ABSTRACT
When the term ‘society’ is used with some geographical prefix, it is most often the name of a national or subnational state, as in British society or Scottish society. Such an approach is clearly inappropriate to the case of Europe, where there is at best something like a polity, the European Union, encompassing part of Europe. European society, like Mediterranean society, is inevitably going to be a fuzzier entity. As Hans-Jörg Trenz (2008: 19) suggests in a splendid recent overview, we need to ask ‘whether European integration is to be understood in terms of continuity or in terms of discontinuity of the project of modernity … [and] … how Europeanization is linked to more encompassing processes of globalization’. This is, he notes, a challenge which sociology, broadly understood, is particularly well fitted to meet, despite its late arrival on the scene of European studies. In a chapter in Adrian Favell and Virginie Guiraudon’s book on the sociology of the European Union, Trenz (2011: 213) concludes: ‘European society is not simply the other side of EU governance to be addressed and domesticated by EU institutions. It is, above all, an emergent reality, indicating a major reconfiguration of the European social, political, economic and cultural space.’
