Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

11 Changing rhetoric and
narratives
German trade unions and Polish
migrant workers
Norbert Cyrus
Europeanisation and intermediary organisations
Europeanisation – defined as ‘the emergence of new institutions, new types of social
and political actions, and new forms of culture beyond or across national boundaries’
– evidently ‘challenges bounded notions of state sovereignty; of state control
over social process; and of state legitimacy over political membership and
participation’ (Favell 1998: 1). In the processes of Europeanisation the EU turns
out to be both cause and effect of itself, a result of a ‘set of explosive and indeterminate
effects of late-twentieth century social and political processes. These effects
are fundamentally reorganising territoriality and peoplehood, the two principles
that have shaped modern European borders’ (Borneman and Fowler 1997: 489).
The hitherto nationally bounded construction and maintenance of boundaries
of belonging withers away. Some research has been done on the construction of
new European institutions and symbols (for a social anthropological review see
Borneman and Fowler 1997) with a focus on the transnational policy arena and the
impact of great actors. But European integration is not only a structural top-down
re-arrangement of the institutional framework and national juridical provision. In
the age of Europeanisation, actors have to adapt to the changing cultural landscape
which comes along with the institutional, political, social and cultural rearrangements
from top-down. Surveys such as those by EUROSTAT report trends
in the national public perception of European issues in member states but cannot
supply insights as to how bottom-up adaptation is working. Until now, the social and
cultural process of bottom-up adaptation of Europe has been widely neglected.
Following Knill and Lehmkuhl (1999) three ideal types of modes of
Europeanisation can be distinguished: positive integration means the imposition of
concrete institutional requirements with which member states must comply. Negative
integration means that European legislation may affect the domestic arrangements by
altering the domestic rules of the game, but do not prescribe any distinctive
institutional model of how the new institutional equilibrium should actually look.
Framing integration affects domestic arrangements more indirectly, namely by altering
the beliefs and expectations of domestic actors. The changes in domestic beliefs may
in turn affect the strategies and preferences of domestic actors, potentially leading
to corresponding institutional adaptations. In other words: framing integration,