Public narratives of European Citizenship - the dialogical citizen in the European public sphere

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





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





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





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.





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





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





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.





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





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





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





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.





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’.





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





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.





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,





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





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





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.





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





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





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





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





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





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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