Abstract
What does Europe mean to an Estonian, an Italian or a German? Is it possible to develop any such thing as a “European” identity? If so, how would that process of identity construction unfold? The edited volume reviewed here, the result of a collaborative research project on “Euroidentities” funded by the European Union, focuses on the process of Europeanization (or lack thereof) to test the ability of citizens from individual European nation-states to develop a larger and more encompassing (supra-national) identity. As one of the most intractable challenges confronting the EU community, the issue of European identity has been studied from different theoretical angles and methodological perspectives. According to the authors in the book, however, previous empirical work privileged a top-down approach that, on the one hand, completely neglected the agency of the research subject and, on the other hand, was based on pre-existing models of Europeanization that limited the interpretive potential of the data collected. To reverse this problematic trend, the contributors adopt the method of in-depth biographical narrative interview and present it as the optimal data collection mode for assessing the evolution of a European identity across time.
Seven partner teams cooperated in the research, each focusing on one country’s experience of joining the EU, from the original member states of Germany, Northern Ireland, Wales and Italy to the new members of Poland, Estonia, and Bulgaria. Altogether, the teams conducted two hundred lengthy life-story interviews with individuals selected according to the likelihood that their life experiences would inspire them to reflect on their connection to Europe. Respondents were located following a list of “sensitized groups” constructed by the research team and comprising the categories of “the educationally mobile,” “transnational workers,” “farmers,” “cultural contacts,” “civil society organizations,” “external to Europe” and “intimate relations.” As showcased by this list, the innovative feature of the team’s research design was to single out for sampling the respondents who might actually have past or present reasons for developing opinions about Europe. For the researchers, a survey questioning the general population about its European identity would not bear as worthwhile results, for it would be mostly based on abstract thoughts rather than direct experiences. The project’s goal was instead to focus on Europeanization as a process, a lived-in phenomenon that develops in accordance with one’s life progress. The researchers wanted to gauge how people make Europe relevant to themselves depending on specific circumstances; to this end, they theorized the emergence of a “European mental space” among the sensitized groups, a space that works as a frame of reference and that does not necessarily require superseding a previous, well-established identity. For the researchers, Europe cannot be conceived simply as a geographical space but should also be thought of as a cultural and mental construct.
During the phase of data analysis, the research team developed a model of distinct dimensions of European identity to use as an interpretive guide for isolating the expression of European identity. Overall, each national partner team focused on one specific sensitized group, and each reported its results (with a couple of exceptions) in two chapters, one of which was dedicated more exclusively to methodological issues. Reflections on method indeed turn out to be as central to the book as the research results, if not more. In a revealing passage, the researchers state that the volume can be read in two ways, “as a book about European identity but also as a textbook about the application of biographical methods… to an empirical question” (p. 20). Although substantive discussion is not absent from the volume, to this reader the strength and depth of the book actually resides in its thorough and lengthy elaboration of methodological issues more than in its treatment of European identity.
One of the two introductory chapters is exclusively dedicated to biographical research, in particular the method of autobiographical narrative interview as developed by Fritz Schütze. The authors emphasize the centrality of biographies as a hermeneutic tool for understanding people in their everyday life; more importantly, they also regard autobiographies as granting privileged access to social reality (in this case, people’s relation to Europe) through the meaning that actors assign to their actions. Methodological discussions of biographical approaches also appear throughout the volume and display the researchers’ heightened level of reflexivity on several of the issues raised by biographical work. Conducting autobiographical interviews is not a simple task, and the researchers spell out in details the procedures they followed, the difficulties encountered, and the ethical issues confronted, as well as the challenges faced by those who tell the stories. “Extempore narration,” which is what the interviewees perform in biographical methods, is subject to several constraints, as it is impossible to tell everything, to start with; in addition, there are specific process structures that orient the narrators in their self-directed search for an answer to the very broad and wide-open question they have been asked to consider. In the specific case study on European identity, the respondents’ prompting stimulus was something along the lines of “the ways in which Europe plays a role in the lives of people” (p. 26). As the informants were encouraged to tell their whole story, it was up to them to construct the narrative and select what and how much they wanted to say.
In terms of data analysis too, autobiographical narrative interviews present notable complexities. For the Euroidentities project, the research team evaluated the biographical content of the interviews through sequential structural analysis, although other analytical methods were also explored, including the biographical-narrative interpretative method, narrative ethnography, and the social constructivist approach. In the end, the variety (albeit all belonging to a similar tradition) of analytical procedures and methodological approaches that the researchers applied were meant to bring to the fore the multidimensional aspects of individual biographies and highlight the complex dynamics linking the individual and the social world. According to the authors, the biographical methods open up a whole field of knowledge that other approaches can only approximate; they also allow bridging the gap between structure and agency, an old theoretical and methodological dilemma that has never been put to rest.
The volume engages in an exceptionally thorough explanation of biographical methods, and for those who are interested in this qualitative approach the book will be a must read. For other readers concerned with identity and Europe, however, this methodological emphasis might be more than they asked for, while they will still find the substantive discussion a bit lacking. No doubt, the book raises thought-provoking points on European identity; it rightly encourages us to consider the European dimension of identity formation as still under construction, and the idea the authors put forward of a “European mental space” as a tool to think about Europeanization is also a stimulating contribution. Yet the book does not delve deeply into these subjects nor does it offer a historical background on the European question. From this point of view, it will hardly satisfy those looking to understanding the general parameters of the issue. For an in-depth analysis of European identity, those readers will have to look somewhere else.