Approaching EU Citizenship from the Perspective of Young People in the East Central European Double Periphery: Introduction

Abstracts

What does it mean for young people in very remote areas of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania to be citizens of the EU? What are the specific challenges faced by EU-related Youth Dialogue projects that aim at promoting active citizenship in these peripheral regions? What factors contribute to the success of these projects, and what can actors at the regional, national, and EU level do to promote active (EU) citizenship among youth beyond urban centres? In this introductory chapter, we explain the scientific and practical relevance of these questions that guide the contributions to this volume. We also discuss why remote areas in East Central Europe constitute a double periphery, why active citizenship among young people in these areas deserves more scholarly attention, how local living conditions might affect the perceptions and practices of EU citizenship, and how we collected the qualitative data for the analyses in this book. The concluding section provides an overview of the structure of the volume and its key findings.

1 Aim and Focus of the Volume

Young people of today will shape the EU policies of tomorrow, the Union’s political architecture, and further integration or disintegration.¹ Many of them, however, have “become disenchanted with mainstream political parties and with those who claim to speak on their behalf” (see p. 134 in Loader et al. 2014). While this phenomenon is not exclusive to the EU, the European Commission promotes youth participation in democratic life by funding Erasmus+ activities and supporting horizontal exchange about education and youth policies among member states. The aim is to encourage the use of all those formal political rights shared by all EU citizens, for instance, voting in EP elections or participating in a European Citizens’ Initiative. However, the preconditions for exercising these rights, i.e. for actively practicing EU citizenship,² differ considerably across Europe. Outside Brussels, European capitals, and other urban centres, it is much more difficult to have access to EU politics, dialogues, projects, events, or even information.

This problem seems to be particularly acute in the remote areas of East Central Europe which form a double periphery in relation to the EU and the national centres. Firstly, being located alongside the Eastern frontier of the EU, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania are relatively far away from the EU hubs of decision-making, lobbying, communication, and wealth in Western Europe (Magone et al. 2016). The proportion of people from the region in the EU’s top positions is significantly lower than their share of the population (European Democracy Consulting 2021). At the same time, their voice is weaker, with turnout in EP elections below the EU average.³ Secondly, some rural areas in these countries are also peripheries within their countries, often struggling with selective out-migration resulting in brain drain and demographic change, poor infrastructures, low GDP, and comparatively low development prospects. While the capitals and their surrounding agglomerations are the political and economic hubs (see p. 1 et seq. in Darvas 2014), peripheral regions are lagging behind and do not equally enjoy the benefits of democratisation, the transition to a market economy, and EU accession (Ágh 2014). This can lead to a downward spiral (see p. 57 in Damsgaard et al. 2011)⁴ and entail a lower material or immaterial quality of life, with reduced life chances and “reduced levels of citizenship” (see p. 763 in Kenyon 2011).

Several features of these double peripheries are known to foster EU scepticism and produce low levels of civic engagement. These include a poor public infrastructure and the out-migration of better-educated people, who are mostly more Europhile (see Dijkstra et al. 2020; Basile and Cavallo 2020; p. 3 in Abts and Baute 2021; Schoene 2019). Moreover, national context factors and the evaluation of the own government’s performance, which often correlates with the perception of regional perspectives and economic development, is itself connected with EU attitudes (see Brinegar and Jolly 2005; p. 566 in Levy and Phan 2014). Thus, regional discontent with national policies which is widespread in “places that don‘t matter” (Rodríguez-Pose 2018) might also inform EU attitudes. In line with this, EU studies have generally identified a new core-periphery divide, with EU-friendly people living in urban centres and EU-sceptical ones in rural areas.

Young people in these peripheral regions are a particularly relevant group to study. On the one hand, research indicates that they are significantly less EU-enthusiastic than young people in similarly situated regions in Germany and Austria (Kucharczyk et al. 2017), and their participation rate is lower (Sobolewska-Myślik et al. 2016). On the other hand, cross-national data suggest that younger people are in general more supportive of the EU (see p. 432 in Down and Wilson 2013). In the 2021 EP Youth Survey, young people in large towns and cities had a more positive image of the EU than those in other types of areas. Young people in rural areas found voting in elections less important than their peers living in large towns or cities (see p. 53, 25 in EP 2021). So far, however, no systematic research has been conducted on what young people in East Central Europe’s double periphery think of the EU and how they perceive and practise their EU citizenship.

Against this background, the aim of the present volume is to explore how young people in Europe’s double periphery—more precisely in very remote areas of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania—perceive the EU and the rights linked to EU citizenship. It furthermore analyses the challenges of EU youth projects aimed at promoting active citizenship in these regions. The in-depth and comparative analyses in this book are guided by the following overarching key questions: What does it mean for young people in Europe’s eastern double periphery to be citizens of the EU? What do they associate with the EU and their rights connected to EU citizenship? What do they think about the EP elections? What factors contribute to the success of EU-related youth dialogue projects in peripheral regions, and what specific challenges do project leaders face? And, more generally, how do the perceptions and practices of EU citizenship differ across remote areas and countries?

To address these questions, the contributions rely on a new and unique collection of qualitative data gathered within the framework of Leipzig University’s Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on “The European Union and its Rural Periphery in East Central Europe”, funded by the European Commission.⁵ This data was collected through focus group discussions with students in medium-sized towns in peripheral areas of the five countries of interest, as well as interviews with organisers of EU youth dialogue projects.

The book adds to the literature by putting the spotlight on EU citizenship perceptions and the practices of youth in Europe’s East Central double periphery. Existing studies on the EU often represent “views from capitals on capitals”. They analyse institutional settings, including formal rights and integration, as well as the actors and their interactions in the EU, based on the experience and expertise of political and administrative decision-makers, NGOs, journalists, scholars, etc. working and living in these capitals or other large cities. Much less is known about the views of the addressees of EU policies beyond these urban centres. Certainly, there are studies focusing either on the active citizenship of young people (e.g. Melo and Stockemer 2014; Chevalier 2016; Sloam 2014; Newman and Tonkens 2015) or (young) people and out-migration in European rural areas (e.g. van der Star and Hochstenbach 2022; Thissen et al. 2010), but so far, we are missing a comprehensive study on the EU citizenship perceptions of young people and the peripheral areas in East Central Europe. Overall, we believe that this volume will be of interest to practitioners and scholars working on Europe and the EU, citizenship, and the promotion of an active EU citizenship.

East Central Europe is not a homogenous region. Obviously, some parties and governments in the region are more EU-sceptic than others, and EU support among the citizens of these countries varies (Lorenz and Anders 2021). Hungarians, for instance, are in general much more supportive of EU membership than Czech people (see p. 87 in Göncz and Lengyel 2021). Similarly, citizenship concepts among adults differ significantly between these countries (Coffé and van der Lippe 2010). At the same time, and as mentioned above, the countries and their remote areas share several features known to affect EU support or engagement. The studies presented in this volume help to better understand if such commonalities go along with similar EU citizenship perceptions and practices or if the picture is more nuanced.⁶

They also have practical implications. Low levels of EU support and participation in remote areas can have long-term negative effects on the democratic practice of the EU. If people are unaware of their opportunities to participate in EU affairs and therefore do not actively partake in European democracy, the widespread perception that Brussels is too distant from ordinary citizens becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and young people might (further) alienate themselves from the EU. In-depth knowledge about the youth’s citizenship perceptions and practices in the EU’s double periphery allows us to adapt EU youth policies and concrete measures to foster civic engagement. Therefore, this volume also contains recommendations for different audiences of “practitioners” related to the topic—be them politicians, project staff, or scholars, among others.

In the remainder of this chapter, we provide further information about the remote areas of East Central Europe as a double periphery and introduce the concept of EU citizenship. We then go on to briefly discuss the connection between local conditions, citizenship perceptions, and practices. Next, we describe the data and methods and close by providing an overview of the book and a summary of the key findings.

2 Remote Areas in East Central Europe as a Double Periphery

Our interest in young people’s perceptions and practices of EU citizenship in remote areas is based on the assumption that space matters for how formally equal rights are known, perceived, and exercised in practice, leading to what has been called a “spatially differentiated nature of de facto citizenship” (see p. 439 in Desforges et al. 2005). While the importance of spatial factors is widely acknowledged in sociology, human geography, economics, and planning science, political scientists, and in particular EU scholars, have addressed them comparatively rarely.

Although definitions of peripheries differ in detail, scholars and political actors use a relatively consistent set of attributes to define them. These are geographic features (location, settlement density, accessibility), as well as socio-economic ones (GDP, income, unemployment). The Territorial Agenda 2030, developed by the ministers responsible for spatial planning, territorial development, and cohesion, understands peripheries as remote and often rural areas that are socio-economically lagging behind (EU 2020).⁷ The concept of “inner peripheries” adds to that by including the idea of disconnection—an aspect which is probably very significant with regard to people’s perceptions of EU citizenship in the peripheries. According to this approach, it is mainly the degree of disconnection in terms of access to services and the levels of interaction with the wider world that distinguishes the peripheries from the centres (ESPON 2017).⁸ The effects of these factors on socio-economic performance vary between the East and the West. In Western Europe, but also in some other countries, geographical remoteness, difficult accessibility, and low population density are often not directly related to weak socio-economic performance (Werner et al. 2017), while the correlation between the spatial and economic indicators of periphery status in East Central Europe is medium to high. By building on these multidimensional understandings, we measure peripherality by means of socio-economic factors (purchasing power, employment rates, median age) and factors capturing the (dis)connection (travel time to a regional centre, the accessibility of general interest services, see the section on data and methods below).

The notion of “double peripheralisation” was coined by Wallerstein (1974, 1976) as part of his sociological reflections about the capitalist world system. His approach distinguishes three types of hierarchically ranked countries. On top, there are the core countries, i.e. dominant industrialised and urbanised politically and socially privileged countries with advanced market economies, which exploit other countries. On the bottom, there are the peripheral countries which are often agrarian, economically dependent on the core countries, and politically less powerful, and in between are the semi-peripheral states with mixed features. Since Wallerstein stressed that the world system is marked by competition between cores, the notion of “double peripheralisation” is often used to express that a region is peripheral in relation to two competing cores or centres, e.g. the Northwestern and Eastern ones (Sombati and Gábriš 2021).

When speaking of East Central European remote areas as “double peripheral”, we do not take all these ideas into account. We agree that a peripheral status in a wider sense is not solely determined by geographic remoteness but influenced by human decisions on the infrastructure or the patterns of political representation. Our region under study is, for example, undoubtedly geographically located in the centre of Europe, but other factors do affect its de facto peripherality. During the Cold War, the five countries found themselves on the periphery of the Soviet hemisphere. Internally, however, socialist spatial policies promoted a levelling of living conditions, e.g. in the context of having a planned economy (industrial cores in remote regions, industrialised agriculture) and the ideal of a homogeneous socialist society (e.g. a “socialist village”, extensive public services, and political-administrative structures). After 1989, all five countries turned towards the West and joined the EU in 2004 and 2007, respectively. Again, the political centres are outside the region, and now the integration into the EU has deepened the socio-economic, infrastructural, and demographic disparities within these countries. It triggered a significant growth in labour productivity, investment, and infrastructure in Warsaw, Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, and Bucharest, enabling these cities to catch up with Western Europe’s standard of living. Regions that had already been peripheral in socialist times, however, were unable to significantly change their situation after 1989 (see Gorzelak 2009; Pascariu and Pedrosa 2017; p. 102 in Leibert 2013). Although living conditions have improved here as well, they have done so to a much lesser extent than in the capitals, leading to spatial polarisation which has been more pronounced in Romania, Poland, and Hungary than in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Bański 2019).

While we share the idea that peripherality is multidimensional, we do not assume that the EU system’s stability depends on fixed core-periphery relations and that the centre(s) always exploit the margins (see xxvi in Pascariu and Pedrosa 2017). Instead, the interdependences are more complex, also because political decisions can counterbalance economic interaction. Even though there is criticism of an asymmetrical relationship between old and new member states, “inner peripheralisation”, and the unfulfilled promises of “the West” (see p. 106 in Krastev and Holmes 2019; Fomina 2019), the East Central European states benefit from EU membership in financial terms and by acquiring additional rights. So the problem is not a general peripheralisation, but rather the fragmentation of local development and living conditions (Leibert 2013). The EU is aware of the diverging economic and living conditions within and between its member states and spends a large share of its budget on its cohesion policy, intended to reduce such spatial disparities. Therefore, our reference to the double peripherality of the areas under investigation is much more neutral with regard to core-periphery power relations than the traditional Wallerstein approach. It is meant to capture the fact that the regions under investigation are, in many respects, peripheral compared to both the European and the national centres.

3 EU Citizenship and Young People

Citizenship can be understood as having the formal citizenship of (mostly) a state or as membership in a voluntary community of politically active people (Richter 2018; Münkler and Krause 2001, for a discussion of citizenship and the key issues of citizenship research, see Karolewski 2023). The latter active notion of citizenship presupposes a “direct sense of community membership based on loyalty to a civilisation which is a common possession” (see p. 40 in Marshall 1950). In addition to the sense of belonging, coherence is the second central criterion in the definition of citizenship. It “results from identical characteristics of the members or from an expressive togetherness and from common action” (see p. 667 in Richter 2018, own translation). The perceptions and practices of citizenship are thus basically two sides of the same coin.

EU citizenship, which became a formal legal status with the Maastricht Treaty signed in 1992, differs from traditional citizenship in that it is derived from the citizenships of the EU member states. This means that only citizens of EU member states are EU citizens and that they cannot renounce their EU citizenship.

EU citizenship confers additional economic, social, and political rights to those people holding the citizenship of a member state, including, for instance, the freedom of movement, the right to settle or to work in any member state, the right to vote in EP elections, and the entitlement to social security benefits in the member state of residence.⁹ Conditions for politically active EU citizenship are different from those for active citizenship in the national context. The main differences to traditional national citizenship consist in the fact that the EU is a multilingual polity, that decision-making has partly been moved to the supranational level, and thus further away from the citizens themselves, and that it has a weaker connection to the established channels of interest articulation and media coverage.

Formal equal rights do not automatically entail identical understandings of citizenship. Studies distinguish different approaches to citizenship which might affect the perceptions and practices of EU citizenship: Liberal approaches emphasise the same individual liberties that must be provided by the polity, while republican-communitarian approaches stress a common-good orientation in collective action, expressed and reproduced through political interest, active political participation, solidarity, and social engagement (see Dagger 2002; p. 802 in Conover et al. 1991). Traditional concepts define citizenship as tied to inherited membership in a particular cultural or ethnic community, while modern civic conceptions consider citizenship as something that can be acquired, for instance through participation in the social and political institutions of a community. Depending on which different conceptions people have in mind (consciously or unconsciously), their perceptions of EU citizenship might differ considerably. A traditional conception of citizenship, for instance, tends to collide with the idea of membership in two overlapping political communities (see Vogel and Will 2023).

Secondly, EU citizenship and its future are far from uncontroversial. This controversy concerns legitimacy questions—with critics arguing that integration was an elite-driven process (e.g. Habermas 2013) and that “there was never a broad-based movement engaged in EU citizenship policy. Instead, the ECJ began to intervene with “tactical interventions” and thus actively participated in the construction and expansion of Union citizenship rights based on its jurisprudence” (see p. 3 in Wiener 2007). It is also linked to cultural arguments—with advocates of a “demoi-cratic” and cultural pluralism approach arguing “that the already existing forms of democratic life established within the various MS have moral worth for their citizens and that a moral loss would be incurred through their absorption within a more unitary and hierarchically ordered EU federation, which transfers supreme and final legal and political authority on certain issues to the supranational level” (see p. 621 in Bellamy and Kröger 2021). Controversy also surrounds social rights—with some seeing “a social union consisting of European-wide social standards […] as a strategy for rescuing the European project and fighting social exclusion, youth unemployment, and social inequality in the member states” (p. 678 in Gerhards et al. 2016). Contrary to the ideas underlying demoi-cratic approaches, this would mean to abandon “the idea that nation-states are the sovereign subjects of the treaties” and instead endow the EU with the “juridical and fiscal powers from the nation-states to establish a supranational social policy” (ibid.). Another controversy concerns the political-economic aspects—with scholars observing that the EU’s pre-accession conditionality policy had the effect that “all East Central European growth models are heavily dependent on FDI” (foreign direct investments) and that “integration into the European political economy has encountered increasing political contestation, especially among the Visegrád countries,” which is “mostly articulated along nationalist lines against foreign dependency and control” (see p. 23, 35 in Bohle 2017). These controversies suggest that (young) people do not necessarily perceive EU citizenship as bestowing welcomed additional rights, but might as well associate it with inequality or insecurity or consider it something that has nothing to do with them.

Thirdly, while EU citizens share equal rights, the EU affects them differently. This is because governance mechanisms in different policy fields, such as regional policy, the amount of EU payments, or the compatibility of national economic policies with EU policies (Bohle 2017), vary between member states. Furthermore, there is a lack of EU competences in the field of social policy and social rights, which stand for a developed citizenship in a community (Marshall 1950), such as welfare and security guarantees or the right to education. They are mainly shaped by national policies and therefore vary across the EU (Schmitter and Bauer 2001). This might affect whether people perceive EU citizenship rights, such as freedom of movement, as opportunities or as threats (see, for instance, Vasilopoulou and Talving 2019).

There is a broad theoretical literature on EU citizenship (see, for instance, Bellamy 2008) and its connection to European identity (Karolewski 2010). There are also various surveys on EU citizenship and democracy, but they strongly focus on knowledge about the EU, EU institutions, the rights of EU citizens, and the EP elections. Eurobarometer surveys (e.g. EU 2019a, 2019b, 2020) provide information on how strongly people feel connected to the EU (and Europe), whether they see themselves as EU citizens, whether they know their rights, whether they are satisfied with the functioning of democracy in the EU, and whether they have the impression of being able to influence EU policies. Yet, the closed-ended questions in these surveys do not allow to openly explore individual understandings of citizenship. As it has been criticised, such questions impose “conceptual unity on extremely diverse sets of political processes that mean different things in different contexts” (see p. 10 in Checkel and Katzenstein 2009). Moreover, we do not know how the people’s ideas on these various aspects combine into their overall evaluation of the EU or whether opinions in the rural peripheries beyond urban centres correspond to patterns in national surveys or deviate from them. In fact, the national samples do not allow for small-scale analyses in rural and remote areas. For the social subgroup of young people, too, the Europe-wide surveys with references to the topic of European citizenship allow only limited regional evaluations. Therefore, the qualitative studies in this volume make an important contribution to the literature on EU citizenship.

4 Local Conditions, Citizenship Perceptions, and Practices

Our study is based on the assumption that local living conditions and experiences inform people’s views on politics and rights in general, which in turn influence the patterns of political participation and how societal groups can make their voices heard by politicians (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

The basic premise of the study

Similar ideas of structurally induced perceptions and interests underlie, for example, the cleavage theory, which sees urban and agrarian societal groups, as well as the populations of the centres and peripheries, as historical counterparts with structurally diverging political interests (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). Such historically developed groups and resulting conflict lines can be persistent and reemerge. Barlai (2023), for example, finds that the historical conflict between urbanists and agrarian populists in Hungary also shapes the structure of today’s party system. In recent years, many works have identified a new cleavage between communitarian groups, particularly widespread in rural areas, and liberal cosmopolitan groups, mainly urban elites, that has emerged in reaction to the processes of denationalisation and EU integration (de Wilde et al. 2019; Hooghe and Marks 2017). This line of conflict partly corresponds with the classical cleavage between the centre and periphery, enriched with elements of urban-rural cleavage and the conflict between materialism and post-materialism observed by Inglehart.

While these works provide important insights into the causes and the political exploitation of these new conflict lines, the stylized conception of two opposing societal groups—people in urban centres vs. the rural periphery—tends to obscure the variance within these two groups. Besides this, human geography and sociological studies have highlighted the differences between actual and subjectively felt living conditions. Even in areas with medium GDP per capita, people can feel relatively deprived, i.e. of not getting their fair share, regardless of their efforts, and of not achieving overall economic progress when comparing their standard of living with the living conditions in urban centres. At the same time, the local environment of individuals who do not themselves face particularly severe living conditions can be a “potential source of grievances that inform political attitudes” (see p. 103 in Salomo 2019). It can result in “contextually induced discontentment [which] takes the form of feeling disadvantaged against a perceived (urban) majority” (ibid.) and increase democratic discontent.

Recent surveys of the particular group of young people across the EU have shown that “young people from rural areas seem to be repeatedly more optimistic when it comes to assessing the current situation of the rural areas and the employment domain” than their peers living in other places (see p. 16 in Bárta 2020). Given the difficulties in many of these areas, this optimistic view contradicts the finding of contextually induced discontent. On the other hand, a survey conducted in 2021 reveals that only 7.8% of the young people in EU member states think that they can make their voice heard to a large extent on the topic of the development of rural areas and 24.2% feel that they can do so to some extent. This is the lowest level of perceived ability to make one’s voice heard compared to the other policy fields covered by the survey (see p. 8 et seq. in Deželan 2021).

To better understand these data and ambiguities, we need to be open to understanding how the young people in the remote areas themselves perceive their living conditions and look at EU citizenship. This requires a qualitative methodology. We need to explore how young people experience their immediate environment, the EU, and the rights connected to EU citizenship. Contrary to conventional surveys on citizenship, we need to leave room for their associations and narratives.

5 Data and Methods

The analyses in this volume are based on data collected between the autumn of 2021 and the spring of 2022. Data on the young people’s perceptions of EU citizenship was collected by means of 20 focus group discussions with 16- and 17-year-old students in two of the most peripheral NUTS 3 regions in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. We additionally surveyed 265 classmates of the students participating in the group discussions. To learn more about citizenship practices and the possibilities to foster active citizenship, we also conducted semi-structured individual interviews with the leaders of projects engaged in EU-related youth dialogues (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

Data collection methods

To identify the most peripheral NUTS 3 regions within our five countries of interest, we developed a peripherality index measuring peripherality along five indicators: the GDP in purchasing power standards per capita, the employment rate, and the median age, as well as the travel time to the closest regional centre and the accessibility of several so-called services of general interest (e.g. supermarkets, hospitals, and pharmacies). For each indicator, NUTS 3 regions that performed poorly in comparison to the national averages were given a score of 1.¹⁰ Hence, the index varies between 0 and 5 and captures the degree of peripherality in relation to the respective national context. Building on this index, we then identified the two regions that ranked highest in each country.¹¹

Within these regions, we then identified towns with 20,000 to 30,000 inhabitants, and we conducted group discussions and surveys at secondary and vocational schools (the types of schools that the large majority of people in those countries graduate from). With our focus on these medium-sized towns, which serve as regional centres, we kept the type of settlement and the context conditions constant and were able to conduct group discussions with students from the town and from the surrounding villages and towns who commute to these towns for their schooling. Each group discussion was conducted by two interviewers with four male and four female students. They were around 17-year-old students in the 11th grade and spoke in their native languages.¹² The group discussions lasted about 75 min. Participants were told that the interviewers wanted to know more about what people thought about their lives in the EU. To avoid othering them as “voices of the periphery” and possible looping effects (see Pates 2023), they were not told that the peripherality of the regions had played a role in the selection of their towns and schools.

To keep group discussions comparable, several questions were used as a guide. Six questions concerned the young people’s perceptions of their own personal situation, their town and their plans for the future, their perception of EU citizenship and the rights connected to it, and the EU elections. We also asked under which circumstances the young people would use their rights, e.g. the right to vote. Moreover, students were asked to rank collaboratively 15 EU rights and policies symbolised by pictures by agreeing on the five most and least important EU rights. This allowed us to observe how students discuss their perceptions of the EU within their own peer group.

We intentionally abstained from analysing competences, which receive a lot of attention in the field of educational research regarding citizenship (Elkin and Sołtan 1999; Hoskins et al. 2008; Healy and Malhotra 2010). Although we checked how much the young people know about their rights, we did not place these questions in the centre to leave enough room to explore how young people link their everyday perceptions of the EU by reflecting on EU rights and policies.

Parallel to the focus groups, we surveyed the classmates of the participating students (see the contributions of Vogel and Will 2023). The small standardised survey comprised 12 multiple-choice questions in the students’ native language, among them many questions taken from the Standard Eurobarometer and the Flash Eurobarometer 485 (European Commission 2020a, 2020b).

To analyse the practices of citizenship in projects of informal citizenship education, we conducted semi-structured interviews with the organisers of six EU youth dialogue projects.¹³ Such projects are of paramount importance because we know from research on citizenship education that the mere existence of rights and duties and knowledge of them do not imply their use (Gollob et al. 2010). Therefore, democratic citizenship education aims at strengthening democratic attitudes and competences (see p. 20 in Audigier 2000). These include skills “that enable an individual to participate effectively and appropriately in a culture of democracy” (see p. 11 in Barrett 2018, own translation). As experts in the field of youth participation, the organisers of the youth dialogue projects can provide information about the practical aspects of their work in peripheral areas (i.e. the resources and infrastructure), the key challenges, and the factors that can contribute to the lasting impact of such projects. At the same time, we can expect that the project organisers do not provide a neutral evaluation of the challenges and impacts of their projects. They can have vested interests, such as legitimising and securing their own work, and this needs to be taken into consideration when interpreting the findings based on these interviews (Kirtzel and Lorenz 2023).

We focused on projects funded by the EU in 2019 to ensure that the projects were not too far back in time and had already been completed. This meant that the memories of the project organisers were still fresh and allowed us to investigate how they evaluated the effects of the projects. Due to the very low number of EU-funded youth dialogue projects in the rural areas of the five countries of interest, we included two projects in the rural areas of other post-socialist regions (a Latvian project and a project in East Germany). Given the low number of such projects in the rural regions of the countries, our case selection thus covers nearly all of them.

Overall, we think that our broad dataset provides an excellent basis for an in-depth analysis of citizenship perceptions (the first part of the volume) and practices (the second part) as well as for context-specific recommendations for policymakers and people working with young people in rural areas (the third part). Findings based on our data will be of high practical relevance in East Central Europe, with its weaker voter turnout and less formal civil society. Asking open-ended questions allows us to explore the own narratives of these societal groups and their reflections on political efficacy (will my action have an impact?) while new insights from youth dialogue projects help to promote an active local civil society, which is known as a driver of participation from the research on civic education and participation.

6 Structure of the Volume and Major Findings

As mentioned, this book is divided into three parts. The first part draws on the focus group discussions and the small survey and provides insights into young people’s perceptions of EU citizenship. The second part of the book builds on the interviews with the organisers of EU youth dialogue projects. It comprises reports on projects promoting EU citizenship in the context of the EU Youth Dialogue and comparative analyses of the challenges and key factors for successful participation and empowerment. Building on that, the third part of the book contains recommendations for local, regional, national, and European decision-makers and for citizenship research. Many of the contributions were written by PhD students as well as Master’s students attending a research seminar embedded in the work of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at Leipzig University. To ensure the coherence and comparability of these contributions, they were based on an identical guideline.

The opening contribution of Pates looks at the subjectivities of peripheralisation, i.e. how young people in regions classified as peripheral perceive their place of residence and what they associate with the EU. Using grounded theory and situational maps, she analyses the metaphors used by the students to describe their living conditions as well as the way they deliberate over emigration and East-West differences and diversity. These findings are discussed in the light of current theoretical debates about peripheralisation, stigmatisation, and the “epidermalisation” of power relations in Europe.

Next, Vogel and Will explore the notions of EU citizenship, knowledge about EU citizenship, support for European integration, and readiness for political participation. They show both that the civic notions of EU citizenship are prevalent among students and that traditional ethnic conceptions are equally compatible with political support for the EU. Besides this, they demonstrate that the perceived peripheralisation does not go along with ethnic concepts of citizenship and low support for the EU.

This is followed by five in-depth analyses of the group discussions in the countries of interest. The contribution of Stosik and Sekunda deals with the perceptions of EU citizenship among young people in the peripheral regions of Poland. It shows that for these young people, the EU seems very distant and that they do not feel particularly connected to other EU citizens. Rather than perceiving the EU as a political community, they see it as an economic union and argue that the EU could create a sense of belonging by providing security on a personal, national, and economic level.

The subsequent contribution by Stangenberger and Formánková sheds light on Czech students’ understandings of EU citizenship. They show that students have difficulties linking EU citizenship to their everyday reality. As the authors show, this is not because EU citizenship rights are not relevant to them, but because they consider core EU citizenship rights, such as freedom of movement, as an absolutely natural part of their lives.

Next, the chapter by Stangenberger examines EU citizenship perceptions among students in peripheral towns in Slovakia. She shows that students have different ideas of the EU. While some consider it a group of solidary states with shared values, others emphasise the importance of the member states themselves.

The contribution by Mandru and Víg analyses students’ EU perceptions in two peripheral towns in Hungary. They demonstrate that while knowledge about the EU is limited, students value the EU for its freedom of movement, the EU-wide right to healthcare, and its financial support for less developed countries.

In the study on the EU perceptions of young people in Romania, Ferenczi and Micu show that students associate the EU with mobility, see a lack of information regarding the EU and the rights associated with EU citizenship, do not consider themselves part of the “European family”, and feel little attachment to European values.

Taken together, the contributions of the first part of this volume provide important insights into EU attitudes in peripheral areas. In contrast to the recent surveys mentioned above, all five case studies reveal that the young people in East Central Europe’s double periphery are not satisfied with their local environment. In all five countries under study, they address the typical problems of peripheral regions, such as the lack of prospects for training and employment opportunities, which forces them to leave for a higher-quality education and reasonably paid jobs, poor public transport, and often also a lack of leisure facilities.

Notwithstanding these difficulties (which most young people believe are a responsibility of the local level), in none of the 20 group discussions did students explicitly express EU-sceptical attitudes or reject the rights connected to EU citizenship. Rather, the discussions reveal that students do associate very different things with the EU and their EU citizenship rights. Apparently, the connection between local conditions and citizenship perceptions is not as straightforward as described in the studies on the divide between the EU-friendly urban residents and the EU-sceptical rural population.

Across the five countries, the focus group discussions additionally revealed that students often lack basic knowledge about the EU and the rights and freedoms connected to EU citizenship. Gaps of knowledge became evident when students reported that they had not yet heard of the elections to the EP (see Stangenberger and Formánková 2023), when they indicated that they were unaware of the exchange opportunities for high school students and apprentices (see Mandru and Víg 2023), when they had questions concerning specific EU policies or rights, or—as it happened in all five countries—when they reported that they had never heard of the Conference on the Future of Europe.

The second part of the book comprises case studies and comparative analyses of six EU-funded youth dialogue projects. They provide information on the challenges that project organisers face as well as the factors that can contribute to the success of youth projects aiming to foster active citizenship in peripheral regions.

Based on their comparative assessment of the youth projects, Kirtzel and Lorenz argue that such projects will be particularly successful when they are tailored to target groups, when the participants are already involved in the early stages of organising the projects, when young people can make their voices heard, and when projects link local and European levels. Next, Treimer and Lorenz take a closer look at the practical challenges youth projects in peripheral regions of East Central Europe face. They identify a broad range of challenges and discuss them in light of studies on youth work in Western countries.

The remaining six contributions of the second part of the book provide in-depth insights into the planning, implementation, and effects of Erasmus+ funded youth dialogue projects. Focusing on projects in Poland, Habelt and Despang present the European Youth Week 2019 conducted in Kielce, and Gawron and Penzlin introduce the Youth Forum organised in the small town Mińsk Mazowiecki. Next, Tadzhetdinova and Gutzer describe Decide on Europe, a transnational project between the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The subsequent contribution by Kónya then sums up the experiences of the Hungarian Federation of the Children’s and Youth Municipal Council with its project (un)Attractive? II. Then, Bockelmann and Samstag report about the transnational youth project The Best Is Yet to Come, and in the last chapter of the second part of the volume, Jolly and Fikejzl analyse the project Experiencing and Understanding Democracy and Europe conducted in Leipzig.

Taken together, these six case studies reveal that financial uncertainty combined with the need for project-based work can limit the lasting success of youth projects. They underline that it takes time to develop the expertise and experiences needed for EU-related youth work and to build the networks necessary for the success of their projects. At the same time, project organisers are confident that their work makes a difference by providing young people with information about the EU and its input channels, activating them, and endowing them with the relevant citizenship competences.

The analyses presented in the first and second parts of the book provide lessons for policymakers and researchers. These are taken up in the third part of the book. The contribution by Lorenz discusses how national governments and regional authorities in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania can contribute to enhancing EU citizenship in peripheral areas. She argues that governments need to ensure equal access to EU-related knowledge by including EU issues in school curricula, improving language education, and taking advantage of the opportunities offered by digitisation. Besides, she recommends creating new incentives to guarantee an equal share of EU-related projects in rural areas.

Next, Stein and Pentzold provide suggestions for local actors on how to foster citizen participation. Drawing on three case studies from Germany, they also underline the potential of digitisation, arguing that it can contribute to (re)connecting the local community and enable young people to shape their regions. The contribution also contains three practical suggestions for on- and offline projects that aim to enhance civic participation in rural regional development. The authors suggest to clearly communicate project relevance to the intended target groups, to exploit the synergies of local projects, for instance by providing a common overview or gateway for information and contacts for these projects, and to provide offline spaces for exchange purposes.

Moving from the local to the EU level, the contribution by Anders discusses how the European Commission and the European Parliament can contribute to enhancing the active citizenship of young people in peripheral areas. She recommends better tailoring knowledge transfer to the needs of young people, enhancing citizenship competences and political efficacy through local participation projects that are linked to the EU level, making project funding more reliable, and putting more effort into ensuring the inclusiveness of bottom-up dialogue formats in order to better connect the overall EU youth policy goals to the diverse living conditions and the needs of young people across the Union.

The third part of the volume is completed with a contribution by Karolewski, who presents recommendations for research on citizenship. He calls for conceptual work, particularly on rural citizenship, and suggests putting more effort into analysing the EU’s role in strengthening direct social rights as well as the idea of EU citizenship as a nested and enacted citizenship.

Overall, the contributions to this book reveal that the potential for an active EU citizenship among young people in East Central Europe’s double periphery—the remote areas beyond urban centres—is currently not sufficiently exploited. As long as this is the case, young people risk experiencing a third type of peripheralisation in the EU, manifested in the form of political marginalisation. Most of them do not feel well informed about the EU and the rights and opportunities connected to EU citizenship. Local youth projects can change this, but in the region under investigation, they face many challenges. This book provides in-depth knowledge of these challenges and suggestions on how to solve them.