Let Us Europeans Move: How Collective Identities Drive Public Support for Border Regimes inside the EU

Abstract

After three decades of European integration, during which border controls seemed like a relic from the past, the refugee crisis and Brexit have brought the issue to the centre of public debate. Existing research points towards the relevance of collective identity for attitude formation in the field of high politics, but has so far not answered the question of how far collective identities explain support for different intra‐EU border regimes. My article closes this gap. It is based on an original representative EU‐wide survey from 2017 (N = 10,827), which analyses the nexus between border regime support, identity and migration experience, as well as contextual factors like immigration rates. Support for Schengen membership is significantly stronger among respondents with a European identity than those identifying exclusively with their nation‐state. These findings suggest that the endorsement of open borders and further integration in this policy area is strongly dependent on an inclusive European collective identity.

Collective Identities and the Integration of Core State Powers: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…In the short term, however, there is little doubt that the post‐functionalist approach to supranational integration sees latent national identities as a potential threat to further integration, should these be activated by opportunistic political entrepreneurs. Exclusive identities may even represent a threat to existing integration in highly politicized contexts, such as the European Monetary Union or the Schengen area (Karstens, ).…”

“…Matthijs and Merler's () article expresses the important function of maintaining Europe as a space with no internal frontiers, granting a fundamental freedom to circulation; a specific form of negative integration achieved by limiting domestic action in the field of border management that has been traditionally seen as a core state function. Matthijs and Merler's work suggests that freedom of movement constructs identification, while Felix Karstens () asks, in the sixth contibution in this collection, to what extent opposition to freedom of movement is associated with exclusive national identities. In his article, Karstens presents a newly collected dataset exploring attitudes towards mobility and intra‐EU border controls.…”

United or divided in diversity? The heterogeneous effects of ethnic diversity on European and national identities

“…Next to the support for the political system, having an additional European identity has also other positive effects for social cohesion: Curtis (2014) has found that including European identity into the self-concept next to a national identity predicts positive attitudes towards immigrants. In contrast, having an exclusively national identity predicts preferences for closed borders ( Karstens, 2020 ). Another key impact of inclusive national identity is the higher preferences for redistribution among Europeans ( Nicoli et al, 2020 ).…”

Opting for opt outs? - Untangling the role of identity in shaping support for differentiated integration

“…The first contribution of this article is to assess whether exclusive identification with the nation-state influences support for differentiated integration even among those not sharing the same group's well-established opposition to EU membership (Hooghe and Marks 2005;Hooghe and Marks 2009;Karstens 2020b;Skinner 2012). The strong correlation between exclusiveness of national identities and opposition to EU integration is posited to stem from how exclusive identification with the nation-state may lead to a perception of the nation-state as the legitimate locus of political authority.…”