Post on 27-Apr-2023
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
Chapter 9
Public narratives of European Citizenship – the dialogical citizen in the
European Public Sphere
Kesi Mahendran, Ima Jackson and Anubhuti Kapoor
Introduction
This chapter uses the ideational site of European Citizenship in contribution to
articulating the mechanisms of discursive governance. It focuses on one central
challenge, that is, the development of the substantial figure of a dialogical citizen,
embodied, relational, dynamic, and compelled to act. Understanding this figure
provides one answer to a key question for discursive governance – in what ways do
political discourses resonate within some quarters of the public sphere and in others
they are resisted. To answer this question, as this book is demonstrating, is a matter of
the bi-directional mechanisms by which political discourses move between political
actors, institutional scaffolding, policy implementation and the public sphere. Our
focus in this chapter relates specifically to examining the different ways the public
sphere can be understood. How are publics and their opinions conceptualised or
perhaps more critically – how do publics constitute themselves?
Following Beland and Cox who state, ‘there is no politics without human
agency’ (Beland and Cox 2012, 12) we privilege the microlevel choices people make,
their sense of agency and their identifications. Human agency relates to perception of
opportunity and positional freedoms, where people’s positions on any given political
idea or policy proposition relate in part, as outlined within the introduction to this
book, to the fact that they are imbricated within social representations that influence
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
how they act within and make sense of the world (Moscovici 1984; Moscovici and
Duveen 2000; Markova 2003; Elcheroth, Doise and Reicher 2011).
Naturally there are a variety of interpretative approaches that shed light on
how people make sense of the world and each other. With European citizenship in
mind, we employ three related theoretical developments, that are proving to be
particularly useful in understanding the public’s knowledge of and involvement in
political matters. Firstly the dialogical approach that privilege a dialogical self
(Hermans 2001) that is able to take many positions on any given issue – those
positions, whether internal e.g. I am an adventurer at heart, ideological, e.g. I am a
pacifist, or external subject positions, e.g. I am a migrant, are all I-positions that gain
their meaning through actual, imagined and anticipated dialogue with others. This
dialogue anticipates existing frames, concepts and metaphors. Our agentic sense
making, in relation to the social and political knowledge around us is shaped by
existing and imagined conversations relating both to prosaic matters and the wider
political conversations that circulate, such as conversations around the future of the
European Union (EU) project.As Bakhtin explains, we speak anticipating the other,
“from the very beginning the speaker expects […] an active responsive understanding.
The entire utterance is constructed as it were, in anticipation of encountering this
response” (Bakhtin 1986, 94).
Social representations approaches originated with Moscovici and now
constitute one of most thoroughly developed theoretics for unpacking the constraints
on socio political action when they are often held implicitly in taken for granted
shared commonsense assumptions and exclusive categorizations that develop to make
sense of unfamiliar aspects of the world. In cognitive terms social representations
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
relate closely to stereotypes and attitudes but are more dynamically created in our
continuous relationships with each other within the public sphere. They exist between
people, rather than in the heads of people. For example Hewstone examined the social
representations people used to make sense of the EU. Alongside the processes of
anchoring and objectification, referred to in the introduction to this book, he draws
attention to two further process: personification of knowledge, where particular
individuals come to denote the ideas, theories or political phenomena we are trying to
make sense of; and figuration of knowledge involving the use of images and
metaphors to concretize complex abstractions - abstractions such as the EU.
Conducting fieldwork in Italy, UK, France and Germany, in 1983 he found one in
four people, undoubtedly influenced by media representations, devised social
representations around EU relating to the Common Agricultural Policy and
technocractically engineered surplus using the figurative metaphors such as ‘butter
mountains’ and ‘wine lakes’ (1986, 187).
Dialogical positions and social representations are combined in this chapter
with narrative approaches. Narrative is a term that can be used rather loosely in both
political and psychological science, but if the term is to retain its efficacy, not every
description of an event, or political process can be understood as having a narrative,
rather narratives relate to the presence of an actor that takes up a position in relation to
the event or issue, moves agentically towards a goal and contain in their telling plot,
space and time, the latter often including past, present and future (Bruner 1990, 77-
79). The ways that narratives link the sensemaking storytelling individual to the
events of society provide a useful way of understanding peoples ideological
identifications, particularly as narrative identification allows for a more dynamic
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
relational understanding of identity than static identity categories relating to class,
age, sex and so on. Hammack and Pilecki have recently provided a clear theoretical
integration of how understanding narrative identification can help shed light on how
people engage with political issues (2012).
European citizenship is an ideal site for such narrative engagements, its
development proceeds through a process of hard and soft bordering. Where at any
given time, individuals are clear when they cross the hard legal borders into Europe,
but such hard border represent the naturalization of soft narrative bordering processes
that reify lines around who, what and where is ‘European’. Eder foregrounds such
symbolic preinstitutional bordering explaining, “defining an imaginary Europe,
impinges heavily on the legal construction of the border of Europe” (2006, 256). Eder
in drawing attention to narrative bordering advises against reductionist and overly
functionalist accounts of Europe that risk missing the popular resonance needed for
the European project to continue its story. Thereby, Europe, in the sense of the
European Union project, then needs narrative plausibility (2006, 256).
People’s engagement, identifications and attitudes on European citizenship as
we demonstrate within this chapter, is an expression of a dialogical capacity to
interplay macrolevel narratives that contain social representations with
microrelational I-positions and discourses relating to their own ongoing
identifications. This capacity has variant open receptive dynamic features as well as
conservative and cognitive closures (Kruglanski 2004; Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski and
Sulloway 2003) into relatively static and resistant positions in response to fears,
uncertainties and a desire for a sense of permanence.
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
The ground for our developing figure of a dialogical citizen is a recent cross
European qualitative study where citizens, with varying degrees of migration-
mobility, were asked the question ‘Do you consider yourself to be a citizen of the
European Union?’ The second focus, then, for this chapter is the aspirational and
rather protean idea of European Citizenship central to the European Union project
(Parsons 2011, Aradau, Huysmans and Squire 2010). It is a contested idea that today
has become part of the reality informing the lives of millions of people both within
and beyond Europe. An examination of the idea of European Citizenship allows for a
political subjectivity to emerge that is rooted in the tensions between grand ideas and
individual level narrative identifications.
In order to cover both figure and ground, we proceed as follows, first we
outline what we term a ‘grand’ narrative of European Citizenship, its ratification,
parameters and possibilities, the chapter then examines how the public is often
conceptualized within studies into the European public sphere to tackle a perpetual
thorn in the side of the European Union project – the criticism of democratic deficit
(Hooghe and Marks 2009) and ‘missing publics’ (Statham and Koopmans 2013) by
proposing that accounts of European public sphere need to deepen conceptions of
citizen capacity and sense making.
The chapter then develops a dialogical analysis that, so as to deepen
conceptions of the public, initially demonstrates a key process that we establish as
central to how participants talk about European citizenship. This process, following
Bakhtin, is termed authoring, where people bring in the voices of others when they
speak about European citizenship to create a discursive multivoiced account. Our
analysis uses the analytical frame of a migration mobility continuum (Mahendran
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
2013, see figure 9.1), to move deeper into five active disidentification and
identification positions and their narrative features. These narratives have spatial,
temporal and mobility dimensions drawn from deeply rooted public philosophies
(Mehta 2011) that very often relate to beliefs on sameness and difference. This leads
us back in the closing discussion, that is, why at an ideational level European
Citizenship is both embraced and resisted within the public sphere.
The ‘grand’ narrative of European Citizenship
Ever since the idea of European citizenship found expression toward the end
of the 20th century in the Maastricht Treaty (1992), there has been much debate about
both its practical and discursive political potential. This is not least because this
ambitious conception of post-national or supranational citizenship creates a challenge
to one of the key features of citizenship – its dependence on membership of a nation-
state. By the time of the Amsterdam Treaty (1997) – opaque references to “citizenship
of the Union’ had been amended to explain” Citizenship of the Union is hereby
established. Every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen
of the Union. Citizenship of the Union shall complement and not replace national
citizenship” (Amendment to article 8.1, Treaty of Amsterdam, European
Communities 1997, 27).
Frustratingly for advocates of more borderless cosmopolitan notions of
citizenship, this nation state dependency remains the case in the most recent
ratification of the Lisbon Treaty (2007) that came into effect in 2009. Within the
formal discourse of treaty documents, there has been no real further articulation.
Initiatives such as the “Europe for Citizens programme (2007-2013) had the central
objective of developing an ever closer union, democratic, world oriented and enriched
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
though its cultural diversity” (Europe for Citizens Programme Guide 2013, 6). The
programme for 2014-2020, now has a greater focus on remembrance, specifically
“citizens' understanding of the Union, its history and diversity. In this effect,
European citizenship is understood in functionalist terms of ‘understanding Union
policy-making processes’ as well as ‘societal and intercultural engagement at the
Union level” (Europe for Citizens 2014, Article 2). Here macronarratives continue to
articulate how Europe has overcome bitter rivalries and bloodshed, returned to notions
of the ‘cradle of civilisation’ and therefore constructed a narrative of shared heritage
and enlightenment values. To follow Bakhtin, ‘Europe’ is imagined as having a
canonical almost ‘epic’ absolute past (Bakhtin and Holquist 1981, 12-13). Further
features worth noting within the European Citizenship narrative include temporal
features such as ‘old’ and ‘new’ European member states, spatial features through its
continuous rebordering and corporeal features through the notion of an embodied
‘European people’ (Fortier 2006). These temporal and spatial features, or ‘scalar
narratives’ as Anne-Marie Fortier puts it, serve to organise the Union, its near
neighbours and candidate neighbours, such as Turkey, into superordinate and
subordinate positions (Fortier, 2006, 326)
Though increased convergence and harmonization is imagined as a means to
increase political and economic security within the region, there remains a resistance
from political actors to the idea of supranational European citizenship independent of
member-state. Mobility has therefore become totemic within the canonical narrative
of the European Union. Mobility, access to mobility and attitudes towards mobility
often become a key to both the narration and the enactment of a sense of European
Citizenship.
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
In the face of this, there is however paradoxically relatively little social
scientific examination of the relationship between European citizenship, political
identifications and mobility. Studies have examined the right to European citizenship
of migrants from nonEuropean countries of origin, (Maas 2008), explored
postnational European citizenship, (Favell, 2001) or further developed Habermasian
citizenship ideals (Habermas 1994, Fernández, 2012). There has not, however, been
any scientific exploration on the relationship between mobility (and indeed
nonmobility) and a developing sense of European Citizenship. Aradau, Huysmans and
Squire provide a noteworthy exception; they propose that the tension between nation
state and freedom of movement is “symptomatic of a more deeply rooted
contradiction between integration and mobility” (Aradau, Huysmans and Squire 2010,
946). According to them, European citizenship is not a top down ‘gifting’ that is
institutionally granted, it is something that individuals enact through their practices.
They propose in an analysis of migrant sex workers’ self organising as a political
movement that different forms of mobility relate to the emergence of new political
actors.
Revealing the public in the European public sphere.
Though the European Union project always placed the people at the centre of
its rhetoric (Hewstone 1986, 19),it has also long been critiqued for a democratic
deficit and an “enlightened despotism” (Parsons, 2011, 127). Hooghe and Marks in
their seminal analysis proposed that the elite led ‘permissive consensus’ had since
Maastricht 1991 been characterised by a more engaged ‘constraining dissensus’ where
national interests are used to challenge elite led decision making (Hooghe and Marks
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
2009). Such accusations of democratic deficit tend to take a functionalist approach
with an institutional focus on knowledge and engagement with the EU institutions,
voter turn-out and the success political actors on the European political stage have in
their attempts to appeal to the public.
Statham and Koopmans refocus the lens on mediated Europeanised debate, in
particular how Europe becomes ‘visible’ in the public sphere via media facilitated
debate at the European level. They suggest European identification is the preserve of a
minority and that people tend to seem themselves in terms of their national identity
first (Statham and Koopmans 2013, 138). They report clear evidence of a mediated
Europeanised public sphere, where European politics are visible to the public.
However, they assess these often to be elite led and they explain that there seems little
sign of a bottom up attentive public that are able, as a civil society, to mobilise and
engage in public critique.
Our approach to the European public sphere in relation to people’s
engagement with and narratives of the European Union is not focused on mobilizing
public critique but rather on narrative dis/identification processes. Here we take a
relational and detraditionalized approach to the public sphere where we view the
public sphere as an open site of representation, contestation and argumentation
(Roberts and Crossley 2004; Jovchelovitch 2007). Our figure of a dialogical citizen
enables a public citizen to emerge engaged with stories, metaphors and narrative ideas
as a way of both enacting and making sense of Europe. The figure of a dialogical
citizen is useful therefore, to the development of the depth and range of
communicative spaces that must necessarily comprise the European public sphere
inherent to a supranational European polity (Fossum and Schlesinger 2007). Such a
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
figure does not dissipate the potential to understand mobilization amongst the public,
rather citizen’s narrative identifications can be the powerful basis of mobilisation as
Reicher and Hopkins have shown in relation to people’s sense of Scottishness (2001)
and van Stekelenburg has shown in relation to radicalization at the supranational level
(2014).
Yet there is a relative paucity of studies into the general public’s identification
with the European Union project, and sense of European Citizenship. Social
psychologists for their part, have focused on European identity rather than citizenship
they have also tended to take a rather functionalist or neofunctionalist approach to
ordinary people’s relations with the EU. This privileges intergroup relations and the
role of superordinate categorisation hypothesizing that national identities may be
complemented or replaced by a European community identity. This line of inquiry
proposes that the EU allows nationals to see beyond their differences and subscribe to
a superordinate identity. For example, Castano found the European identification
increases according to perceived entitativity of the group, i.e., the more citizens see
the EU as its own entity the more they identify with it (2004). Mummendey and
Walduz, however, point out that whilst the EU can act as a superordinate category that
brings together identities; equally it can serve to sharpen crossnational hostilities
through ingroup projection, where nationals claim Europe as characterised by their
own national qualities (2004). Chryssochoou’s comparison of lay constructions of
Europe by French and Greek nationals draws important attention to some of the social
representational constraints on European narrative identification. She uses the term
‘hierarchies of Europeanness’ to signal the extent of one’s own EU identity relates to
international power relations within the EU. The French participants see the project in
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
terms of their own nation acting like a ‘lighthouse’ for the EU project while Greek
participants positions themselves as the ‘poor cousins’ (Chryssochoou 2000; 2013).
Such social psychological analysis begins to deepen and develop our
conception of the public, by recasting individuals as group members of polities whose
identifications and attitudes relate to these polities. Social identity studies provide
rich detail to Eurobarometer attitude surveys which have also traditionally surveyed
and interviewed the public through the national lens. By introducing a dialogical
citizen into the public sphere we go a little further still, allowing citizens to speak
from a variety of positions, naturally some will begin with their national identity to
articulate their position on European Citizenship, but others may work through
different stories and different frames (Mahendran, Andreouli, Jackson, Magnusson
and Howarth 2014).The European public sphere, understood here as a relational site,
becomes a more symbolic space, where stories circulate and shared stories create
borders. In order to understand public narratives of European citizenship, therefore,
we need a conception of the European public that attends to the stories that are being
told about being European and the narrative identifications that construct Europe as an
identitarian space (Eder 2006, 257) – the one indeed construct the Other. Citizens then
are not just influenced by dominant narratives, or resistant of them, they coauthor
them within the European public sphere.
Method
The analysis presented here draws from a wider qualitative scoping project
that interviewed 75 participants on questions on belonging, integration and citizenship
within five cities in Europe – Dublin, Düsseldorf, Glasgow, Gothenburg and London.
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
Fieldwork, necessarily involved relatively small numbers in each city as we aimed to
examine microlevel relational practices. The cities were selected to represent a variety
of Europhile and Eurosceptic positions and also to build on an existing study in
Scotland and Sweden (Mahendran 2013). Fieldwork was conducted between March
2012 and August 2013 involving 65 citizens and 10 practitioners working in the area
of integration. 38 were female 37 male, and the distribution across the cities were 15
in Glasgow, 20 in London, 12 in Gothenburg, 14 in Dusseldorf and finally 14 in
Dublin. Participants ranged from 18 to 78 years old. Their education levels involved
secondary schooling through to postgraduate/professional training. Participants were
quota sampled along the Migration-Mobility Continuum (see Mahendran 2013 for the
development of positions in the MMC) that ranges from generational nonmigrants to
serial migrants anticipating their next move (see Figure 9.1). The subset of data from
which this analysis emerges relates to question 40 (Q40), the last question in a 60-
120 minute recorded, transcribed interview. The entire dataset was then cross
referenced for further references as follows ‘European’, ‘European Identity’ and
‘European Citizenship’.
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
Figure 9.1 The Migration-Mobility Continuum (Mahendran 2013)
The interview involved an open ended section and then a priming section. The
first question was a sentence completion task, completing the statement ‘I am a part
of…’, participants that responded spontaneously ‘I am a part of Europe’ were cross
referenced with Q40. Part Two of the interview primed in the sense that participants
were exposed to a stimulus, in this case statements and images from the European
Union, and this in turn influenced how they respond to the next stimulus. In questions
Q37, Q38, and Q39, (see Mahendran et al 2014 for an online example of a stimulus
image). This enables the analysis to distinguish between spontaneous identification
and primed identification when asked our central question Q40: Do you consider
yourself a citizen of the European Union.
The initial coding frame that emerged related to identification,
nonidentification and disidentification. The subsequent analysis revealed that across
these identification positions were thematic dimensions relating to mobility and
freedom to move, spatial conceptions of citizenship, and temporal and emergent
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
features. The analysis does not present more passive nonidentification cases, where
the participants said yes or no, based on their geographical location; they lived in
Europe, or an institutional fact such as a European passport, though it is worth noting
this amounted to around 25 per cent of responses. Here we focus on processes of
active dis/identification.
Authoring – a dialogical feature of European Citizenship
Reasoning through a position on European citizenship is both ideational and
dialogical, participants immediately engage in key capacities, relating to how they are
seen, and how they discursively relate to other citizens. For example JJ, introducing
an interlocutor within his response relating to the peace and cooperation aspects of the
EU.
Extract 1
JJ: Yeah. I will gladly try to convince anyone that says that Sweden should like um (1)
we should disband the European Union. I would gladly like *go to war about it*1. I
would gladly like take the side of staying within the European Union because of that
reason (avoiding war) Every time I hear someone complaining about the size of
strawberries and that the EU shouldn’t do stuff like that. Well, who cares? It’s a huge
system apparatus there’s parts of the system that are broken and that needs fixing. It’s
frigging ridiculous! But I don’t care because we don’t have a war. JJ, MMC4,
Gothenburg
JJ’s imagined dialogue, illustrates how people grasp their understanding of the
EU through social representations where Hewstone, as noted earlier, had found
participants had a social representation around EU surplus, referring to ‘wine lakes’
1Asterix denote laughing.
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
and ‘butter mountains’ here today we see social representations of EU
standardisations as a result of integration, taking on the figurative metaphor of the
‘size of strawberries’ (1986). JJ takes up a clear position, I would go to war about it,
the next two extracts, use authoring as a means to reveal contingencies. QM in Dublin
responds, to reveal, a similar authoring. He also starts to sets some parameter on
European Citizenship.
Extract 2
QM: Yes and this question was posed to me last year and I remember someone said
‘first of all I would classify myself as this ethnic minority in the north of Spain’ that I
had never heard of, ‘then I would say I’m Spanish, (…) then I’m a member of the
European Union, and then I’m a world citizen’. (…) while I’m not an ethnic minority, I
can’t subscribe to being that, but (…) if I was like a Swedish person that lived in
Finland, I probably would identify as Swedish, identify as Finnish, identify as a
member of the European Union, but I personally don’t identify as a world citizen coz I
think (…) there’s too much difference and I think that’s a <good> thing. I think that if
we all start saying that we’re the same we’re not gonna go forward (…). If everyone
had that same frame of mind all the time and everyone thought the same way, (…)
there would be no innovation, no difference, no creation (.) you know. So (.) but that’s
a very long answer but yes I would definitely consider I am member of the European
Union. QM MMC1, Dublin
QM, a nonmigrant with plans to move to the US, in his reasoning is able to
dialogically take up two figures first a person he encountered from Spain, and then an
imagined Nordic migrant, to formulate, the caveats to his identification with the EU.
He distances himself from the nested citizenship taken by the Spaniard, and then he
authors another imagined Nordic figure scenario, he comes to constrain his position,
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
as European but not global citizenship, by using a philosophy around the importance
of difference for innovation and creativity. This authoring, the introduction of other
voices, is a key feature of our dialogical abilities as citizen to keep other people and
our self-other relations in mind on political questions. Further the ideational nature of
this citizenship, in terms of prospective belonging and its unfinished narrative, is
revealed, by the way participants are not taking up recognized subject positions, say
as a working class man, or in my profession, rather they turn to much broader
questions of our relationships with each other in terms of mobility and the parameters
of belonging. In the final extract PR, in Gothenburg who also engages in authoring
reveals an important source of disidentification – the extent to which being a
European citizen is other-conferred.
Extract 3
PR: I don’t identify myself as a European citizen but I know people who do and call
themselves Europeans when they are outside of Europe [KM: and why don’t you?] well
it’s a lot to do with what you identify with. If I, I who identify with a global context
and don’t want to make that difference between people and people. I see us as one so
it’s not so strange that I don’t identity with that but those who do such as a girl I
studied with she travelled a lot in Europe and in USA and she identified her life as a jet
set life. We had different backgrounds but she said she had always identified herself as
European and not Swedish. For me it’s a very conscious decision that I’m absolutely
not going to make those differences and anyway I don’t look very European either *so
no one would buy it* PR, MMC10, Gothenburg.
PR came to Sweden, as a refugee, from Iran, via a transit camp in Turkey in 2003, a
serial migrant (MMC10) she imagines she will move again. Here she makes the
‘conscious’ decision to think in terms of a commonality. Her response to Q1, I am a
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
part of, was spontaneously, ‘I am a part of the human race’, and reveals her own
philosophy around global citizenship.
Public narratives of European Citizenship – disidentification
PR’s position is a disidentification pattern (see Table 9.2) that is termed here
‘Active global disidentification’. Hereby, citizens understood citizenship around
common ‘one world’ humanity. We found this particular public narrative on European
Citizenship in all cities, where participants were migrants in MMC positions 7-10 and
were originally from nonEuropean countries. European citizenship becomes resisted
amongst this section of the European public as creating boundaries between people. It
is worth noting this is also an outsider narrative, our participants often black or brown
skinned, irrespective of their degree of settlement, explain that they are not likely to
be treated as ‘Europeans’.
[Table 9.2 about here]
Identification Ideational
philosophy
Ethno-
cultural
Demos/Citizenshipp Spatial MMC
Positions
City
Active national
disidentification
Difference Vitality of
Cultural
differences
National-level
political voice
/National
Citizenship
World
of
nations
1-6 Non-
migrants
London
Gothenburg
Glasgow
Active global
disidentification
Inclusive
sameness
Common
humanity
One world – Global
citizenship
One
world
7-10
Non-
European
migrants
All cities
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
Active city-level
disidentification
Exclusive
Difference
Diversity Global city/City-
level citizenship
Global
city
1-6 Non-
migrants
London
Table 9.2: Active disidentification with European Citizenship
The likelihood of identifying as a citizen of the EU, we found, is related to
their degree of mobility. Nonmobile participants in MMC positions 1 were more
likely to disidentify with the EU. However, this was partly contingent on national
context. For example, Dublin had high levels of identification that may relate in part
to a national narrative of mobility in Ireland. Also we found that we did not really
have anyone that took up a settled nonmobile position rather all participants at MMC1
had plans to move. In Düsseldorf, where again in line with Eurobarometer surveys,
identification was high this was rarely articulated in terms of the political or economic
EU project, but rather in terms of mobility and travelling regularly to neighboring
countries. City level findings given both the size of the sample and its framing using
the MMC at best can be understood as indicative. Yet they begin to reveal the role
that mobility has within people’s social representations in relation to the EU. A public
freedom through mobility narrative can work to create both identifications for those
that enact it and disidentification for those that reject levels of European integration or
wish to have a stronger sense of national borders.
In cities where a clear nonmobile position emerged, such as Gothenburg,
London and Glasgow, the public narrative on bordering and mobility related to an
‘active national disidentification’. Such participants regarded national differences to
be uncontested where such differences are in UEs case personified and essentialized,
and his certainty that he is not a European citizen rests on this categorisation.
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
Extract 5
UE: No. Because a Frenchman is a Frenchman, and an Englishman is an Englishmen
UE, MMC1, London.
The final disidentification position, moves from the national to city level. This local
level disidentification can be articulated, as the following position, I am a cityzen.
This position was found most commonly in London.
Extract 6
TB: No, not at all. I don’t mind even if the UK withdraws its membership from the EU and
we are banned from entering Europe and we would have to get visas, I don’t mind. TB
MMC2 London
London saw the highest level of disidentification it was positioned as a cosmopolitan
global city, allowing for a citylevel citizenship, Europe was characterised as a rather
boundaried and parochial form of belonging in the context of a more cosmopolitan
belonging.
Extract 7
VK: Nah. It’s convenient if I wanna go to Europe, but if I’m not travelling I don’t really think
about that, Europe, or myself as European. To be honest with you, I just see myself as a
Londoner. But really and truly, I don’t even think of myself as a nationality. VK, MMC1,
London.
Public narratives of European Citizenship – identification
Narrative identification with European citizenship, as noted was related to
either the polity of the place one lived or a degree of mobility or both. The most
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
spontaneous identifications with Europe occurred in Dublin and once participants
were asked Q40, they tended to say yes if they were nonmigrant.
Identification Ideational
philosophy
Ethno-
cultural
Demos/Citizenship Spatial MMC
Positions
City
Active post-
national
identification
Exclusive
Sameness
Common
Euro
culture &
history
Regional political
voice/European
Citizenship
Europe 7-10
intra-
European
migrants
All cities
Active
national
identification
Exclusive
Sameness
Common
Euro
culture &
history
National-European
voice/European
Citizenship
Nation
in
Europe
1-6 non-
migrants
Dusseldorf
Dublin
Glasgow
Table 9.3: Active identification with European Citizenship
The statement ‘I am Irish first’ (PF, MMC1), led to identification with Europe, rather
than a disidentification, because the nation itself had a national narrative of belonging
to Europe. This national level identification that occurs in Düsseldorf and Dublin
relates to a narrative of European citizenship that does not necessarily involve any
actual migration. The narrative however, whilst it rests on a community commonality,
shared history and a shared future, equally has an exclusive quality it risks being an
exclusive categorisation that puts some on the outside. HE, who came to Dublin for
Ghana, explains when asked by IJ, the second author, Q40.
HE: (Sighs) I think so, depending, because if when you travel to different countries (2)
<your> passport doesn’t even matter. It’s the way you look and who you are and it’s
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
still the issue of discrimination and racism, then it brings the question back to ‘do you
really belong here? Are you part of here?’.HE MMC7 Dublin.
Finally, across all cities, we found the emergence of a postnational identification with
European citizenship that speaks to the ambitions of the original articulation of the
concept in Maastricht Treaty. Here JP, takes up the position.
JP: Yeah. I wouldn’t mind actually having a European passport that says ‘European’ on
it rather than German or Irish or something else’. JP MMC10 Dublin.
This narrative of the European Union was held by participants in all cities. They were
citizens who were intraEuropean migrants in positions 7-10 on the MMC. This
‘freedom through mobility’ narrative took the form of articulating common
sensibilities and common heritage, here CL, a German migrant in Gothenburg that
plans to return to Germany imagined a possible future.
CL: Well this is for me it is also a concept. This is an idea. This is something I like a
future vision for me. It’s a citizen from Europe a European citizen is a modern, open-
minded person. (…) Who is not xenophobic, who is not afraid of new things, (…) who
rather sees the positive aspects of a multicultural concept rather than being threatened
by it. CL, MMC9, Gothenburg
Discussion
“The European idea is empty. It has neither the transcendence of Messianic
ideologies nor the immanence of concrete patriotism. It was created by intellectuals,
and that fact accounts at once for it genuine appeal to the mind and its feeble echo in
the heart (Aron 1954, cited in Hewstone 1986, 9)”. Now over fifty years into the EU
project our study suggests that to some sections of the public it seems to have gained
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
some narrative plausibility. We see evidence in our study that ordinary people are able
to project their ideals into the European project. Our analysis has begun to outline the
narrative structure of people’s identification and disidentification with the EU. We
propose narrative identification, with its rich detail, character and contingencies, to be
a key empirical dimension, in understanding the discursive governance that
characterises the protean nature of the EU project alongside the more recognised
indices of European level democracy – voter turn-out, salience and knowledge of
European institutions and their policy-making processes.
This initial scoping study has parameters and as such limitations, our
objectives in developing a micro relational analysis concerned with dialogical
positions, required relatively small numbers in each city, however by including
different Europhile and Eurosceptic polities, the study reveals the beginning of a
conceptual framework that allow a fuller examination of people’s relationship with
the EU project that moves beyond the broad nature of such national polities. The
chapter has demonstrated that individual variation within each city most often relates
to degree and nature of mobility.
As such, the use of the Migration-Mobility Continuum (MMC), suggests that
when mobility is understood as continuous it can reveal itself to be a key dimension to
European Citizenship. Though freedom to move is regarded as the key right of
European Citizenship, it is striking how much existing research into European
identification, European citizenship and the European public sphere, assumes a
national nonmobile citizenry. We hope our findings promote a more dynamic and
emergent understanding of citizens’ relationships with the EU as well a deeper
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
understanding of the public, as dialogical citizens, actively making sense of social
knowledge circulating in a globalised and relational public sphere.
In returning to the question informing this chapter, that is, the ways discourses
are resisted or resonate within sections of the public sphere, we propose three
considerations: firstly, that citizens constitute themselves as publics, and indeed that
acts such as migration constitute publics in response to them. That social
representations around bordering, shared heritage and mobility were key to
understanding both resistance and resonance. Resonance, in our study is centred
chiefly around the idea of supranational or post-national identification contingent on
mobility. Equally resistance and disillusionment with the EU, relates to a variety of
positions, local and global identification, and disenchantment with the failure of the
EU to leave it up to its own ideals.
Conclusion
In contrast to the direction of findings on the European public sphere that have
tended to see deficit or ‘missing publics’, within our analysis we found very little
evidence of a disinterested public. Instead, with the use of social psychological
priming techniques, the European public sphere was found to be very much alive.
Such differences may well be due to the divergence of methodological approaches,
where media analysis and survey techniques risk flattening the public’s ability to
articulate their reasoning processes around the discourses and representations of the
European Union within the public sphere. We propose, however, that Europe is at a
critical juncture, in the hearts and minds of the public where the freedom through
mobility narrative is for citizens creating a contested site. While the national media
across Europe continue to focus on the parameters of immigration as a key
Mahendran, K, Jackson, I & Kapoor, A. (2015) Public Narratives of European Citizenship – the
dialogical citizen in the European Public Sphere. In Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the
Public Sphere – Edited by Umut Korkut, Kesi Mahendran, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Robert Henry Cox.
Palgrave Macmillan. Published September 2015
problematic for the European Union, our study signals the emergence of such
mobility and anticipated mobility as the narrative basis of a postnational active
identification with the ongoing ideals of the European Union project.
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