European integration through mobilities?
Résumé
In its different forms, mobility is a central concept to understand contemporary social life (Urry 2000 and 2007). In this paper we focus on the European context and argue that indeed social life in Europe is enacted through diverse kinds of mobilities – in both physical and virtual space. On the basis of survey data, we map out the patterns of these mobilities, including intra-European migrations, international travels, but also individual networks across borders and online transactions, and explore how they are structured depending on both individual socioeconomic characteristics and places from which they originate. Going beyond the mobilities paradigm, the analysis sheds light on how free movement within the EU, one of the basic rights of the EU citizens, is translated into a set of mobility practices. Therefore mapping out mobilities is a way of mapping EU citizenship practices in a day-to-day reality. Preliminary analyses show that there are national specificities in mobility patterns, countering the idea that mobilities ‘level the field’ and have integrative effects.
We address these issues using the EUCROSS survey which was carried out in six European countries (Denmark, Germany, Italy, Romania, Spain and UK) in 2012. EUCROSS included various measures of physical and virtual mobilities, which are used as dependent variables in logistic regression models. Based on statistical analyses we draw a detailed account of EU citizenship practices across national borders.