We Are Europe: An Ethnography of Volt NL Members During Their First Political Campaign

Abstract

"While a new, progressive political movement, the pan-European party Volt, enters the European Parliament election of 2019 in the Netherlands, its members realize the difficulties advocating for more supranationalist collaboration in the current political climate. Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork during the Volt NL campaign, this thesis uses Benedict Anderson s conceptualization of imagined communities to describe and analyze this work. Anderson s influential theory describes the emergence of communities and how nationalism shaped the modern world. Combining participant observation, interviews and online data analysis, I explore three challenges Volt NL members faced in advocating for their political cause improving the European Union. The first challenge deals with using European and Volt symbols, the second with the use of modern means of communication and the third is the challenge to deal with an elitist or cosmopolite image. Volt NL members are aware of these challenges but have yet to find ways to overcome them. The state of today s society affects the applicability of Anderson s theory, because the European Union lacks shared history to make symbols meaningful, current communication methods differ crucially from the days of printcapitalism and the role of the elite is not perceived positively by the public today."