Cognitive Mobilization and European Identity

TLDR

Since WWII, Western Europe has experienced rapid rises in income, education, and urbanization, with widespread television and automobile ownership expanding communication across society. The article examines how the expansion of communication infrastructure influences European integration. Deutsch and Lerner argue that social mobilization—integrating new groups into extensive communication networks—transforms parochial societies into cosmopolitan ones, thereby expanding horizons.

Abstract

Since World War II, Western Europe has been experiencing a rapid rise in mean levels of income and formal education and a sharp decline in rural population. In the more advanced European countries, ownership of television sets and automobiles has spread widely during the past decade, providing the potential for far broader communication among the various spheres of society. Higher education has developed at a particularly rapid pace. To cite one dramatic example, the number of university students in France has almost tripled in the last ten years. The concern of this article is what this development of the infrastructure of communications portends from the standpoint of European integration. Karl Deutsch and Daniel Lerner have produced brilliant and provocative analyses of the process which transforms parochials into cosmopolitans.1 Deutsch describes this process as social mobilization.2 For him, the essential change which occurs is the integration of new groups into extensive communications networks, thus expanding their horizons