ABSTRACT
In an address to the Irish Institute for European Affairs in Dublin on 3 November 1997, the British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook MP warned that
political leaders must be careful that as we build supranational structures, we do not lose contact with the people. We need to reconnect the peoples of Europe with the European Union which their governments are trying to create. They need to know that the EU is relevant to their lives. The EU seems to spend too much of its time discussing things that do not touch the people’s lives, abstractions and institutions rather than a concrete agenda. The people need to believe that their agenda is our agenda. Britain has a mission as President of the European Union - to give Europe back to the people. 1
Rhetoric like this has become increasingly common in popular, governmental and scholarly debates on the relationships between European residents and citizens and the institutions and processes of ‘European’, i.e. European Union (EU), integration. Scholars are beginning to focus on the growing gap between, on the one hand, the initiatives of economic and political elites in fostering post-Maastricht programmes of economic and monetary union, common European citizenship, and common security and defence policies, and, on the other hand, the social understanding and acceptance of such initiatives in the localities of Europe, among non-elites. Although such scholarly inquiries often focus on the EU’s so-called ‘democratic deficit’, there has been a marked recent turn to what may be termed the ‘cultural deficit’, a lack of fit between diverse European cultures and the elite cultures of member states’ governments, multinational corporations, and the institutions of the EU, i.e. those people, institutions, and ideologies which give impetus to the European project.