The ambiguity, specificity, and ambivalence of living in a European union

Abstract

European union can mean a lot of different things depending on where you put the emphasis. A European union can be a union of Europeans, a union that has specific or specifically European characteristics, or a union that brings together both Europeans and European characteristics at the same time. The union itself is also ambiguous, insofar as it can reflect a sense of unity (togetherness), a set of formal institutions, or both – but leaving open the questions which came first, the feeling or the institutions, and whether the two things are reinforcing in a functional sense (Haas, 2004) or working against one-another in a post-functional sense (Hooghe and Marks, 2009).