What Part Does Europe Play in the Identity Building of Young European Adults?

Abstract

With Inglehart's work on values and European identity as a starting point, and based on a representative survey of 18- to 24-year-olds from 10 cities in six European countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Slovakia, Spain, and the United Kingdom), the present paper analyses the meaning and relative importance of identification with Europe in comparison with other identification objects. Analyses of covariance and cluster analyses reveal that geo-political entities (like Europe, one's home country, one's region of residence, or one's birthplace) all draw similar ratings as to their importance for one's identity, and that this importance is low to at most medium high, with friends, partners, family, job and educational attainment of a much higher importance. In spite of the fact that the importance ratings for identification with geo-political entities are positively correlated with each other, they predict ethno-centrism differentially, identification with one's country being a positive, identification with Europe being a negative predictor of ethno-centrism (as revealed by multiple regression analyses). This finding leads the authors to theorize that on the Inglehartian continuum from survival values to self-expression values, national and European identity have dual meanings as expressions of value orientations, national identity overlapping in meaning with survival values, but also with European identity, and European identity overlapping in meaning with self-expression values, but also with national identity.