The Europe of Elites: A Study Into the Europeanness of Europe's Political and Economic ElitesHeinrich Best, György Lengyel, Luca Verzichelli A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via www.oup.com/uk as well as the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license and is part of the OAPEN-UK research project. It has been widely acknowledged that the process of European integration and unification was started and is still pursued as an elite project, designed to put an end to debilitating conflicts and rivalries by consolidating a common power base and by pooling Europe's economic resources. Nevertheless elites have remained the known unknowns of the European integration process. The present volume is designed to change this. Based on surveys of political and economic elites in 18 European countries, it is a comprehensive study of the visions, fears, cognitions and values of members of national parliaments and top business leaders underlying their attitudes towards European integration. It also investigates political and economic elites' embeddedness in transnational networks and their ability to communicate in multicultural settings. The book strongly supports the view of an elitist character of the process of European integration on the one hand, while challenging the idea that European national elites have merged or are even merging into a coherent Eurelite on the other. As the 11 chapters of this book show the process of European integration is much more colourful and even contradictory than concepts of a straight forward normative and structural integration suggest. In particular this process is deeply rooted in, and conditional on, the social and political settings in national contexts. The empirical basis for this book is provided by the data of the international IntUne project, which has for the first time created a comprehensive database combining coordinated surveys of Europe-related attitudes at the elite and general population level. |
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80 Economic Elite 97 Filter 98 Don’t know analysis answers attachment to Europe attitudes towards European Austria big threat Bulgaria cent chapter citizens citizenship cohesive Europe common system contacts correlation countries Czech Republic democratic Denmark dependent variable dimension elite groups elite–masses enlargement Estonia Euro Euromanifestos European army European career European Commission European elites European identity European institutions European integration European level European Parliament European Union Eurosceptic Euroscepticism F-statistic factorial axis factors Greece Hooghe and Marks Hungary hypothesized ideology immigration IntUne project issues know 99 Refused left–right Lithuania logistic regression multilevel Multilevel models national elites non-EU one’s orientations perceived perceptions of threats Poland policy areas political and economic Portugal positions preferences pro-European process of European radical parties regional regression analysis represent representation role scale Serbia significant single foreign policy Slovakia social security strengthened supranational Table tion Turkey unification unified tax system views