Conclusion

5 Conclusion

This Living Review has attempted to provide a thorough overview of the state of the research on public perceptions of the EU as a system of governance. The intent is to provide a resource to researchers unfamiliar or new to the field by presenting the theoretical development over the past decades, the ‘knowns’, and suggesting a few avenues for future research.

Our understanding of the mass publics’ perception of the EU has been driven by the considerations by which the EU itself has progressed. From the origin to the relative economic stability of the early 1990’s (even as late as the EFTA Enlargement), popular orientations to European integration were largely understood as a function of the stratified cleavages that had served the origin of mass parties and the modern political state in Western Europe, namely instrumental self-interest (explicitly economic self-interest) and a constellation of individuals’ social location attributes. On the heels of policy expansions, collective security and identity issues, and debate over the future of national sovereignty that emerged from the Maastricht summit,²⁴ mass publics’ orientations to the project became a more significant and salient element in discussion of the EU’s potentialities. Scholars’ understanding of the sources of these orientations shifted as well and increasingly approached this question in terms of the necessity of popular support. The resulting research has suggested that perhaps this has been a function of citizens becoming more sophisticated in their demands of the EU as it had come to increasingly impinge upon their daily lives. Therefore, scholars moved from economic determination to the heuristics of identity and institutions (both evaluative and proximate), and the interlocutors of parties, media, and elites, all with an appeal to normative congruence.

An alternative to the continued approach of national-level models of normative and institutional support is to consider the EU as sui generis among supra-national organizations. Schmitt and Thomassen (1999 ) cite the potentiality for expanding research on the EU as a new field in comparative politics, namely, supra-national politics. They argue that despite the EP’s nominal role, political ability and effective political representation need to take place at the EU level in order to satisfy the demands of the collective European project (Schmitt and Thomassen 1999 : 256). This avenue of research would be an outgrowth of comparative politics, rather than international relations, and the theories that inform them including political behavior and public opinion (see Marks and Wilson 2000 ). In these we find a potential for citizens of the EU to begin thinking in terms of a shared sense of ownership in the overall result and therefore the seeds of European thinking. Not only does this demand a realignment of political identity for Europeans, but also that political representation – and therefore legitimacy – is hamstrung by the inability of both EU level elites and parties to make a meaningful linkage to their constituents, however poorly formed and self-aware.

Although a historically guided assessment of cross-national support for the EU is a tremendous task, the spiraling evolution of the EU warrants deeper examination. For simplification’s sake, cross-national, individual-level analyses make several assumptions about the populations of member states. Among a multitude of nation-specific variations is the agricultural subsidies program (CAP) for French farmers (in contrast to Italians or Germans) tends to skew national level discussions and ultimately party positions. A more generalized cross-national difference – but still sub-regional in terms of the EU – is the southern European on-going struggles with corruption, poor performance of the state, low responsiveness of political parties, and high structural unemployment. Other members, with low corruption, an efficient democracy, and highly developed welfare states, are likely to provide citizens with a distinctly different political, social, and economic environment from which to base their orientation to matters of further integration and support for the EU. Finally, history casts its long shadow on sub-national variations in support as well. Southern Italy has been the recipient of begrudging support via the economic performance of northern Italy and is likely to produce differences in support that find comparable sub-national contests among other member states. In other words, non-national – including sub-EU regional and sub-national – disparities exist and can be evaluated. One example, Mahler, Taylor, and Wozniak (2000 ) present initial evidence at the regional level of the competing origins of support between the utilitarian and broader affective orientations to EU support.

In addition, as we have seen above, there is growing evidence that national-level variation in the quality of democratic institutions plays a significant role in determining support for the EU. It is possible that forces that motivate popular EU support may be reconfigured around alternative institutions of sub- or supra-national character. Aside from obvious instruments of integration and national political institutions, what of cross-national, non-governmental organizations (e.g. professional organizations and trade unions) transcending national concerns to confront European issues? Included in this potential avenue of analysis is the research question of issue politics. Following the fourth expansion, expansion has come to represent less economic security and more physical and/or cultural security. With the inclusion of Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, the EU has reached what might most easily be described as its ‘geographical limit’. What is the most useful conceptualization of Europe? A geographical one? An institutional one? A social, economic, or political model?

This is where we find ourselves today. The critical center of this research lies in what might be best described as a process of socialization of Europeans toward a new political norm of supra-national governance. Again, the project of the European Union represents a pioneering model of supra-national institutional possibilities, and as discussed above, its future will be influenced by popular sanction. One can think of the preceding decades as a period of the conceptualization of an integrated Europe and the current period as the realization of the European project.

Incumbent upon this recent realization are two mandatory debates. First, the study of public perception of the EU as a system of governance will increasingly confront the possibility of a genuine European identity. In order to achieve increased levels of legitimacy and to secure a popular mandate through which it can continue, the future of integration will demand a public discussion of the nature of membership and identity. Europe has reached what might be identified as its historically familiar shape; yet, from this point, the bases for exclusion and inclusion have yet to be determined. This looming identity crisis is the cradle of the debates over issues of security, the notion of a European public sphere, and ultimately the emergence of a European demos.

The second issue is the related but more tangible debate over the future of the nation-state. Europeans must consider not only the possibilities of expansion but the usurpation of the nation-state by pan-European institutional governance. The attenuation of the relative strength of each member states’ governing structure and the institutional supplication to an expanding EU will force citizens to address the role of the nation-state in the emerging supra-national organization.

Clearly, these two debates are inherently linked. As identity is manifest in-group association, the citizens of Europe will be deciding at what level that group will be, whether it is association by cultural, institutional, philosophical, political, or economic congruence. In reaching a definition, the answer will impact the future of the nation-state and ultimately the trajectory of the European Union.