Jan Mewes

Transnationale Soziale Beziehungen. Eine Kartographie der Deutschen Bevölkerung

Transnational social relations. A map of the German population

Summary, in English

The article explores the extent to which the German population is involved in transnational networks of personal relationships. It is argued that ongoing processes of globalization have weakened the social cohesion of nation-states and engendered more and more border-crossing transactions. In the paper, key empirical indicators are presented to demonstrate the increased transnational interdependence at different societal levels. The empirical part presents results from a representative survey on the transnationalization of people's life worlds conducted in spring 2006. According to our findings, almost half of the German population has regular contact with at least one person living abroad. A closer look reveals that equal proportions of private transnational relations are contacts between Germans and foreigners and contacts between Germans and other Germans living abroad. The analysis of the geographic structure of cross-border relationships shows a confined spatial dispersion of cross-border ties. A large part of personal ties reaches into Western and economically powerful states, while the non-OECD-countries play a negligible role. Thus, we can refer to a First World transnationalization of the cross-border networks of the German population.

• Author: Steffen Mau; Jan Mewes
• Publishing year: 2007-08-01
• Language: German
• Publication/Series: Soziale Welt
• Volume: 58
• Issue: 2
• Links: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40878555
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Nomos
• Topic: Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology)
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 0038-6073