In Sociology, it is common wisdom that ours is an era of globalization. Thus, “society” can no longer be understand solely as national, but increasingly as global. Many scholars assume that a world society has emerged, complementing national societies as the locus of social interactions. In this contribution, we challenge this idea for European societies. While sharing the assumption that social life is increasingly transnational, we suggest that the horizon of Europeans has become more world-regional (and thus European) rather than global. Our theoretical argument is that the ever closer legal-political integration of Europe – mainly, but not exclusively in the shape of the European Union - has eased transnational human activities within Europe to an extent that Europe has become an increasingly dense social space. In consequence, we witness the formation of a European society, rather than a world society. Empirically, we explore this idea via network analysis of various transnational human activities – migration, student exchange, tourism, and telecommunication. We analyse 31 862 country dyads from 179 countries worldwide, over a period of up to 50 years, depending on the type of activity. As the main method we apply community detection with the density-based modularity algorithm that combines countries to clusters if they have strong exchange relationships among each other. Our results suggest that for all four human activities studied, the present-day European social space is a more sharply defined cluster within the world than in the past. We conclude that the supranational political integration process within Europe has been effective in shaping human transaction flows, thus forming a European society.
