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Abstract
Considering the current process of horizontal Europeanisation which has resulted from the new opportunity structure created by the EU, this article discusses to what extent the European Member States are economically and socially intertwined. The proposition of this paper is that social interactions go hand in hand with economical interactions between the European Member States. In order to validate this assumption, a horizontal Europeanisation index that measures Europeanisation in contrast to globalisation was developed. The underlying variables of our index cover 25 European countries and were mainly collected from OECD and EUROSTAT. Almost all European countries are economically more Europeanised than globalised. We observed a medium correlation between the economic and social dimension, indicating a rather low systematic pattern between the two dimensions of horizontal Europeanisation in 2011. However, this assumption cannot be upheld when considering the time perspective. When comparing 2007–2011, social cross-border transactions are relatively disconnected from economical cross-border transaction.
Notes
1. In this way, the transactionalist approach regards social and economic ‘interactions’ as the main indicator for the measurement of ‘integration’.
2. In this framework, ‘downstream effects’ of EU legal and political directives, decisions and jurisdiction on specific national structures (Bartolini Citation2005; Cowles, Caporaso, and Risse Citation2001; Flockhart Citation2010) have been covered.
3. Unlike globalisation and internationalisation, Europeanisation follows as a direct outcome of legal decisions (Favell et al. Citation2011) and has often been framed as a specific response to worldwide developments (Bartolini Citation2005).
4. The fact that European nation states belong to the most globalised countries has also been affirmed by the KOF index for Globalisation in the economic, social and political fields (Dreher, Gaston, and Martens Citation2008), as well as by the DHL Global Connectedness Index in the areas of trade, capital, information and people (Ghemawat and Altman Citation2012).
5. For further information on attitudes towards Europe, see Gerhards and Lengfeld (Citation2013), Fligstein (Citation2008), Kuhn (Citation2011) and Recci and Nebe (Citation2003). Regarding the identification with Europe, see Díez Medrano (Citation2008).
6. These terms where coined by Lockwood (Citation1964) and used and developed by Habermas (Citation1987). For Lockwood, the term ‘social integration’ referred to social interactions among actors, while system integration covers the relationship among institutionalised parts. Habermas specified that social integration is therefore driven more by communication and norms, while system integration displays instrumental rationalities (Delanty and Rumford Citation2005).
7. The 25 countries considered are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia and the United Kingdom. In order to eliminate missing values at certain points in time, for each country and variable we used the mean value for the years 2006 and 2007, 2008 and 2009 as well as 2010 and 2011. Hence, values for the year 2011 refer indeed to the average value of the jointed years 2010 and 2011.
8. In the CFA, we included further variables (e.g. transport of freight and persons, exports and imports of print media, tourism overnight stays as well as multiple other economic and social practices). These were not described above because they did not contribute to a better identification of our latent factors.
9. The CFI measures the model fit in structural equation models. It equals the discrepancy function adjusted for sample size. CFI ranges from 0 to 1, whereby a value of 0.90 or greater implies an acceptable model fit (Hu and Bentler Citation1999).
10. The indicator Cronbach’s alpha measures internal consistency showing the density of a set of item’s interrelatedness. It ranges from minus infinitely to one; the reliability coefficient is rated as good above a value of 0.6.
11. Where 0 indicates no horizontal Europeanisation (0%) and 1 an ideal ‘complete’ horizontal Europeanisation (100%).
12. The values of the EC and NO-index are correlated with each other to a highly significant degree, social to 0.8 and economy to 0.96. While the values of the NO-index add to the EC-index in showing us the relevance of the particular variables within each country, our index of European closure informs us about the usage of the European social and economic opportunity structure, already on its own.
13. This indicates that intra-European social interactions are relatively low when compared to their national reference categories. The share of European free-movers who work or study abroad is relatively small in contrast to the absolute number of persons working or studying in a country. This can be in particular attributed to the fact that in the CEEC few people have the economic and linguistic abilities to live abroad for a longer period of time (Mau and Mewes Citation2012).
14. In this context, it also has to be acknowledged that migration effects will not show up in the country of origin but in the country in which these people immigrate, work and contribute to the social life.