THE SIGNIFICANCE OF TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL FIELDS AS A SOURCE OF EUROPEAN IDENTIFICATION |
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Tea Golob, Matej Makarovič
Abstract
The issue of European identity has been a topic of various political and academic discourses, which nonetheless narrate more about the functioning of particular institutions, integration projects or cultural politics on national or supranational levels, than the European identity itself. The article attempts to recognise, which factors influence the social processes enabling identifications with European space and who can participate in them. It is argued that the intensity of identifications on the European level depends significantly on the participation in European transnational social fields, where symbolic capital, embracing social and cultural capital, substantially influences the existence of European (transnational) habitus and accordingly the identifications. The most significant result of the analysisthus lies in the relationship between the structural properties in terms of what the people are and practices in terms of what they do within the (transnational) social fields and how are both related to the European identification. Applying binary logistic regression analyses to the survey data from all EU member states provides evidence that the practices within the transnational social fields do contribute to the European identification.
Keywords: European Union, European identification, transnational social fields, social practices
M.Sc., doctoral candidate at the School of Advanced Social Science, Nova Gorica, Slovenia
[Ph.D., Associate Professor at the School of Advanced Social Science, Nova Gorica, Slovenia
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