Euroidentities
EUROIDENTITIES -- The Evolution of European Identity: Using biographical methods to study the development of European identity
Magdeburg participants: Fritz Schütze, Anja Schröder-Wildhagen, Ulrike Nagel, Martin Dreher
The Euroidentities project was using qualitative in-depth biographical interviewing and analysis to gain insights into the lives of European citizens and the significance of ‘Europe’ in their narratives. Their accounts of lived experience was to shed light on the evolution and meanings of European identities from the ’bottom up’ perspective of the individual.
The project was targeting five ‘sensitized groups’ - aggregates whose life experiences have led them to confront questions of their own identity within Europe. The five groups, broadly conceived, were: (1) ‘transnational workers’ at all levels ranging from menial economic migrants to ‘high end’ technological workers whose origins are in one country but who work in another; (2) mature adults who experienced educational exchange schemes in their youth; (3) farmers who are subject to Europe-wide markets and systems of regulation; (4) people whose work or life experience has included multi-national ‘cultural contact’ in spheres of either ‘high’ or popular culture that have an explicit or spontaneous pan-European rationale; (5) participants in civil society organisations explicitly intended to ameliorate ethnic or national legacies of conflict, possibly within an European frame of reference.
The seven partner teams in Euroidentities included large and small nations who are in both original and accession states located in both the peripheries and the core of Europe. The seven partners are: Queen's University, Belfast; Otto-von-Guericke Universität, Magdeburg; University of Łódź; Bangor University, Wales; Tallinn University of Technology; Bulgarian Elizabetta Perrone, Pasquale Musella. Members of the German group were the following persons: a) in Magdeburg, Institute of Sociology: Ulrike Nagel, Anja Schröder-Wildhagen, Johannes Angermüller, Fritz Schütze, b) in Magdeburg, Institute of History: Martin Dreher, c) other places: Lena Inowlocki, Universität Frankfurt / Fachhochschule Frankfurt, Fachbereich Sozialwesen, Bärbel Treichel, Universität Erfurt, Institut für Anglistik, Werner Kallmeyer, Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim, Gerhard Riemann, Georg-Simon-Ohm-Hochschule Nürnberg, Fakultät für Soziale Arbeit. Scientist in charge of the German team: Fritz Schütze; research assistant of the German team: Anja Schröder-Wildhagen.
Communication between the teams was being maintained by periodic project workshops, ad hoc visits between individual teams and the circulation of interview transcriptions. Euroidentities maintains a project web site at: www.euroidentities.org
The following aspect emerged as especially interesting in terms of social-science basic theory:
European Collective Identity vs. European Mental Space
When we had started our “Euroidentity” research project, we asked, whether or not
- many of the members of our EU-sensitive social aggregates - other than “everyday” citizens of the E.U., who are not specifically sensitized towards the EU - would explicitly identify with the European “entity” as a collective identity and we-group that is biographically important for them; whether or not
- - they - apart from “everyday” E.U. citizens- would have semantically precisely circumcised and configured images of the European collective identity (e.g. Europe as cradle of Enlightenment, Europe as realm of Christianity, etc.); whether or not
- they - other than “everyday” E.U. citizens - would set apart the European collective identity from other powerful political entities like, e.g., the U.S. (i.e., via a “negative” definition of collective identity by contrast set: as being other than the entity to compared with), whether or not
- they - apart from “everyday” E.U. citizens - would explicitly (in some sort of practical theorizing) reflect about the European Union as a political realm beyond and below the imagined community of the nation that is conventionally envisioned as the most general “we”-community relevant for one’s own biography as well as whether or not
- they would differentiate between the rules and obligation of a supranational European entity, on the one hand, and those of the nation state, on the other.
All this explicit dealing with Europe can be really witnessed in autobiographical narrative interviews, but it is conditioned by complex situational and biographical circumstances. Under such conditions it sometimes can be more in the forefront of awareness than under others: One informant, a devoted English female teacher of business English running her successful language teaching school in Germany, feels more European when she is being in Germany but less when she is being at home in England; with a Danish young female teacher of the English and the Danish language who is working in northern Germany it is just to the contrary: when being in Germany she feels more Danish and less European; after having come back to Denmark it is just to the reverse. (Different biographical experiences and collective social backgrounds generate such cross-national differences in regard to the permanent changes of attitudes to Europe and to one’s nation of origin.) In addition, quite often we can witness within our autobiographical narrative interviews that the personal attitudes to Europe are quite vague and fuzzy, utterly absent or even openly denied.
Does this mean that Europe is not relevant in the lives of the members of the Europe-sensitized social aggregates? Having analyzed numerous autobiographical narrative interviews we arrived at the assessment, that such a conclusion does not hold true. Even if there is no crystallized biographical identification with Europe during the narrated live course of an informant, there might be many biographical relevancies of Europe in her or his life as indirectly or symptomatically expressed through her or his narrative rendering. However, quite a lot of those phenomena cannot be categorized and acknowledged by means of the theoretical language of collective identity. For the analysis of these phenomena we had to find another analytical treatment with more appropriate categories: those ones connected with the central category of the “collective mental space of reference”.
Our research project „Euroidentities“ resulted in four general insights, that hold true for the life histories of members of all Europe-sensitive aggregates (however in weaker form for the transnational migrants and farmers). Very shortly formulated, there are the following four empirical conclusions:
- Biographical relating to Europe mostly is implicit and situational, but remarkably effective.
- Biographically more important than images of the European entity as some sort of collective identity are orientations towards and within a European mental space of reference, that does not transport systematically filled or even essentially defined images of Europe.
- All biographical relevancies of collective, especially national, identities in the understanding of imagined communities (Benedict Anderson 1991) are relativized by means and in the medium of European mental space and critically assessed and tamed through it.
- The transnational liaison workers of intercultural cooperation, who are active in the NGOs of civil societies and in professional social worlds, are the protagonists of the unfolding of the European mental space, especially of its cooperative kernel structure.
Publications of the German team in the overall project up to now:
Miller, Robert, and Schütze, Fritz, 2011: The Evolution if European Identity: Using Biographical Methods to study the Development of European Identity. In: Przeglad Socjologiczny, Vol. 60, NO. 1, 2011, pp. 9-40
Schröder-Wildhagen, Anja, and Schütze, Fritz, (2011): How to Deal with Autobiographical Narrative Interviews in the Euroidentity Research Project. In: Przeglad Socjologiczny, Vol. 60, NO. 1, 2011, pp. 41-91.
Nagel, Ulrike, Spanó, Antonella, Musella, Pasquale, Perone, Elisabetta: From Europe to Europeans and Beyond. Meanings of Europe through people’s biographical experiences. In: Przeglad Socjologiczny, Vol. 60, NO. 1, 2011, pp. 217-249
Inowlocki, Lena, and Riemann, Gerhard: A Biographical Perspective on Youth Exchange and Related Processes. In: Przeglad Socjologiczny, Vol. 60, NO. 1, 2011, pp. 115-138.
Schütze, Fritz (2011): Europäische Orientierungs- und Identitätsarbeit aus der Sicht europa-sensibilisierter Bürger der Europäischen Union: Aufriss eines Forschungsprojektes. In: Herzberg, Heidrun/Kammler, Eva (Hrsg.): Biographie und Gesellschaft. Überlegungen zu einer Theorie des modernen Selbst. Frankfurt: Campus. S. 475-504
Domecka, Markieta, Eichsteller, Marta, Karakusheva, Slavka, Musella, Pasquale, Ojamäe, Liis, Perone, Elisabetta, Pickard, Dona, Schröder-Wildhagen, Anja, Siilak, Kristel, and Waniek, Katarzyna: Method in Practice: Autobiographical Narrative Interviews in Search of European Phenomena. In: Miller, Robert, with Gray, Graham (eds.): The Evolution of European Identities. Biographical Approaches. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 21-44
Inowlocki, Lena, and Riemann, Gerhard: Exploring European ‘Potential Space’: A Study of the Biographies of Former European Exchange Students. In: Miller, Robert, with Gray, Graham (eds.): The Evolution of European Identities. Biographical Approaches. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 129-149
Schütze, Fritz, Schröder-Wildhagen, Anja, Nagel, Ulrike, and Treichel, Bärbel (2012): Discoverers in European Mental Space: The Biographical Experiences of Particiapants in European Civils Soiciety Organizations. In: Miller, Robert, with Gray, Graham (eds.): The Evolution of European Identities. Biographical Approaches. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, pp.150-169.
Schröder-Wildhagen, Anja, Schütze, Fritz, Nagel, Ulrike, and Treichel, Bärbel (2012): Miriam, an Environmental Activist. In: Miller, Robert, with Gray, Graham (eds.): The Evolution of European Identities. Biographical Approaches. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 170-181.
Schütze, Fritz, and Schröder-Wildhagen, Anja, 2012: European Mental Space and its Biographical Relevance. In: Miller, Robert, with Gray, Graham (eds.): The Evolution of European Identities. Biographical Approaches. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 255-278.
Fritz Schütze and the German team of the Euridentities research project (Lena Inowlocki, Ulrike Nagel, Gerhard Riemann, Anja Schröder-Wildhagen and Bärbel Treichel) 2013: Policy Suggestions Regarding Support of the Work of European Civil Society Organisations. Erscheint in : Przeglad Socjologiczny, Vol. 2012, No. 4