What Part Does Europe Play in the Identity Building of Young European Adults?

Abstract

With Inglehart's work on values and European identity as a starting point, and based on a representative survey of 18- to 24-year-olds from 10 cities in six European countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Slovakia, Spain, and the United Kingdom), the present paper analyses the meaning and relative importance of identification with Europe in comparison with other identification objects. Analyses of covariance and cluster analyses reveal that geo-political entities (like Europe, one's home country, one's region of residence, or one's birthplace) all draw similar ratings as to their importance for one's identity, and that this importance is low to at most medium high, with friends, partners, family, job and educational attainment of a much higher importance. In spite of the fact that the importance ratings for identification with geo-political entities are positively correlated with each other, they predict ethno-centrism differentially, identification with one's country being a positive, identification with Europe being a negative predictor of ethno-centrism (as revealed by multiple regression analyses). This finding leads the authors to theorize that on the Inglehartian continuum from survival values to self-expression values, national and European identity have dual meanings as expressions of value orientations, national identity overlapping in meaning with survival values, but also with European identity, and European identity overlapping in meaning with self-expression values, but also with national identity.

Key Words:

• European identity
• national identity
• young adults
• survival values
• self-expression values
• ethno-centrism

Notes

Two additional surveys (not reported here) were conducted as part of this project. The first one was another quantitative survey of almost 800 university-educated young adults from the same age group who were on a ‘European career track’ (e.g. students of European law) or whose biography was distinctively pro-European. The second was a set of more than 200 qualitative follow-up interviews with participants of the quantitative survey. Selected findings from both can be found at http://www.sociology.ed.ac.uk/youth. At this website there is also a complete list of all the involved researchers, co-ordinated by Prof. Lynn Jamieson from the University of Edinburgh.

The success of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), a right-wing political party aiming at British withdrawal from the EU, in the recent European Parliament elections, is an English phenomenon. UKIP did not win a single mandate in Scotland; all its 12 seats were achieved in English electoral constituencies.

F(15, 3296) = 1.73, p = .039, η² = .008; Wilks' λ estimates of F are given throughout; η² is given to enable an evaluation of the size of effects, with sizes below .01 certainly being very small effects.

F(60, 12868.15) = 35.65, p < .001, η² = .139.

F(75, 15791.6)  = 12.19, p > .001, η² = .052; Prague and Bratislava were treated as cities of one ‘country’ (the former Czech and Slovak Federal Republic) in order to allow for the nested ANCOVA design.

F(15, 3296) = 10.22, p < .001, η² = .044.

Finally, we turn to the interaction between gender and country, i.e. to possible gender differences that exist only in specific but not all countries. Only this interaction effect can be tested in a nested ANCOVA design. The interaction term was also significant, but the effect size was minute, F(60, 12868.2) = 1.93, p < .001, η² = .009; for only four out of 15 identification objects were significant gender differences (p < .05) found. The low importance of the interaction effect also minimizes reservations against interpreting the multivariate main effects.

In conducting our analyses, we resorted to the ALSCAL approach offered by SPSS, treating our data as unstandardized interval data, and employing the so-called city block metric. Using this metric implies – simply speaking – that the program calculates the number of steps (units) necessary to span the distance between two data points under the condition that only steps parallel to either the x- or the y-axis of a co-ordinate plane can be taken. This rule forms the basis for the name of the metric, because in a city one can also only walk along the streets delimiting a block when intending to reach a certain address, one cannot follow the beeline (called the Euclidean distance by mathematicians). The choice of this metric was based on the goodness-of-fit achieved by using the various metric options: Using the city block metric showed the best fit of the two-dimensional MDS solution, i.e. the lowest so-called stress, in comparison to other metric options.

Dimension 1 can be interpreted as the importance dimension. Dimension 2 is much more difficult to interpret. One might speculate that degree of subjective life-course stability might be what this dimensions refers to, but no interpretation is overly obvious.

We also calculated regression analyses that incorporated the other identification objects as predictors whenever their relationship with ethno-centrism was significant (p < .05). Results of these analyses showed no relevant change from the co-efficients reported in Table 3.

The significant negative path co-efficient for ‘region of residence’ should not be over-interpreted, because the concept of being not only a city (often ones birthplace) but also a region is not overly developed in Bratislava, so that for other questions reference to the region even was dropped there.