According to the programme ”Europe for citizens”, European citizenship is an important factor for the legitimation of European integration. Habermas (2011) for example, regards it as the right way to respond to the current Euro-crisis since a European identification would make true European solidarity possible. This means that European citizenship could help the deepening of the EU. This is why it is so interesting to examine how European identification comes about. The aim of this paper is to distinguish if Europeans who know more about the EU, also have a stronger identification as a European citizen. Ever since Inglehart’s seminal article on the subject in 1970 a link was posited between cognitive mobilization and a stronger European identification. It seemed for a long time that it is mainly higher education that triggers identification with Europe. But in 1998, by using Eurobarometer data, Gabel already found that this relationship did not appear in every EU-country. In current empirical research the link between education and a European identity was even inexistent. This would be all the more problematic as the EU itself sees education as a good trigger to strengthen notions of European citizenship. Theory mainly states that more knowledge is the defining factor that explains the link between education and a European identity. Adolescents then seem the ideal group to test this proposition because it allows seeing whether new knowledge (on the EU) influences their identification. Earlier studies on the impact of educational programs on how young people relate to Europe were often based on qualitative research with small samples of youngsters. We will analyze the data of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2009 to test this question on al larger scale with a quantitative methodology. This dataset includes 22 out of 27 European member states. The number of countries in the ICCS allows for the use of a multilevel approach to control for country-level variables that might influence the relationship.
