Connected Europe(ans): does economic integration foster social interaction?

Abstract:

Considering the current process of horizontal Europeanisation which has resulted from the new opportunity structure created by the EU, this article discusses to what extent the European Member States are economically and socially intertwined.

The proposition of this paper is that social interactions go hand in hand with economical interactions between the European Member States. In order to validate this assumption, a horizontal Europeanisation index that measures Europeanisation in contrast to globalisation was developed. The underlying variables of our index cover 25 European countries and were mainly collected from OECD and EUROSTAT.

Almost all European countries are economically more Europeanised than globalised. We observed a medium correlation between the economic and social dimension, indicating a rather low systematic pattern between the two dimensions of horizontal Europeanisation in 2011. However, this assumption cannot be upheld when considering the time perspective. When comparing 2007–2011, social cross-border transactions are relatively disconnected from economical cross-border transaction.