The past ten years have witnessed the publication of a number of sociologically-inspired studies of European integration.  These studies started with a focus on identification support of European integration and have gradually shifted their attention to transnational experience and practices, as well as to the interplay between experience and identification.    This research on the social transformation of Europe is slowly breaking away both from national comparisons and from the exclusive orientation to European integration that dominated the study of Europe studies since the 1970s.  Furthermore, the most recent work rests on original and rich datasets collected specifically to test specific factual hypotheses.  This symposium presents some of these research projects’ empirical results and systematically develops and test explanatory hypotheses for the findings.  The symposium is organized around two main topics: First, the relationship between transnational experience and political participation. Trans-European solidarity and de-nationalization lie at the center of these substantively and methodologically diverse set of papers.  Second, what some authors refer to as “banal” transnational practices, practices related to new forms of geographic mobility, partner choice, and consumption, whose accumulation over time may play a key role in the emergence of a genuine European society.