Narrating European Society

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., This is a timely book as European integration is considered doomed by a series of crises. Hans-Jörg Trenz finally asks the right questions: Whether we are citizens or students, what does the EU mean for us "in real life"? How can we make sense of past enthusiasms, current skepticism and the on-going processes of integration through actual relations across Europe between individuals and groups? This book provides us with insightful analytical tools to understand European integration relying on updated classical sociology and state-of-the-art empirical comparative projects., This book is an important step forward in European Studies. It addresses the world in which European politics takes place: the world of the people living in Europe. Instead of taking this social world for granted, looking at people as objects to be controlled and governed, it takes serious the idea of people as agents who engage in making sense of living in Europe. Working through an enormous amount of literature, Trenz offers a challenging new sociological view on Europe: Europe not as an object of more or less well placed political engineering, but as a narratively constructed space in which ideas, arguments and stories for and against Europe circulate, thus generating a social space without a finalité, yet full of dissensus, conflicts, destructive actions and actions of repair. The idea of organizing this space along four narratives created by policy makers, scientists, and the media provides the frame for a “discursive” theory of society as a foundation for European studies.

Hans-Jörg Trenz is professor in the Media, Cognition, and Communication Department at the University of Copenhagen and research professor at ARENA, Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo.