InTune - Integrated and United: A Quest for Citizenship in an ‘ever closer Europe’

INTUNE is a research project whose aim is to study the changes in the scope, nature and characteristics of citizenship that result from the process of the deepening and enlargement of the European Union.
Its focus is on how integration and disintegration processes at both the national and European level affect three major dimensions of citizenship: identity, representation and scope and standards of good governance.
These three dimensions of citizenship derive from three normative principles of democratic government, which ground the legitimacy and democratic quality of government at any level.

We address the problems of citizenship under the threefold approach of identity, representation and standards of good governance, by looking at the interactions between elites and public opinion, that traditionally nurture the dynamics of collective political identity, political legitimacy and representation, and standards of performance. We see the process of EU building not as an either-or choice between those who claim for the Europeanization of the domestic or those who claim for the domestication of Europe, but as a recursive relationship.
Accordingly, there are two dynamics we want to explore as related to citizenship: the relationship between mass and elites and the relationship between European and domestic dimensions of political life.

INTUNE is an Integrated Project No. CIT3-CT-2005-513421 financed by the VI Framework Programme of the European Union.