Students of political integration from all schools of thought have recognized that the creation of a new larger political community out of smaller existing units depends upon the development of values of legitimacy towards the new political centre. This process is often referred to as the development of a “sense of community” or as a “shifting of loyalties,” and it has been theoretically posited as a fundamental condition for the long-term success of political integration both by the cybimetic and the neo-functional schools of integration.

When changes in values towards supranational integration in Europe take place they will be observable in the socialization process as younger generations of European students acquire the new values. This article examines changes in the values socialized in the French Lycée through a diachronic quantitative content analysis of history textbooks used in 1950 and 1966. Three central hypotheses are derived from the two major approaches to integration and are examined in light of the data with particular attention being paid to changes in values of nationalism, conflict vs co-operation, and high political vs economic and social matters.

The results of the analysis show contradictory trends, some of which are explained by controlling for international regions and some of which must remain unexplained until a larger cross-national study is undertaken.

A common finding in cross-sectional survey studies of adult political activity in the US and several other democratic states is a curvilinear or approximate normal curve relationship between age and voting and political interest: young adults are less likely to turn out to vote and be interested in politics, middle-aged persons (in their late forties and early fifties) are more likely to vote and report election interest, and elderly persons are less likely to show involvement on either count (though they are often reported to be as active as young adults). This is a rather widely cited phenomenon in prepositional inventories by political scientists, political sociologists, and social gerontologists. These age relationships have been interpreted as support for the idea that voting activity and interest in elections generally increase from young adulthood through middle age and then decrease for those past middle age, though perhaps not to the level characteristic of very young adults.