Who Are the Europeans? Reassessing Fligstein's "Class Project" Paradigm

In Europe, citizens’ experiences and life-styles are transnational (i.e., they reach across national borders) to a different extent. This very fact is behind Neil Fligstein’s famous notion of Europe as a “class project” (Fligstein 2008), which has become a widely accepted paradigm in social transnationalism research. Whereas follow-up research has indeed shown that transnational experiences vary by socio-economic status, it is yet unexplored whether this empirical pattern is strong enough to warrant the notion of a class project as the key to understanding transnational life-styles.

This presentation aims to fill this gap by examining whether the class project paradigm actually holds when confronted with two alternative explanations. Within EU-societies, we run a horse race testing the power of class variables (education, occupation, income) against ascriptive status variables, such as gender, age, and migration background. Across societies, we run a horse race between the class variables and country-level characteristics, in particular the level of human development. The class project paradigm would be supported if (a) on the individual level the class variables explained more variance in transnational life-styles than ascriptive status variables do; and if (b) the class-related individual-level variance were larger than the contextual-level variance explained by human development.

Preliminary results using 2010 Eurobarometer data (EB 73.3) for the EU-27 countries suggest that it is misleading to depict social transnationalism as being solely or mainly a class project. Further, the evidence suggests that it makes sense to move away from the class project paradigm and to re-conceptualize citizens’ transnationalism –and hence Europe– as a modernization project.