One union, different futures? Public preferences for the EU's future and their explanations in 10 EU countries
| Author | Claes H de Vreese,Andreas C Goldberg,Erika J van Elsas |
| DOI | 10.1177/14651165211034150 |
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
One union, different
futures? Public preferences
for the EU’s future and
their explanations in
10 EU countries
Andreas C Goldberg
Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of
Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Erika J van Elsas
Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University,
Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Claes H de Vreese
Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of
Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Abstract
Most studies of public opinion towards the European Union focus on attitudes regarding
the past and present of the European Union. This study fills a gap by addressing attitudes
towards the European Union’s future. We expand on a recently developed approach mea-
suring preferences for eight concrete future European Union scenarios that represent the
ongoing political and public debate, employing original survey data collected in 2019 in 10
European Union countries. We assess cross-national differences in the distribution of
future European Union preferences, as well as in citizens’motivations to prefer different
variants of Europe in the future. The findings show citizens’fine-grained future European
Union preferences, which are meaningfully related to common explanations of European
Union support. We also find cross-national difference s linked to countries’structural
position within the European Unio n.
Corresponding author:
Andreas C Goldberg, Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam,
Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, 1018 WV Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Email: a.c.goldberg@uva.nl
Article
European Union Politics
2021, Vol. 22(4) 721–740
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14651165211034150
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
Keywords
Comparison, European Union future, European Union support, public opinion,
scenario approach
Introduction
One of the major challenges for the European Union (EU) today is how to reconcile the
differences in public opinion regarding the future direction of European integration. Not
only does the degree of enthusiasm or scepticism towards the European project vary
widely between citizens as well as between countries, recent work has also shown
that member states differ in the types of Euroscepticism t hat are most prevalent (D e
Vries, 2018). Little research exists, however, on citizens’preferences for the future
of the EU, which is surprising given the fact that it is precisely the future trajectory
of the Union that curren tly looms largest. What do Eu ropean citizens want for the
EU’s future and their country’s role in it? And to what extent do such future preferences
vary between countries? The aftermath of the UK’s Brexit referendum has shown that
the future of Europe is not simply a choice between integration and disintegration, but
there are many substantively different paths to take. As the UK case has shown, it
already proves hard to align people behind one preferred future scenario within a
single country. This becomes vastly more complicated when trying to align citizens
of countries with widely different trajectories, experiences and positions within the
EU, which is the challenge faced by the remaining 27 member states. Importantly,
unlike the fear to see a Brexit ‘contagion’, public support for the EU in the remaining
27 member states has ra ther gone up since the Brexit vote (De Vries, 201 7; Van Kessel
et al., 2020), which s ignals potential public support for scenarios that dev elop the EU in
the direction of ‘more’Europe.
In contrast to the focus on public opinion about the current EU, we explicitly address
future preferences by covering a wide range of preferences that are part of the ongoing
political and public debate about the Union’s future. Contributing to the scarce litera-
ture that looks at citizens’attitudes about the future of Europe is an important endeav-
our given the crucial difference between people’s support of the present EU and their
desire for future levels of integration (Hobolt, 2014; Malang, 2017; Ray, 2003). In a
recent study, we provide a first attempt to study citizens’future preferences in detail
(Goldberg et al., 2021). In this article, we build and expand on our previous finding that
citizens have nuanced preferences about the future of Europe that cannot be reduced to
simply preferring more or less integration. By tailoring the possible future scenarios to
the ongoing debate about the EU’s future, we go beyond the common one-dimensional
approach of EU supportby allowing future EU preferences to vary not onlyin the intensity
of integration, but also in terms of the type of integration (e.g. focusing on the economy,
enhancing democracy or allowing for different speeds) they propose. This allows us to
open the black box of what citizens want for the future.
We crucially expand on our previous approach (Goldberg et al., 2021) –developed to
map degrees of Euroscepticism in the aftermath of Brexit –by refining the measure to
722 European Union Politics 22(4)
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