Amistad e identificación: las micro fundaciones de las pertenencias macro. Amigos europeos e identidad europea

• Published in: Redes : revista hispana para el análisis de redes sociales Vol. 3; p. 6
• Main Author: de Federico de la Rúa, Ainhoa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 01.09.2002
• ISSN: 1579-0185

Macro belongings to abstract “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983), such as nations, are grounded on the generalized metonymy transfer, encouraged by institutions, to the inhabitants of a certain territory, of the interpersonal experience of trust and solidarity.Indeed, trust and solidarity are first learned in the interactions taking place sphere of kinship. Later on, it is through the learning of solidarity in friendship by age groups that individuals are able to go beyond primary family solidarity into more abstract solidarity in universalistic societies as ours (Eisenstadt 1956).The national social contract is ideologically founded on the ideal model of friendship solidarity. The most explicit example of it being the French motto “liberté égalité fraternité”. This doesn’t mean that there is an exact correspondence between the two kinds of relationships, as Eisenstadt (1984) points out the ideal fraternity announced by the nation serves to hide and justify , the power and instrumentality that the order of the nation-state exerts. At the same time, friendship (in its large conception) sustains the social contract at the same time as it has to be relegated to the private sphere due to its subversive potential (Paine 1969).Friendship relations often stay within the sphere of nation-states, since their institutions structure interaction and interdependencies by the division of labor. However what happens with cross-national friendships? The paradoxical figure of “foreign friends” introduces a tension between the foundations of abstract solidarity and the experience of interpersonal solidarity. Is this tension relegated to be solved in the private sphere? May it have an impact on the claims of public macro belongings?Furthermore, in the European context there is an institutional setting allowing and trying to encourage European identity. Can such micro European friendships give a content to the, otherwise empty in terms of emotional attachment, macro legal shell of European citizenship encouraging European identity?We examine the effects of cross-national friendships in a sample of 218 European exchange students on their perceptions of other Europeans as foreign and opening on their European identity.