Europe as a non-issue. The irrelevance if transnational relations for citizens’ daily lives

A great deal of European sociology is interested in Europeans’ attitudes towards Europe and the EU. Research on Euroskepticism, European (financial) solidarity, transnationalism, and the effect of European inequalities has produced a large body of literature. In this paper, based on qualitative interviews with people living in Germany, Poland, and Italy, we change perspective and focus on a particular finding from our material: our interview partners, while generally thinking positive about Europe and even identifying as Europeans, have quite little to say about Europe. In their day-to-day lives, even though they travel and have contacts abroad, other European nationalities and countries are simply irrelevant. This makes investigating issues like transnational social trust and other attitudes towards fellow Europeans difficult. But it also tells us something about such attitudes which, we argue, become only salient when practically relevant. And, indeed, Europe is not practically relevant for citizens’ daily lives as our interviewpartners readily admitted. We explain our findings from a pragmatist theoretical perspective. Moreover, our findings connect with research conducted by, e.g., Van Ingelgom (2014) on the indifference of citizens towards Europe. Last but not least, studies we draw conclusions connected to studies emphasizing the importance of political framing to understand phenomena of disintegration like Brexit (Wood & Ausserladscheider 2021).