Welcome
How integrated is Europe, from a sociological perspective? To answer this question we analyze the social integration of Europe, also referred to as horizontal Europeanization. In contrast to political integration with its top-down perspective and focus on EU institutions, Europe’s social integration is established bottom-up, dependent on how much various collective and individual actors from different European countries interact with each other.Our research concentrates on transnational human activities and their relation to EU-attitudes on the one hand, and Europe’s political integration process on the other. In this particular project, the upcoming book Network Europe (working title), we track the development of Europes social integration over the past 55 years. The main goal is to explore whether Europe constitutes an emerging space of cross-border human interactions. Such an emerging space could be seen as a first step towards forming a European society. For this purpose, we use a relational approach and analyze cross-border transactions between the European national collectivities with the method of social network analysis.
From the potential pool of cross-border transactions we choose those which in our eyes best represent the social dimension of Europeanization - transnational human activities. Thus, migration, student exchange and tourism represent different facets of cross-border mobility, whereas phone calls exemplify flows of cross-border communication. We take a macro-sociological, satellite’s view by looking at the aggregated flows between the nations, not specific individuals. The time-period covered ranges to a maximum of almost six decades.
This internet page provides some material produced in the process of preparing the book. It serves two functions: as a “teaser” for the book (see Material), and as a place to provide supplementary material (see Appendix).
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