ABSTRACT
The growing interest in the transnational character of contemporary migration has emerged from, or been seen as the cause of, an increasing sense of the fragmented nature of social, cultural, and political communities within modern liberal societies. Present patterns of migration are not the sole or even biggest cause of this fragmentation, however. Other factors are introducing new challenges for communities of all sizes, particularly with regard to the creation and maintenance of social cohesion, including the ubiquity of technology and social media, widening income disparities, and internal ideological divisions. In established and emergent liberal democracies, the question of whether new groups of migrants can wish to contribute to the stability of nationhood and citizenship and, at the same time, maintain strong ‘transnational’ ties and allegiances, is part of a larger public concern about how a sense of a shared collective identity can be established among a diverse and fragmented populace. In Europe this has been intimately connected to the debates over migration to Europe, the extent of European integration, the possibility of a European constitution, internal economic differences, and challenges over the sustainability of the Euro and even the Union itself. It is not surprising that the issue of ‘social cohesion’ became the most resonant concern of much European policy during the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, and European identity issues informed many of the agendas set by the European Commission’s research frameworks.
