Images of Europeans: In-Group Trust and Support for European Integration. Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series Vol. 14 No. 3, March 2014

Prior research on citizen support for European integration does not consider how individuals’ evaluations of European nationalities are associated with support. This paper fills this gap by developing a political cohesion model based on social identity theory. I claim that the probability of supporting integration increases with greater levels of trust in fellow Europeans, which assumes to reflect their positive images. Also, trust in eastern European Union nationalities has the highest impact on the probability for support, followed by trust in the southern nationalities, and then northern nationalities due to the eastern and southern nationalities relatively lower economic development. Controlling for various factors, the ordered logistic regression analysis of the European Election Study (2004) data support these claims.

Redrawing Identity Boundaries through Integration Policies: Strategies of Inclusion/Exclusion of Immigrants in Québec and South Tyrol. EDAP Paper 01/2013

Following the research agenda introduced by Will Kymlicka, this qualitative study offers an interpretation of how the sub-national elites of Québec and South Tyrol police the integration of immigrants. For these national minority groups, which are constantly undergoing a process of redefinition of their collective identities by differentiating themselves from the Others who do not belong to the in-group, immigrants have progressively become the most significant Others as they are not part of the original system of compromises. This article questions how sub-national elites are handling this relatively new kind of ethnocultural diversity brought about by large-scale permanent immigration on two levels: first, the political narrative of the ruling sub-national parties, their electoral appeals, manifestos and speeches; second, the policy arrangements for the integration of immigrants in education, language and social policy. The initial approach of the article is pessimistic, as it assumes that sub-national elites will marginalize immigrants to please core nationalist supporters. In fact, the hypotheses to be tested are whether the national minority groups of Québec and South Tyrol engage in a process of reconstruction of their ethnic identity bounded by opposition to real or imagined Others – the newcomers; and whether they adopt practical measures that force newcomers to be assimilated into the group or to be marginalized. The comparison between Québec and South Tyrol provides a basic understanding of the impact of immigration in two sub-national polities that are very different, but still adopt similar political narratives and policy strategies with regard to the integration of newcomers.