Increasingly, research on attitudes towards the European project focuses on transnational practices. This article furthers the transnational approach by offering the first systematic analysis of how domestic transnationalism – i.e. transnational practices conducted in the home country – influences the formation of pro-European sentiments. We argue that domestic transnational activities foster recognition of common, transnational interests and identities that support the European integration project. Using a 2013 Eurobarometer, we show the distinct need to pay attention to domestic transnationalism. Individuals engaging in more domestic transnational activities display more pro-European sentiments in four of our five dependent variables. Moreover, the effect of domestic transnationalism is particularly intense among less-educated citizens.

European political integration has largely been described as a process that is driven by elites rather than citizens. This does not apply to the field of European social policy, which is often influenced by individual actors and their particular interests. This specific involvement of individuals is based on politically created roles, such as European Consumer, European Worker and European Citizen, and the rights related to them. EU citizens now adopt these roles and actively refer to entitlements that emerge for them from EU Law, especially when asserting their rights in court. As an unintended effect we can indeed observe a transfer of competences from the national to the European level in the field of social policy -even against the expressed will of national governments. The evolution of European social policy can therefore only be explained by including the individual citizen in the analysis.

The fact that highly educated individuals are significantly more likely to self-identify as Europeans than those with lower levels of educational attainment is one of the most robust findings in the scholarship on individual Europeanization. Previous work also shows that this cleavage in supranational identification varies cross-nationally and over time. We contribute to the existing literature by examining the country-level, sociostructural conditions that influence the education cleavage. Focusing on how the educational environment influences identity formation, we test two divergent predictions of how societal education -i.e. the average national level of educational attainment -shapes the cleavage between individuals of differing education levels with respect to their self-identification as European. According to Christian Welzel's (2013) 'cross-fertilization approach,' societal education should widen the education divide. By contrast, our alternative 'cross-attenuating approach' posits that societal education should instead help to close it. Using a cross-national time-series dataset that includes 28 EU member states and 28 Eurobarometers covering 1992-2015, as well as betweenwithin multilevel models, we find a significantly narrower education cleavage in countries where societal education increased the most during the period of our study. This result provides strong support for the cross-attenuating approach presented here. We theorize that societal education helps to narrow the individual-level education cleavage through a discursive and a network mechanism.

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