Abstract
Based on representative survey data, the present study examines potentials for the sustainable development of a transnational civil society in French-German, Polish-German, and Czech-German border regions. The theoretical framework is a social capital approach in the tradition of Putnam. Transnational engagement is seen as a key element for the development of a border-crossing civil society. For the analysis, existing forms of social capital were classified according to their bridging and bonding functions and the potentials of local and transnational activities are described. Furthermore, using multilevel analysis, the predictive power of different variables like individual dispositions and specific contexts of the regions on cross-border activities are examined. Descriptively, the expected lower level of local civil-society engagement, in general, and also with regard to the transnational activities was found for post-socialist border regions. It is shown that, first and foremost, existing experience in civil-society engagement in the local context is a high-impact predictor for both transnational activities and an interest in such activities. Other variables like feelings of a historical burden or the economic situation of the region are less important.
Highlights
In political science, the social integration of Europe is rather a neglected topic [1,2,3]
The present study focuses on transnational civil-society engagement as a core component of transnational social capital and—in our view—central building block on the trajectory toward sustainable transnational civil society engagement
To identify advancing and restricting aspects and especially the role of pre-existing local social capital, eight city pairs were examined with multilevel methods
Summary
The social integration of Europe is rather a neglected topic [1,2,3]. The development of a transnational civil society demands particular forms of social capital, because in this case social networks must cross nation-state borders. This clarification makes it obvious that we are not looking at changing governance structures, as has recently been done by Fioramonti [11] in an important collection of papers, nor at transnational activities of migrants, as done by Snel et al [12] or Nwana [13], but at grass-roots engagement and the interest in cross-border civil-society activities It is the aim of the present paper to characterize different forms of social capital in the border regions as “bridging” or “bonding” [10], and to identify promoting and constraining factors for the development of a sustainable transnational civil-society engagement. It thereby intends to uncover the bases for the creation of sustainable cross-border civil-society engagement
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