Opting for opt-outs? - National identities and support for a differentiated EU

Abstract

A large literature investigates individual support for European integration. However, support for differentiated integration has only recently become an important topic of study for public opinion scholars. Previous literature on this issue has not probed how differentiated integration is shaped by exclusively national identities, and whether the effect varies by how differentiation has been implemented. Using survey data from 2020-21, I show that exclusively national citizens are most likely to support differentiated integration that allows for greater national autonomy and may oppose differentiation whose primary goal it is to facilitate further integration. I also find that the effect of national identity on such support is largely independent of whether differentiation has been voluntarily chosen by governments or externally imposed by the EU. This raises important questions both about what kind of differentiated integration will enjoy public legitimacy and how regional contexts shape support for EU differentiation.

Does differentiation beget differentiation?: Examining the link between implementation of and support for differentiation

“…The phenomenon of differentiated integration is extensively investigated conceptually (Bátora and Fossum 2020;Leuffen et al 2013;Schimmelfennig and Winzen 2014), empirically (Gänzle et al 2019;Malang and Holzinger 2020;Ott et al 2017;Schimmelfennig and Winzen 2017;Winzen 2020) and normatively (Bellamy 2019;Eriksen 2019;Lord 2021;Nicolaïdis 2004). The few contributions investigating individual support for differentiated integration focus on liberal economic values (Leuffen et al 2022), Euroscepticism (Blok and De Vries 2023;Schuessler et al 2023), territorially exclusive self-identification (Moland 2022) and party cues (Telle et al 2022). However, we still do not know whether past exposure to differentiated integration leads to greater support for flexible integration in the future.…”