ABSTRACT
European citizens are used to perceiving and assessing living conditions within a European frame of reference. Europe has become a shared social space, at least in cognitive terms, because it provides European citizens with a joint horizon for the perception and assessment of social and political reality. This situation has integrative and disintegrative effects, as the evidence presented in this book and discussed in this concluding chapter shows. The European Union has institutionalised a political field that is a reference point for people’s political thinking. This has fundamentally politicised social divisions within Europe by giving them a political contour. The aim of the European integration process may well have been to develop comparable living conditions in Europe and to defuse potential lines of conflict. But since the economic and financial crisis that ensued after 2008, it is not only the inequalities of living conditions in Europe that have increased. European citizens are also sensitive to unequal living conditions in Europe, thus increasing the ranks of citizens severely criticising their national governments. Under these circumstances, it is highly probable that the homologies between social divisions and political cleavages will continue to nourish political conflicts at the national and European levels.
