Loving it but not feeling it yet? The state of European identity after the eastern enlargement

Abstract

The inclusion of 11 new member states from the former Eastern bloc constitutes a significant challenge to the European Union in various respects. Many worry that whatever tenuous ‘European identity’ existed prior to the eastern enlargement, it has now become so diluted that no meaningful European political community can form. We provide an empirical account of the state of European identity after the eastern enlargement through a comparative analysis of affective and cognitive European identity in the old and the new Central and Eastern European member states. Our empirical analyses indicate that while the overall levels of cognitive European identification in the East are indeed lower than in the West, citizens from new member states are just as attached to Europe as citizens from old member states. Most importantly, not only is there no discernable difference in cognitive identification among young Europeans in East and West, but the youngest in the East seem to be even more strongly attached to Europe than their peers in the West.

Experiencing and supporting institutional regionalization in Belgium: a normative and interpretive policy feedback perspective

“…Bringing European integration into the equation may help solving this puzzle as the youngest cohorts might identify more as European than their older counterparts. Indeed, it has been demonstrated that citizens' European identification and support for European integration are related to their generation (Ceka and Sojka 2016;Down and Wilson 2013). Moreover, we observe in our data that younger cohorts tend to identify more often primarily with an 'other' community, which includes Europe, but also the municipality and province.…”

“…The impact of regionalization on identification is, however, expected to be stronger when regionalization takes place at a young age. Similar to other political attitudes, it has been observed in the context of the development of European identification that people who came of age when their country was part of the EU tend to identify more strongly with the EU than people who were already deep into adulthood (Ceka and Sojka 2016).…”

Cohesion Policy and European identity building: Trust as a mediating element

“…The inclusion of the year of accession of the country of residence to the EU is justified by the fact that the length of membership plays a role in shaping citizens' affection and perception of Europe (Sanders, Bellucci, Tóka, & Torcal, ). In a similar vein, since the literature pointed out differences in the identification with Europe between western and eastern Member States (Ceka & Sojka, ), Equation is estimated for the whole sample but also separately for the two groups of countries.…”

Common currency, common identity? The impact of the Euro introduction on European identity

“…We move from the well-established idea that individuals hold multiple (Kohli, 2000: 116), nested (Díez Medrano and Gutiérrez, 2001), and partially overlapping (Risse, 2005: 296; see also Aksoy and Hadzic, 2019) identities. We recognise that these identities have both a civic and a cultural component (Bruter, 2003) and that individuals experience their identities in different spheres, insofar as their belonging to the group is grounded both in cognitive and affective processes (Ceka and Sojka, 2016). Thus, strong national identities do not necessarily have to be detrimental to European integration as long as they maintain an element of inclusiveness.…”