Cosmopolitan Europeans or Partisans of Fortress Europe? Supranational Identity Patterns in the EU

Intra-European student mobility and the different meanings of ‘Europe’

“…Civic elements include democratic values and rights, cultural elements include common history and language, and ethnic elements include ancestry and religious heritage. Schlenker's (2013) results suggest that civic elements dominate the content of European identity. In turn, the study of Schroedter et al (2015) investigates the latent structure of the meaning of Europe among national and European bi-national couples in Switzerland.…”

“…After all, people can mean very different things when talking about and/or referring to Europe while using the same terms (Diez Medrano, 2010;Jenkins, 2008a). However, only a limited number of studies investigated the meanings individuals attribute to Europe (Diez Medrano, 2010;Schlenker, 2013;Schroedter et al, 2015;Slavtcheva-Petkova and Mihelj, 2013). Therefore, the first aim of this paper is to investigate which meanings higher education students attribute to the word 'Europe'.…”

Regional Integration Support: A Positive Externality toward Migration Attitudes

“…After all, the EU comprises a community of members (see also Bello, ) and conditions for membership do exist. These communitarian traits within the EU could suggest that European identity is not compatible with cosmopolitanism (Schlenker, ). Interestingly, however, Schlenker () reveals that both civic and cultural constructions of EU identity are positively associated with cosmopolitan attitudes; only ethnic construction, i.e., a European parent as a requirement for being European, is negatively associated with these, if only weakly.…”

“…These communitarian traits within the EU could suggest that European identity is not compatible with cosmopolitanism (Schlenker, ). Interestingly, however, Schlenker () reveals that both civic and cultural constructions of EU identity are positively associated with cosmopolitan attitudes; only ethnic construction, i.e., a European parent as a requirement for being European, is negatively associated with these, if only weakly. According to García‐Faroldi (), European identity is mostly built on civic grounds, thus indicating that the positive roles of civic and cultural traits in an EU identity lessen the potential negative effect of ethnic constructs.…”

“…On one hand, this is because only a small percentage of Europeans identify themselves as exclusively EU, while the vast majority claims a dual identity (Zürn, ). If anything, this suggests that EU boundaries may not provide much of an ‘anchorage point for delimitation' of new in‐groups and out‐groups (Schlenker, , p.36). On the other hand, and more importantly for public attitudes, European citizens do not necessarily use the EU as reference for ‘us' (EU) and ‘them' (non‐EU).…”