Narrating European Society

Toward a Sociology of European Integration

By (author) Hans-Jörg Trenz

Paperback - £39.00

Publication date:

23 March 2018

Length of book:

224 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498527071

Trenz introduces a sociological perspective on European integration by looking at different accounts of Europeanization as society building. He observes how Europeanization unfolds in ongoing practices and discourses through which social relations among the Europeans are redefined and re-embedded. The chapters describe how the project of European integration has been powerfully launched in postwar Europe as a normative venture that comprises polity and society building, how this project became ingrained in every-day life histories and experiences of the Europeans, how this project became contested and confronted resistances and, ultimately, how it went through its most severe crisis. A sociology of European integration is thus outlined along four main themes or narratives: first, the elite processes of identity construction and the framework of norms and ideas that carries such a construction (together with notions of European identity, EU citizenship, etc.); second, the socialization of European citizens, processes of banal Europeanism, and social transnationalism through everyday cross-border exchanges; third, the mobilization of resistance and Euroskepticism as a fundamental and collectively mobilized opposition to processes of Europeanization; and fourth, the political sociology of crisis, linked not only to financial turmoil but also, more fundamentally, to a legitimation crisis that affects Europe and the democratic nation-state.
Trenz’s sociology of European integration opens new avenues for studying Europe and invites us to rethink standard academic paradigms. The book traces the unfounded hopes and premature fears of the European Union. It analyses both the arguments of those who tried to build an integrated continent and of those who tried to resist this. While he does not want us to read his book as a history of decay, he has the courage of imagining the unthinkable: the collapse of the European Union and the subsequent disintegration. The EU may well be in crisis, but Trenz’s book demonstrates that European studies are thriving.