Europe without Borders: Remapping Territory, Citizenship, and Identity in a Transnational Age (review)

Sociological books about European integration are few and far between. Precious few American sociologists, in this most American-centric of disciplines, have really grappled with the fundamental changes afoot in European societies as a result of the European Union (EU). Political scientists and geographers have made a better show of it, and we should thus welcome this new, polished volume from Johns Hopkins Press, that brings together high quality contributors on this subject from all three disciplines. The European Union is transforming Europe in ways that do not map well onto the typical U.S.-centered notions of modernity that still guide most reflection on society in the twenty-first century. The EU is not a United States of Europe in the making; nor is it only a thin bureaucratic overlay for national societies that retain self-contained autonomy. In fact, EU member states in the postwar period have fashioned a unified economic space that manages to break down barriers to free movement of all kinds, while preserving much of the patchwork of local and national cultures that gives Europe its richest resources. Political integration has followed economic imperatives, but has created a complex structure of multileveled governance, not a new state. Nations have calmly given over sovereignty to a new common currency (the euro), while jealously guarding the national public spheres of culture and media. Immigration, and globalization more generally, have changed the continent too, but the model of society emerging within the new pan-European institutional framework is one whose accent on welfare and social rights, redistribution, human rights, and freedom of information, language use, and cultural diversity, not to mention diplomacy rather than war, is going to differ quite dramatically from the flattening, all triumphant version of American neoliberal capitalism, often assumed to be the world's only viable political blueprint.

These big political economy questions should be the ones that most jump out in a book about Europe beyond borders, but they are covered only partially in this otherwise interesting volume. Mabel Berezin's congenial introduction sets the tone for a volume that is essayistic in style, more concerned with conceptual issues than presenting evidence, and that leans towards cultural rather than institutional or economic analysis. Berezin brings the notion of territory upfront, rightly, as one of the aspects of European society that has fundamentally changed. We can no longer speak of European societies as if they were self-contained, territorially unambiguous nation-state-societies alone in the way that we routinely speak about social processes in the U.S. European societies are now multileveled, nested, blurred national entities in the sense that the social formations within them are now as likely to transcend conventional notions of political boundaries as fall neatly within them. It is these boundaries — which have hitherto almost exclusively defined the personal identities of modern citizens — that can no longer be assumed. Berezin sees the changes as operating on both a cognitive and emotional level. Europeans today are thus presumably more likely to imagine their personal future on a broader cross-regional, pan-European, or even global scale, and they are less likely to root core emotional attachment and identity in the home nation (or region) of yore. Or, at the very least, Europeans are more likely to vary on this dimension, according to class, education, social opportunity, and other classical sociological indicators. As some become more cosmopolitan, others less privileged retreat into xenophobic local attitudes. Berezin's ideas here are suggestive, rather than empirically proven, but they do point towards fundamental dynamics afoot. Talk of emotion, meanwhile, raises the point that one hidden motor of European integration has been the sense of transnational romance and adventure that many young Europeans have embraced as the most tangible, personal fruit of living their lives on a European scale. It is remarkable how, among, for example, so many young German and Spanish couples, or...