In this issue we approach a number of interlinked topics on the themes of Education, Selection, and Mobility; Youth and Citizenship; and Trust and Scepticism over Europe.
The articles on Education, Selection, and Mobility connect with the issues of social capital discussed in the previous issue of European Societies. In ‘Educational homogamy in 22 countries, Henryk Domanski and Dariusz Przybysz of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, address issues of educational selection. Using European Social Survey data to look at cross-class intermarriage patterns, they find the strongest patterns of educational homogamy in Central Europe. The countries of Western Europe tend to show more ‘open’ marriage patterns. Scandinavia exhibits a mixture of patterns: Norway showing high homogamy, while Sweden and Finland show low homogamy. They also found that, across all countries, homogamy was higher for the lower classes than for the higher classes. In the majority of the countries studied, women tended to marry men with a higher education than they had themselves achieved.
Mads Meier Jaeger of the Danish National Institute of Social Research in Copenhagen looks at ‘Educational mobility across three generations: The changing impact of parental social class, economic, cultural, and social capital’. He tries to disentangle the effects of family background from social class effects, arguing that these tend to be confounded in many existing measures of social class. Intergenerational data from Denmark, he argues, allows these effects to be separated and shows that the effects of social class on schooling have been overstated. Family background is conceptualised in terms of Bourdieu's work on the forms of social and cultural capital, and Jaeger concludes that macro-level class schemas (of the kind discussed by Rose and Harrison in the last issue of European Societies) may not be the most effective methodological instrument for educational research.
Working at the University of Turku, Matti Lindberg reports on ‘Connections between the differentiation of higher education participation and the distribution of occupational status’. His particular concern is the effect that higher education has on labour market success after graduation. While there is a distinct educational effect, its strength and character vary among the seven countries studied. The most important factor of variation is the extent to which the transition period between education and work is extended: a longer period of education, because of poor labour market opportunities, buffers the relationship between education and work, and this factor operates at both the individual and the national level.
Both Daniel Faas of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy in Athens and Jorge Benedicto and Maria Luz Morán (UNED and Universidad Complutense, Madrid) are concerned with issues of youth and citizenship. Faas studied Turkish youth in German and English secondary schools, looking at the ways in which their political identities are shaped by school-level processes and by social class. He discovered that their identification as ‘European’ varied with whether ‘Europe’ itself was presented and perceived as multicultural or as predominantly Christian. This argument is extended in the study by Benedicto and Morán, who explore evolving ideas of citizenship among European youth. Their paper constructs an analytical framework for handling this issue, focusing particularly on the cultural dimension of citizenship., using the two dimensions of belonging and involvement.
The final group of articles relate to issues of trust and scepticism over Europe. Mattthias Kaelberer of the University of Memphis draws on work on money from the new economic sociology to explore the institutional framework of trust accorded to the Euro. In ‘Trust in the Euro: Exploring the governance of a supra-national currency’ he looks at how a framework of trust has been built through the ‘vertical’ relations of the European Central Bank and other political agencies and the ‘horizontal’ relations of business enterprises operating in national and transnational markets. He addresses the frequent complaint that the Euro notes and coins contain no easily identifiable images and so generate a culture of scepticism and distrust, holding that the attempt to use transnationally European images does in fact encourage and reinforce a European identity. Trust, he shows, is something that has to be deliberately constructed and negotiated through the social agency of the bodies involved in managing the currency.
In ‘Explanations of political euro-scepticism at the individual, regional and national levels’, Marcel Lubbers and Peer Scheepers of Radboud University, Nijmegen, look directly at this issue of scepticism. Using European Social Survey data, they investigate the factors responsible for high and low levels of euro-scepticism. The principal factors producing high levels of scepticism are nationalist generated distrust of European institutions and the strength of anti-immigrant sentiment within a nation. These effects are countered by the tendency of higher education, higher income, and involvement in socio-cultural professions to produce low levels of euro-scepticism. Cultural and linguistic factors are especially important, as scepticism declines with distance from Brussels and with the availability of foreign language television broadcasts.
The articles in this issue of the journal produce a striking picture of the state of trust, identity, and citizenship within Europe, with the significance of education coming across as a key factor. Education plays a key part in social placement and social selection, but it is also central to cultural and political identity. These concerns will be further extended in the next issue of European Societies, a Special Issue on the mass media, the public sphere, and cultural spaces within Europe.