ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the main results of the study, reflects on its limitations and points out some implications. The main contributions of this book are the following: first, it shows not only that, but also how, national and regional symbolic boundaries matter among a highly European group of EU professionals– the officials of the EU Commission. Second, this book claims that not only national categories of identification are relevant within the Commission, but also regional ones (like “Northern” and “Southern European,” or “Western” and “Eastern European”). Finally, it demonstrates that these reflect the perception of cultural, socio-economic and political differences between the member states of the EU. This chapter goes on to discuss the limitations of this study, stemming from its use of interviews as a methodological tool and its focus on the symbolic dimension of boundaries only. Finally, this chapter concludes by discussing the impact of these symbolic boundaries on the social cohesion of the EU Commission, their generalizability to the field of EU policy making at large and the implications of these findings for the dynamics of European social group-making.
