the Jacques Delors Centre. Her research interests include (transnational) education, identity and socialisation, European integration and policy learning, and qualitative methods. She successfully completed her DPhil (PhD) in Sociology at the University of Oxford in 2018 with her thesis ‘Raising European citizens? European narratives, European Schools and students' identification with Europe’. She also holds Political Science degrees from Freie Universität Berlin, Sciences Po Paris, UCL London, and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.