ABSTRACT
This chapter justifies Europe in Love’s thematic focus and situates it in the literature. It outlines the slow historical process toward the formation of more geographically extensive social formations and highlights that inter-marriage is a necessary and significant vehicle toward these transformations. It then shows that social scientists, while interested in both inter-marriage and the contribution of transnational skills, practices, and experiences to the development of cosmopolitan dispositions and identifications, have neglected to study how inter-marriage contributes to the development of transnational practices and a cosmopolitan mindset. Europe in Love fills this gap in the literature. It demonstrates that, in the context of European economic and political integration, binational couples are core cells of a future European society. This introductory chapter also outlines the book’s main findings: (1) binational couples are vehicles to a cosmopolitan society, (2) highly educated and less educated binational couples differ in terms of experiences and outlook, (3) binational couples are rooted in the cities and countries in which they live, and (4) partners in binational couples have a cosmopolitan outlook but their identification remains primarily national. This introduction concludes with a short summary of each of the book’s chapters.
