Central and Eastern Europe

4 Central and Eastern Europe

For the member states in the pre-2004 EU, the EU question was first centered on whether and why they should join the European Union after the demise of communist regimes. For ascension and applicant states, the EU question was instead popular support for potential membership. In pre-ascension Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), researchers approached support for EU membership through the lens that these citizens would view the EU as a guarantor of reforms (Cichowski 2000

; Kucia 1999 ; Tucker, Pacek, and Berinsky 2002

).²² Additionally, Jones and van der Bijl (2004 ) have demonstrated a positive correlation between aggregate popular support and candidate countries’ share of total exports of the member states.²³ Other macro-dimensions, such as economic and political performance, also seem to have had an impact (Christin 2005 ).

However, at the individual-level and in contrast to the utilitarian and value models of the West, in accession states (pre-2004), attitudes toward democracy, capitalism and individuals’ political partisanship are the strongest in predicting support for EU membership (Cichowski 2000 ). While some analyses of EU support in CEE have focused on economic winners and losers (Tucker, Pacek, and Berinsky 2002 ), these instrumentalist views have found little support in this region in other studies before they became members of the EU (Rohrschneider and Whitefield 2006a ). To some, support for integration was more a question about satisfaction with political and economic transition that has occurred (Tverdova and Anderson 2004 ). In this line of reasoning, Rohrschneider and Whitefield (2004 ) argue that CEE’s more likely to make decisions based on underlying economic or political values than outright material payoff (see also Rohrschneider and Whitefield 2006b ). It is, they argue, individuals’ attitudes toward domestic economic and political reforms that are better predictors of citizens’ attitudes about the EU. The application of the instrumentalist approach in CEE is also weakened by the unstable and often insubstantial demographic effects on support (Tucker, Pacek, and Berinsky 2002 ; Cichowski 2000 ; Ehin 2001 ; Tverdova and Anderson 2004 ), inconsistencies which undermine the utilitarian approach of resource-defined groups (whether human or economic) ‘calculating’ their potential gains and losses from integration. At the same time, at the time of this writing (winter 2007), nearly all published academic have focused on the time when these new democracies had not yet joined the EU; a fact which clearly influences the basis of popular attitudes about the EU. For example, after the accession to the EU, publics in CEE may no longer be deeply concerned about maintaining democratic and economic reforms – the EU will guarantee those. Instead, publics in new democracies may now focus on the more mundane bread-and-butter issues, such as generating economic affluence. As a consequence, citizens may increasingly rely on economic perceptions when judging the EU.

Less work has been done on group-level process in this region including media, parties and elites. Taggart and Szczerbiak (2004 ) have found a rather equitable distribution of ‘Euroscepticism’ in CEE regardless of party family or left/right ideology, although some parties – primarily on the right – employed this rhetoric to strengthen their ‘outsider’ or ‘non-incumbent’ status. In turn, Marks et al. (2006 ) and Rohrschneider and Whitefield (2007 ) show that the domestic cleavages of post-communist societies affect the position taken by political parties on European integration.