Political Psychology of European Integration

Writing over two decades ago, Stuart Hall (1991) first told the story of European identity as contradictory processes of marking symbolic boundaries and constructing symbolic frontiers between inside and outside, interior and exterior, belonging and otherness, which are central to any account of the political psychology of European integration. The study of European integration has come a long way in the intervening decades, but no systematic attempt has been made to weave the stories of European identity together with those of European integration using political psychology. Given that marking inside and outside, interior and exterior, belonging and otherness are both political and psychological processes, and this absence of engagement seems problematic.

This chapter takes a step towards addressing this absence of engagement by surveying what political psychology and European integration have to say to each other in the understanding of the European Union (EU). Political psychology is understood as the bidirectional interaction of political and psychological processes (Deutsch and Kinnvall, 2002: 17). European integration is understood
as the economic, social and political processes of mutual accommodation and
inclusion by European states and peoples. The chapter will draw on five strands
of political psychology as part of this engagement – conventional psychology,
social psychology, social construction, psychoanalysis and critical political psychology. Within each of these strands, a number of examples of scholarship at the interface of political psychology and European integration will be examined in order to understand the merits of engagement.