Raising European Citizens? European Identity in European Schools

Judith Rohde‐Liebenau

doi:10.1111/jcms.13050

Abstract

AbstractCitizens' identification with Europe could consolidate European integration. European Schools, created for children of EU officials, should mirror the EU's vision of citizens of member states united in (national) diversity. Instead, this study reveals that European School students construct an explicitly European in‐group and deviate from EU visions by differentiating themselves from a more national and less mobile lifestyle. The article draws on qualitative content analysis of in‐depth and focus group interviews with teachers and 101 students in European Schools in Germany, Luxembourg and England. This elucidates the relationship between European schooling and this peculiar but ultimately European identity. In a dual mechanism, by ‘doing Europe’, students actively nourish a transnational social network in school; by ‘telling Europe’, students are more passively exposed to European and diverse national narratives. Both the analysis of how their European identity emerges and descriptive underpinnings show the complexity of European identity construction even under most favourable conditions.

Highlights

With the EU’s triple crisis (Caporaso, 2018) on the Euro, refugees and Brexit, having a sense of belonging by Europe’s citizens is an increasingly important element of sustaining European integration
The analysis aims at establishing the internal validity of identification with Europe within the case of the European School
Working within the most likely case of European Schools, this article finds that students identify with Europe, defining it as an in-group of multilingual and mobile individuals and differentiating themselves from more national lifestyles

Summary

Introduction

With the EU’s triple crisis (Caporaso, 2018) on the Euro, refugees and Brexit, having a sense of belonging by Europe’s citizens is an increasingly important element of sustaining European integration. I suggest there is an interaction between ‘telling Europe’ and ‘doing Europe’ In their school setting, students actively do Europe by developing a transnational social network in which physical mobility and multilingualism are the tools that mark their in-group status. While the students directly experience their membership of the small in-group of transnational Europeans in school, identifying with a larger in-group beyond school (that is, a group of multilingual and mobile Europeans) requires both telling and doing Europe Both features contribute to identity research beyond the specific case of these schools. The expected observable implications (Beach and Pedersen, 2013) of theories on education and identity building are summarized as follows: Proposition 1: I expect European Schools to provide an explicitly European education to their students, which implies influencing their patterns of identification. The concepts of socialization into a European in-group and education towards European citizenship as well as students’ cognitive mobilization for Europeanness are discussed as part of the theorization section below

Methods and Data

Students’ European In-group and Exclusive Out-group Identity

Mechanism of Identification with Europe

Conclusion