Cultural Cleavages in the European Union: Modernization and Cultural Persistence

Abstract

To what extent does a common culture exist among the countries of the European Union (EU)? European institutions have existed since the 1950s, and for the past several decades the peoples of the European Union countries have experienced increasingly high rates of economic, social and political interaction. Are their world-views converging? A first step in this process might be the evolution of a uniform culture throughout the European Union; carried to an extreme, some critics argue that we are on our way to one global culture — a sort of “McWorld.”