Abstract
Nowadays, families seem to be the basis of our contemporary societies. We commonly speak of the family unit as a stem cell, which would be the foundation of our social organization. But, as strange as it may seem, there is no common family policy in the European Union. At first sight, it can appear a bit strange, more specifically for a French student, to see that the European Union has a common environment policy, a common cultural policy and even a common social and employment policy, but nothing about the family. The different approaches of the family policy can be explained by the fact that the family is not defined in the same way from one state to another. The concept of "family" is above all a social construction, which is not immutable and reflects a certain way of thinking about society. Based on the work of some anthropologists, the French sociologist Bourdieu analyzed the family as "a social-made group" and as "an institutionalized fiction".
