The Europeanisation of Everyday Life: Cross-Border Practices and Transnational Identifications Among EU and Third-Country Citizens State of the Art Report

This paper illustrates the research questions, the main underlying concepts and therelevant literature of the EUCROSS project. It reports on the existing literature in sociology, anthropology, political sciences and social psychology related to the project which seeks to examine the relationship between the manifold activities of EU residents (nationals, mobile EU citizens, and third country nationals) across the borders of nation states and their collective identities. It raises questions about 1) how to map out individuals’ cross-border practices as an effect of European integration and globalisation; and 2) assess the impact of these practices on collective identifications, while also controlling for the inverse causal process. Which cross-border practices are more likely to foster some form of identification with the EU – e.g., contacts with foreign friends and/or unwanted foreigners, periods of labour mobility abroad, business and tourist travel, or consumer relations with international companies? Under which contextual and individual conditions do these experiences promote a higher sensitivity to ‘Europe’ – rather than the ‘local’ or the ‘global’ – as an identity catalyst? Which social groups are more likely to adopt a European mindset in the wake of the Europeanisation of everyday life? While substantial separate literatures about ‘Europeanisation’, ‘European identity’, ‘cross-border practices’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ can be found, we argue that seldom are these concepts treated altogether to specify the link between spatially and culturally situated behaviours on the one hand and collective identifications and value orientations on the other. Moreover, few studies examine socio-cultural Europeanisation and supernational identifications comparatively, and none include simultaneously native and immigrant populations, who in fact may attest of different modalities in which the behaviour-identity link can take place