Scholarly record

THE SOCIOLOGICAL FRAMEWORKS OF EUROPEAN CITIZENSHIP IN ITALIAN JOURNALISTIC NARRATION

S. Nanetti

Abstract

European citizenship is one of the main achievements of the European transnational political institution. The history of its institution, however, presents a profound ambivalence. On the one hand, it extends the rights of belonging to the citizens to a transnational social-political reality, on the other, it sees the feeling of belonging of the same European neo-citizens diminish. In our own times the consensus with respect to the validity of the European policies goes into crisis, by reducing the sense of belonging in a common destiny of its citizens. The recent case of Brexit is an example of the malaise that hit European citizenship. European citizenship realizes a form of unprecedented transnational belonging with respect to the past. The modern categories of citizenship do not seem adequate for the understanding: the feeling of belonging and the political-juridical formulation of this status. Through a relational sociological analysis, we will locate the specific characteristics of European citizenship. Placing the focus on the historical memory axis, we will try to understand how the constitutive memory of European citizenship can give shape to a feeling of transnational belonging. Relational analysis will be supplemented by the study of social representations that compose the Italian journalistic narrative. The articles published in the last four decades by some of the major national newspapers will be analyzed, reaching a conceptual synthesis of the predominant argument patterns that draw the outlines of historical European citizenship in the Italian context. The aim of this paper is to understand the sociological frameworks of European citizenship in Italian journalistic narration.

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