Central and Eastern European Attitudes in the Face of Union

S. Guerra

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349327096, 9780230279865
• eBook ISBN: 9781137319487
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique européenne

Through the analysis of data on support for and opposition to European integration in Central and Eastern Europe, this book explores how and why support for the EU has changed in this region and the factors that have led to the fall in popularity of the EU as an institution.

1

Introduction: Europe and Europeans

After the Danish rejection of the Treaty on European Union (EU) (1992), the legitimizing relationship between public opinion and European integration acquired more salience, as the ‘readiness of European political elites to use’ referendums provoked uncertain developments around the EU project (Taggart and Szczerbiak, 2005). As the ‘permissive consensus’ was not assured, mass attitudes became ‘both a measure and a determinant of the process of European integration’ (Gabel, 1998a, p. 9). EU politics was no longer an elite-driven process, and the role of public opinion became a determinant in shaping its agenda. The question of what determines public support for the EU has been widely examined, focusing on the domestic context (Anderson 1998; Gabel, 1998a), political parties (Ray, 2003a, b), and perceived cultural threats (Carey, 2002; McLaren, 2006). Further contributions to the study of public support for the EU stressed the importance of cultural factors, where one of the ‘most vital … elements is religion’ (Nelsen et al., 2001, p. 192; Nelsen et al., 2011).

Public opinion is now crucial to the relationship between member states and the EU. It has a strong dual relationship with domestic politics, on the one hand affected by and on the other hand affecting domestic politics, particularly through political parties. At the same time, domestic politics is also influenced by, and impinges on, the quality of the relations with the EU, depending on the nature of public support for membership or opposition to it.

Public opinion therefore had and still has important implications in terms of the manner of member states’ initial forays into EU membership as well as the type of member state they would eventually become. EU citizens’ political choices generally ‘shape and constrain the process of European integration’ (Gabel, 1998a, p. 333), and this makes the relationship between the EU and its citizens, particularly in new member states, as fundamental as setting the basis of a long-term relationship.

With the fall of Communism in the 1990s, overwhelming support for the EU spread in all the former Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. While political elites were looking at the stabilizing factors of joining both NATO and the EU, public opinion was all for EU integration. The ‘return to Europe’ signalled a new beginning in the history of these countries and became a ‘leitmotif’ towards integration in many candidate countries, in particular Poland (Szczerbiak, 2002a). The EU was regarded as the source of political and economic help, far from the Soviet shade, and able to improve the social sphere significantly.

Most of the studies on public support for European integration in former Communist countries focus on public opinion before accession or carry out comparative analyses of EU member states’ after accession. Rachel Cichowski (2000) has indicated new avenues of research on the way these determinants can change over time. This book addresses the question of the manner in which the determinants of public support for, and opposition to, the EU have changed in Poland and other former Communist countries before and after accession. The fifth enlargement of the EU presented researchers with a number of new cases when eight former Communist countries joined the Union. Since then, two further Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, Bulgaria and Romania, have become EU member states, Croatia has joined in July 2013, and other countries – such as the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia – have been granted the status of EU candidate countries by the European Council. The EU is planning to enlarge further to the Western Balkans, when Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina are ready to join the EU, and possibly Kosovo. As Liesbet Hooghe (2007) has argued, European integration has become a more contentious domestic issue and citizens are now much more directly involved in the EU political process. The attitudes of the citizens of these candidate countries will determine the successful completion of the transition to membership, given that they might hold accession referendums, while citizens of member states could also ‘constrain’ the process of further integration, through referendums or through the expression of disaffection and Euroscepticism in European Parliament (EP) elections. Thus, analyses of attitudes towards EU integration also respond to current salient issues on the EU political process. It is fundamental to understand why citizens can oppose further integration when voting in EU referendums and how they take their choices when voting ‘on Europe’, as it would be misleading to study citizens’ vote without understanding the determinants of these choices.

This book measures citizens’ evaluations towards the domestic situation in order to explain their attitude towards EU integration and their political behaviour in EP elections and referendums. Support for EU integration, in fact, does not necessarily correlate with willingness to vote in EP elections or voting ‘for’ in case of European referendums. Another variable, examined with people’s knowledge on the EU and focus groups, is studied and represents an important factor when choosing to vote. This project contends that the relative economic poverty of post-Communist countries is the main factor to affect patterns of support. An affective dimension termed as ‘unconditional support’ and collective (economic) benefits are the two factors impacting on public support for EU integration before accession. After accession, individual benefits can become more salient, possibly affecting long-term patterns of behaviour. Further, a comparative analysis of attitudes towards European elections points to levels of disengagement with politics and highlights the role of information, while addressing the characteristics of the post-Communist case study.

This chapter introduces the question of what determines public support for the EU. Firstly, it introduces the idea of Europe and debates the legitimacy of the EU, explaining why analysing citizens’ views of the EU is important. The cultural dimension of Europe and the religious roots will be highlighted in the examination of the emergence of Euroscepticism and of populist parties and social actors in the run-up to accession, in Chapter 6. Secondly, it addresses the study of public opinion on European integration as the subject of extensive research in the literature on comparative European politics and contemporary European studies. Thirdly, reflective of the post-Communist case and the situation in a candidate country before accession, this analysis selects and explains its framework.

Finally, the analysis considers both the peculiarities of the CEE frameworks, where support is expected to be higher because of the relative economic poverty of the Communist past, and the similarities with Western member states.

Europe and the EU

The idea of Europe is a controversial one, made up of different – mythological, geographical, historical, political, and cultural – dimensions. Europe as a term could not be found in the Bible, nevertheless ‘Europe became a Christian notion’ (Wilson and van der Dussen, 1993, p. 19), particularly under the threat of Islam and in its opposition. The mythological dimension has its roots in Greece and has provided inspiration for writers around the story of the abduction of Europa, the daughter of Phoenix, king of Phoenicians, by the Cretan God Zeus (Mikkeli, 1998, pp. 3–5). The notion was mainly geographical, coinciding with the Hellenic world. Later, the Roman Empire embraced a vague and composite aggregation of peoples, but became the centre of Western civilization after defeating Macedonia (197 BC). Subsequently, when the Arabs moved up to Northern Africa and Spain, and the Carolingian ruler Charles Martel, Duke and Prince of the Franks (737–743), defeated the Muslims under the symbols of the crucifix and the crescent in battle, Europe added its cultural dimension around Christianity. With time and the threat from different borders and different tribes, such as Germanic in the north, Viking at the south, Magyars in the east, and Islam still persisting in the southern border, Europe strengthened its historical dimension. Charlemagne proclaimed himself as the ‘father of Europe’ (rex, pater Europae) and ‘Christianity provided the western monarchies with a powerful myth of legitimation’ (Delanty, 1995, p. 26). Already in the seventh century, in fact, it could have been possible to attach to the notion of Europe ‘an emotional charge’, linked to the ninth chapter of the Genesis and Noah’s sons, where ‘Europe was the continent of Japheth and his descendants, the continents of Greeks and Christians’ (Mikkeli, 1998, pp. 14–15).

With the arrival of fifteenth century and the fall of Constantinople under Mohammed II (1453), Christianity felt threatened and the Papacy created a defence of the ‘Respublica christiana’ against Islam, where Europe and ‘Respublica christiana’ became ‘interchangeable synonyms’ (Wilson and van der Dussen, 1993, p. 35). It was the Turkish threat and the humanist culture developing in the sixteenth century that further structured the idea of Europe upon the one of Christendom. Schisms and heresies divided the unitary Latin Christian Europe, and the idea of Europe and Christianity lost their overlapping identity, though ‘idealists’ still referred to a unique sentiment of cultural identification between Europe and Christendom. As Denys Hay underlines, the ‘chief monument of this attempt … to “institutionalize” the notion of Europe came … with the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’, the author of the Mémoires pour render la paix perpetuelle en Europe (1957, pp. 119– 120). The idea of the Holy Alliance, bringing together the Russian Tzar, Alexander I, the King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm III, and the Emperor of Austria, Franz I, in 1815 drew back to the idea of Europe of the Middle Ages, and the idea of peace preserved ‘in the same Christian nation’ by God, the ‘Divine Saviour’. However, in the late nineteenth century, Greece came to symbolize civilization, with reference to the Athenian democracies. Democrats and liberals contrasted Greece to Rome, and the roots of Europe went back to the Hellenic world.

Nationalisms emerged and, with the First World War, Europe went into ‘degeneration and decline’ (Wilson and van der Dussen, 1993, pp. 74–78). Europe and its idea assumed different forms and dimensions depending on the thinkers who designed their own idea of Europe (Friedrich Naumann, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Richard CoudenoveKalergi, and Aristide Briand). Europe as a concept and idea stretched its political and geographical dimensions, but always represented a union for peace, after the struggles of the First World War. The emergence of Nazism and Fascism stopped any realization of a pan-European federation and led to the idea behind the European Coal and Steel Community (1950), which was both political and economic.

Nevertheless, from the outside, the Community could also be perceived through a cultural dimension, as the six founding fathers covered a similar geographical Europe to the one of Charlemagne, with the return of a common ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ (Asad, 1993, p. 217). The lack of legitimacy and the debate on the democratic deficit has animated the last 20 years of European integration. When the Constitutional Treaty attempted to return to the EU’s roots in 2003, religion became a salient debate; and religion, as Nelsen et al. (2001) showed, and as this book illustrates, can become an important issue when both Europe and, specifically, the EU are debated at the domestic level, particularly in the Eurosceptic rhetoric.

This book’s approach is based on domestic evaluations and an affective dimension. The framework adopted combines frameworks of analysis applied to both Western and Eastern cases and demonstrates how it can be explanatory in each case and why it is important to study how determinants of public support for, and opposition to, European integration are critical in the current European political process.

Public support: Western models

The Treaty of Maastricht created the first big debate on the way European citizens could structure their attitudes towards European integration and vote in European referendums. The debate between Mark Franklin and Palle Svensson examined the role of political parties and the government in the June 1992 referendum. Karen Siune and Svensson (1993) underlined that when political parties agreed on support of the European issue, they could positively influence public opinion. On the contrary, politicians’ difficulties in explaining the themes of the Treaty provoked more independent and less influenced behaviours of citizens from the parties they identified with. Recent research on media effects and European integration pointed to a different direction, as ‘[C]onsensus among political elites seems to have a numbing effect’ (Peter, 2007, p. 141) – although that seems to be less valid in the case of very salient elections, such as the EU accession referendum.

Franklin et al. (1995, p. 101) suggested that people’s attitude towards referendums depended on ‘the popularity of the government in power’. After a further article by Svensson (2002), Franklin (2002) refined his thesis, distinguishing between low salience and high salience referendums; in the future, the European issue would acquire more salience, and European member states would have a similar attitude to the Danish case where the opinion of the government could have less impact. Later, Sarah Binzer Hobolt’s analysis (2009) stresses the salience of frames and to what extent elites matter, mediated by political awareness and partisans affiliations.

The eastward enlargement produced a large amount of information in the new member states. Particularly in the run-up to accession, citizens were bombarded with information on the EU. However, as this analysis shows (Chapter 5), information did not follow the momentum of accession, and the 2004 EP elections may have resulted in low turnout partly due to the lack of salience – as Franklin (2002) underlines – and lack of information.

Further, former Communist countries developed a deep distrust towards the institutions and political parties at the national level. It is unlikely that parties can cue citizens, in particular when these feel strongly about the issue(s) at hand. The old Communist ‘nomenklatura’ left the heritage of the division between ‘us’ (the people) and ‘them’ (the institutions, as the government, or the members of parliament). It is more likely that public opinion can force political elites not to portray themselves as too Eurosceptic, if they do not want to become too unpopular across Euroenthusiastic citizens, indicating a bottom-up approach (Steenbergen et al., 2007).

The Polish case shows that citizens’ consistent Euroenthusiasm can guide political elites; supporting the EU and building good relationships with the EU can represent a political and electoral advantage for political elites. In Poland, after accession, opinion polls and elections illustrated less and less support for Eurosceptic political parties and the incumbent government (2005–2007) (Kochanowicz, 2005). In 2007, Self-Defence (Self-Defence of the Polish Republic, Samoobrona Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej: SRP) (1.54 per cent) and the League of Polish Families (Liga Polskich Rodzin: LPR) (1.28 per cent) were the losers of the Polish pre-term election (Guerra and Bil, 2009). Thus, Poland presented an interesting case of mismatch between public attitudes towards the EU and political elite cue. That is the reason why support for political parties is studied with an in-depth qualitative analysis, despite Leonard Ray’s (2003a, b) interesting findings. In comparative perspective, Ray found that political parties did ‘affect public opinion about European integration’ (2003b, p. 987); furthermore when the issue was salient, (i) parties had a stronger impact, (ii) party unity (as already confirmed by previous studies) further strengthened it, (iii) political closeness was another important variable, and (iv) interaction and variations in party positions were significant as well. Finally, he observed that an elite’s consensus was important, and if the parties aggregated, they could shift a part of public opinion and ‘[might] act to discourage policy voting’ (2003b, p. 990).

However, these models were applied to Western member states and, as aforementioned, political parties can represent a misleading independent variable in Central and Eastern Europe. In particular, Poland showed very high rates of volatility and high levels of distrust towards politicians (Chapter 2).

Sylvia Kritzinger (2003) offered the most similar model to the one that this book’s analysis is going to test. Through her comparative framework, Kritzinger focused on four Western member states (Germany, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom) and measured the impact of national factors and the EU factor on attitudes towards EU integration. Starting from the previous literature, it was possible to assume that citizens gathered information on the EU by means of ‘shortcuts’ and ‘awareness (could) be achieved as a result of continuous EU media coverage’, so not to rely on national factors. On the other hand, public support for the EU could be shaped by ‘particular economic, political, historical and cultural context’ (2003, p. 222), in line with Matthew Gabel’s analysis (1998a). However, this situation could be linked to the salience of the EU issue, where the lack of salience and contentious issues over the EU could play a role on public attitudes.

Christopher Anderson (1998) partially reinforced Franklin’s thesis and affirmed that people could not have a definite and particular idea on the European integration issue, so when asked for their opinion they used domestic proxies, i.e. evaluations of the domestic situation. Further positive fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: Europe and Europeans
• 2. Patterns of Support for, and Opposition to, European Integration as a Candidate Country
• 3. Patterns of Support for, and Opposition to, European Integration after Accession
• 4. Voting for or against Europe
• 5. Information on the EU: Poland and Central and Eastern Europe
• 6. Euroscepticism and the Next Enlargements
• 7. Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index