What Stories Does Europe Tell? - What do Europeans think? What do they care?

The following sections will discuss trends in European public opinion the Europe’s Stories project is based upon, the concept of the ‘formative European moment’ and how it helped to identify some polyphony in the plethora of stories gathered across Europe. [...] But even though European citizens’ attitudes are more negative concerning the current state of affairs of the EU, they are generally positive when being asking questions about the principles behind and potential of the EU.1 These findings are in line with the work of the Tribes of Europe project from Chatham House. [...] The dominance of personal travel and studying experiences as formative moments suggests that many of the interviewees belong to what Neil Fligstein calls the ‘European society’: a relatively small privileged elite of roughly 13% of the European population that speaks foreign languages, travels regularly and consequently feels attached to the European project.4 While aiming for diversity regarding. [...] 3 The idea for the format ‘Europe when I was 20’ stems from a supposed quote by Napoleon Bonaparte who is said to have said, ‘To understand the man you must know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.’ We were unable to identify the exact source of this quote which thus needs to be taken with a grain of salt. [...] We used a multitude of formats to ask Europeans about their wishes for Europe in 2030: the aforementioned qualitative interview series, a two-day conference with ‘post-89ers’ (those born between 1980 and 2000) from the Dahrendorf Programme and the Mercator Foundation in Berlin in November 2019, workshops with high school students in Brandenburg, Germany in February 2020 and a Europe-wide represent.