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European integration and globalisation bring about emerging possibilities to exit the ‘box’ of national societies more easily than ever before in history. Europeans today can travel, work, study and retire abroad freely, using low-cost flights made possible by EU deregulation; they can buy property in other EU member states within a mutually recognised legal system; they can shop across the EU without having to pass through custom offices. All this opens increased opportunities of interaction with people across national borders. But do citizens of EU member states take these opportunities? Who is taking them and who is not? Are there individual and context-level differences in the degrees of transnationalisation of social life? Does involvement in transnational spaces makes up a growing type of social distinction, much along the lines of classic insights by Merton, Bourdieu and Bauman? Or does it associate in more complex ways with educational and occupational stratification patterns?
This paper sets out to answer such questions by charting the forms by which Europeans have expanded the radium of their lives by travelling physically and virtually across national borders. It shall presents the results of a unique comparative survey – the EUCROSS survey – carried out among residents in Germany, Italy, the UK, Spain, Denmark and Romania (1,000 cases per country) on the basis of a EC-funded research project on border-crossing behaviours (www.eucross.eu) coordinated by the author. Several types of cross-border practices shall be taken into account, distinguishing between physical and virtual practices (e.g., resettling, holidaying, business travelling on the one hand; following foreign media, shopping online on international sites, participating in transnational web forums/chats on the other). An index of cross-border behaviours shall be created and analysed through multi-level modelling to single out the conditions that help explain different propensities to the transnationalisation of social relations.