Tracing the development of nationalist attitudes in the EU
| Author | Robert Rohrschneider,Nicholas Clark |
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116520988902 |
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Tracing the development
of nationalist attitudes
in the EU
Nicholas Clark
Department of Political Science, Susquehanna University,
Selinsgrove, USA
Robert Rohrschneider
Department of Political Science, University of Kansas,
Lawrence, USA
Abstract
We discuss the relevance of national attachments for European integration, reviewing
the existing literature and drawing connections across the articles in this issue. We also
consider that the ageing European population might be a possible explanation for why
nationalism is increasingly shaping EU support especially outside the ideological
extremes. Taken together with the other contributions in this issue, it is quite possible
that national identity will increasingly shape the views of individuals with ideologically
moderate views who in the past have supported European integration.
Keywords
Ageing, EU support, identity, nationalism, political ideology
For decades now, scholars have been writing about the relationship between
nationalism and support for the European Union (EU). The conventional
wisdom suggests that strong national identities undermine support for the EU
(Carey, 2002); a pattern that has become especially marked since the turn of the
millennium (Clark and Rohrschneider, 2019; Fligstein et al., 2012; Polyakova and
Corresponding author:
Robert Rohrschneider, Department of PoliticalScience, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66044, USA.
Email: roro@ku.edu
European Union Politics
2021, Vol. 22(2) 181–201
!The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116520988902
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Fligstein, 2015). Clearly, as the EU created a common currency and increasingly
transferred policy-making authority to the EU, identity-based considerations
became slowly but steadily more relevant to citizens. This was reinforced when
the EU expanded to include several countries from Central and Eastern Europe,
raising questions about the EU’s capacity to integrate an increasingly diverse set of
nations. Against this backdrop, the sovereign debt crisis, the resulting austerity
movement, and the growing influx of migrants and asylum-seekers stretched the
EU’s ability to deal with severe policy problems. The confluence of these dynamics
increasingly strained support for the EU from 2007 onwards, although the EU has
recently recovered some of the pre-crisis support. Still, Brexit illustrates the con-
sequences when the strength of national attachments is used by skilled political
elites to outmaneuver those who support the EU (de Vries and Hobolt, 2020;
Hobolt, 2016). The situation we find today is one in which nationalism will
likely continue to shape public perceptions of the EU in the years ahead. This
Special Issue features contributions that seek to better understand the depth of
nationalist impulses that currently exist and the effects they may have on the
politics of European integration. Unlike other recent special issues (e.g. Kuhn
and Nicoli, 2020), we primarily focus the contributions on an examination of
the levels and sources of national attachments.
There are two central motivations for the focus of this Special Issue. First, even
the most ardent supporter of the EU will agree that national attachments linger or,
more often, plainly shape public debates. Therefore, we wanted to bring together a
set of articles that help explain when citizens develop stronger national attach-
ments and why national identity remains dominant. Given that the EU has con-
tributed to Europe’s prosperity and the peaceful coexistence of nations for
decades, an Eastonian “output” model would predict a decline of national identity
and a weakening influence of national attachments on EU evaluations because
specific policy achievements tend to deepen public support for institutions over
time (Easton, 1975). Instead, people’s identification with the EU has remained
much weaker than their attachment to nation states and, moreover, this balance
has not changed much since the late 1980s (Figure 1). What makes national iden-
tity so sticky? Is it, as Fuchs and Klingemann (2002: 19) put it nearly two decades
ago, that “in view of the cultural plurality and heterogeneity of European nation
states, it is doubtful whether the constitution of a European demos with a tenable
collective identity is possible at all”? This Special Issue illuminates several potential
reasons for why national identities remain at the forefront of the minds of mass
publics.
Second, from a practical perspective, no single journal issue or volume can fully
examine all aspects of various identities, spanning regional, national, and supra-
national identities, and their linkages with economic, institutional, political, factors
as well as the influence of elites and current issues on mass views about integration.
We therefore settled on six topics that examine key aspects that underlie national
identities: the way that personality types shape preferences about national attach-
ments (Curtis and Miller, 2021), how populist preferences drive a wedge between
182 European Union Politics 22(2)
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