National/European identities and political alignments

Abstract

Reflecting on the articles in this special issue of European Union Politics, this essay first asks whether EU scholarship has sufficiently conceptualized and measured what it means to identify with the European Project and/or the European Community. The evidence in this special issue indicates that many citizens now have attachments to Europe, albeit in uncertain depth. European attachments also exist in combination with or as an alternative to national identities. European/national identities also now overlap with partisan attachments, potentially forming a new basis of political cleavage. The research in this collection demonstrates a rich portfolio of methods to examine this important topic, and yields new evidence of how geographic identities are related to public opinion on issues such as immigration.

Keywords

European Community European identity immigration national identity party alignments

One of the primary goals of the European Project has been to moderate the nationalism that had led to conflicts among European nations culminating in World War II. Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman saw this as a major objective of European integration. Konrad Adenauer also saw a European attachment as a solution for Germany’s political integration into postwar Europe. Thus the logic of European integration was that it would improve the living conditions of its citizens, and gradually build affective support for the European project or even European identities.

This special issue of European Union Politics (EUP) tracks the course of European and national identities among contemporary publics, the sources of these identities, and the implications. As Clark and Rohrschneider (2021) write in their introductory essay, the topic of Europeans’ political identities has dramatically increased in salience over the past two decades. On the one side, the broadening of the European Union’s (EU’s) social and political role post-Maastricht created new skeptics of the European project. The expansion to include new post-communist nations from Central and Eastern Europe added new member states that lacked the half-century of EU experience of West Europeans. And then political events—the Great Recession, the financial crisis following the recession, Brexit, and the refugee crisis—produced new economic and political challenges for the EU.

On the other side, many of these same events seemed to reinvigorate national identities albeit often from different sectors of society. Brexit was both an anti-EU action, but also an expression of latent nationalism. The recession and financial crisis created new divisions among some European states. And the refugee crisis seemingly rekindled feelings of national identity versus foreigners in some nations.

These factors make it especially salient to devote a special issue of EUP to the topic of national and European identities, and their implications for Europe’s political future.

The concept of identity

The concept of identity is separate from the evaluative judgments of the EU and its policies, and the same for national identities. A sense of identity is a deeper attachment to a political entity, more than just approving current EU or national policies. This builds on David Easton’s (1975) concept that diffuse support for a political community should be a deeper and more persistent form of political support that would help the community grow and endure when short-term problems arose. It is much different to say one approves of EU policies than to say they identify with the Community.

From the outset, however, there has been considerable uncertainty about how a supranational identity might relate to existing political identities (Duchesne, 2008; Duchesne and Frognier, 1994;). For example, the landmark 1973 European Community Study asked people to locate themselves along a geographic continuum from the local to a cosmopolitan identity (Inglehart, 1981). Researchers viewed local, regional, national, and European identities as steps along this continuum (Diez Medrano, 2003; Diez Medrano and Gutierrez, 2001). An evolutionary image of political identities was also embedded in the so-called Moreno question that presented a European identity as a future extension of national identities.¹ And periodically, the Eurobarometers ask another question to tap national versus European attachments.²

These differences reflect not just variations in the phrasing of the question, but also in the underlying conceptualization of identities. Does social modernization produce a linear continuum of identities from local to supranational? Are political identities exclusive or inclusive (Hooghe and Marks, 2004)? If the former, the growth of a European identity would necessarily involve the deconstruction of national identities. If the latter, national and European identities could be complementary: one could feel an attachment to both your nation and Europe, just as regional identities coexist with national identities in much of Europe.

This collection generally focuses on a conceptualization of geographic identity that can include attachments to multiple political levels: city, country, and European. I think that this framework of allowing for separate and multiple identities is a preferable way to approach the topic. It does not presuppose a structure to identities, and it creates analytic options that are not available with the other Eurobarometer measures.

Several implications flow from this methodology for the articles that use this question or equivalents. First, geographic identities are conceptually separate from short-term judgments of the political systems and their activities. As a result, these identities should be less affected by short-term political forces (Easton, 1975). The tumultuous events of the past two decades test this assumption. Second, geographic identities are not exclusive; someone can be attached to their region and nation, or their nation and Europe. Or neither. Clark and Rohrschneider (2021) demonstrate the diverse patterns across Europe in their essay.

Missing from the literature on European identities has been a better conceptualization and measurement of what it means to be “European”. Is this a cultural identification to European history and traditions, an attachment to the European Community as a political institution, or a belief in the ideal of European integration? While studies of national identity probe into the content of these identities, work on Europeanness has not produced comparably complex models and measurements. This might require more extensive research that goes beyond the measures available from the Eurobarometers. The distinctions between alternatives measures of Europeanness have important theoretical and political implications.

Methodological innovation

All of the articles in this collection deal with some aspect of nationalism or Europeanism among contemporary publics, and this collection is exceptional in the diversity of the methodologies applied to this topic. Most of the articles examine the individual-level correlates of public opinion toward nationalism and/or Europeanism albeit with different theoretical foci and different methodologies. Rooduijn et al. (2021), for example, formulated an experiment within a national opinion survey that provides more leverage for their tests of causal processes. van der Brug and Harteveld (2021) conduct cross-level analyses by merging a survey time series with statistical measures of asylum-seeking over time. Both articles use demanding methodologies where causality can be more directly ascertained. Perhaps the higher standards of these methods contribute to the lack of strong empirical effects for their hypotheses, but that is the value of robust methodologies.

Two other articles examine the correlates of national attachments with cross-national survey data. Curtis and Miller (2021) use cross-national cross-sectional data and a panel of the British public to look at the personality correlates of geographic identities. Panels are extremely valuable to examine both stability and change. One wishes they had written more on the stability of geographic identities across panel waves because it appears to be highly stable (their Table 4), as Easton would predict. If so, predicting changes in identities would be difficult, especially if identities are more stable than personality traits. Foster and Frieden (2021) build sophisticated time series models to explain the ebbs and flows in public approval of the EU. This is more a specific measure of EU performance than European identities and thus should be more variable over time.

Jackson and Jolly (2021) use the innovative Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) expert surveys to describe party positions toward the EU. Considerable research shows citizens’ partisanship or left/right ideology is related to national or geographic identities. This CHES methodology opens the potential to determine the parties’ roles in shaping—or representing—these opinions (see the later discussion of Figure 2 in this essay), and how party positions on other issue dimensions might be related to the values engrained in national or EU identities. However, this piece also highlights the question of how we measure Europeanness; as a counter to nationalist sentiments, support for European integration as a goal, or positions on the immigration issue. Are we comparing diffuse or specific measures of public opinion?

As discussed below, this type of multi-method approach often yields complementary views of the same causal processes albeit from alternative empirical methods. It is a model to be emulated. But it requires exceptional data resources and extensive collaboration to make sure the research foci overlap. This collection represents a significant advance along this research path.

Nationalism and Europeanism

Given the agenda Clark and Rohrschneider (2021) presented in the introduction, two essays directly address the question of whether the tempestuous politics of the last two decades may have changed geographic identities. Roojuijn et al. (2021) consider whether hearing populist messages about refugees and Muslim immigrants increases cultural conservative/nativist opinions among the Dutch public. van der Brug and Harteveld (2021) examine whether the refugee crisis might have affected Europeans’ national identities as well as attitudes toward immigrants. In short, these articles ask if the immigration issue and the articulation of nativist ideas by far-right political actors may have stimulated nationalist sentiments that seemed to intensify in the past decade.

Rooduijn et al. (2021) find that populist messages have a limited impact on nativism. Pre-existing party identities are strongly related to these opinions, rather than reactions to the political stimuli of the experiment. van der Brug and Harteveld’s (2021) research yields a similar message. While the number of asylum seekers in a nation had some impact on attitudes toward immigrants, the carryover to nationalist feelings was not evident. In sum, national identities (and party identities) appear more likely to shape issue positions and the interpretation of political events than to change in response to these factors.

This is important evidence that national identities appear deeply embedded in belief systems and are resistant to short-term forces of change. Neither study examines European identities, however. European identities may be more malleable because they lack the historical and cultural traditions built up over generations as with national identities. The time trends from Clark and Rohrschneider (2021) are relevant to this point. If one separates national and European identities, the picture of stability is more apparent than change.

Figure 1 shows the time trend for local, national, and European attachments for the 15 early EU member states.³ There are strong national and local attachments. Moreover, these sentiments are quite stable over time (Foster and Frieden, 2017).⁴ Among this set of EU nations, the average attachment to the nation barely changes from 4.3 to 4.4 between 1991 and 2019 (2021). The trend lines are also relatively flat for the other national groupings in the Clark and Rohrschneider comparisons.

Figure 1.

Trends in local, national and European attachments in EU15 nations.

As another reference point, Europeans also express relatively strong and stable attachments to their local community. One suspects this pattern reflects feelings of a sense of local community, rather than a local identity analogous to nationalism. At the least, it shows that multiple geographic attachments can exist simultaneously.⁵

Attachments to Europe show some volatility in the early 2000s, but this involved both the addition of the new EU15 members and then the eastward expansion of the Union in 2004. However, European attachments barely changed between 1991 and 2000, and the same general stability applies to the 2008 to 2019 period. Attachments to Europe in 1991 (mean = 2.9) have only slightly changed by 2019 (mean = 3.2). The greatest change in attachments to Europe comes in the EU members joining since 2004 (Clark and Rohrschneider, 2019). Given the EUphoria of the 1990s and the newness of these attachments in Central/Eastern Europe, change among these expansion members is not surprising and circumstances in the region have been more malleable over this period.

These trends are important evidence that national identities are embedded in existing belief systems and thus resistant to change. Similarly, data from the 1981 World Values Survey and the 2008 European Values Survey found a fairly stable level of national pride for a set of about a dozen affluent European democracies despite the tumultuous events of the 1981–2008 period (Dalton, 2019: 265). Other research shows strong linkages between broad value orientations and geographic identities that are at the core in this special issue (Inglehart, 1977a, 1977b, 1990; Welzel, 2014). Geographic identities can change, but their links to a broader value system encourage continuity. These linkages are often implicit rather than explicit in this collection of essays, and more research on how geographic identities shape issue opinions and evaluation events is warranted.

One valuable work in this collection examines the individual-level meaning of national identities. Aichholzer, Kritzinger, and Plescia (2021) use the 2013 International Social Survey Program’s module on national identity to explore the variety of national attachments. People express different levels of national attachments, but they also vary in the content of these sentiments. Some think of national identity in terms of tradition, duty, allegiance; others think of national pride in terms of social progress, political exclusion, a negative history, and division (Dalton, 2021: ch. 7). Their article disaggregates national identity into four components: patriotism, civic norms, chauvinism, and an ethnic base.

This method shows the complexity of national identities and their distribution across the public. Those who identify with the nation in terms of one component may be less attached to the nation in terms of another component. For example, “patriotic supporters” of the nation are more common among the better educated, but nationalist supporters are less common. This opens the door to a richer understanding of geographic identities—a goal to emulate in future research. The complexity of national identities also might explain why events and experiments have so little impact on single measures of national attachment. Unfortunately, the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) does not include comparably diverse measures of EU identities which might illustrate the same complexity as seen in national identities. It would also be valuable to compare their results for 2013 to the two earlier ISSP national identity modules which could add a time dimension to the analyses.

Another important lesson from this collection is how the influence of partisan predispositions might combine with geographic identities to frame events and new information. For instance, Rooduijn et al. (2021) found large partisan differences in opinions separate from their experimental effects. Van der Brug and Harteveld (2021) show (their Figure 4) that the asylum experience moved sentiments in the arrival nations as party positions dramatically shifted. The articles by Curtis and Miller (2021), and Foster and Frieden (2021), show that a rightist ideology is positively related to national attachment and negative related to a European attachment. I suspect the national identity patterns (Aichholzer et al., 2021) are also clearly linked to party identities, although this is not tested.

Further evidence of the importance of party cues comes from the Jackson and Jolly article on party positions using the CHES. Among the very rich comparisons, their Figure 1 shows that party positions toward the EU have become more distinct from the parties’ traditional economic positions. The polarization of party positions on European integration also increases over time. In other words, as new parties critical to the EU have emerged, voters are sorting themselves into parties that reflect their own views toward Europe. This realignment of party systems is worthy of continued study.

Overlapping geographic and partisan identities are more likely to stimulate motivated reasoning in which these identities shape citizens’ perceptions of the political world (Haidt, 2012). For example, nationalists who support far-right parties would interpret the refugee surge through a different political frame than Europeanists who support center/leftist parties. As a result, the same events might reinforce pre-existing identities. In short, identities are more likely to shape issue positions, and not the reverse. This process would limit the potential for external forces to change broad geographic political identities.

In conclusion

What is the larger lesson to be learned from this research collection? At one time, not so long ago, the idea of a “permissive consensus” described Europeans orientations toward the European project. The European Community was seen as contributing to the betterment of Europe, even though the integration process had just begun. This special issue has shown that a deeper sense of European identity has developed over the subsequent several decades. For many citizens, this European identity exists alongside national identities that have persisted (Clark and Rohrschneider, 2019). For others, these two identities are conflicting rivals.

As European integration progressed, the consensus toward Europe has also softened. European elites often ignored or tried to circumvent public opposition, such as the negative referendums on constitutional changes (Eichenberg and Dalton, 2007). Or parties avoided giving citizens a choice to de-politicize EU issues, such as the German parties’ decisions to yield the mighty D-mark in favor of the Euro (Risse, 2003). EU-favorable elites dominated the process.

That pattern has changed. As the EU responsibilities have increased, this has mobilized opposition among parts of the European public (De Vries and Hobolt, 2020). Old and new parties are now representing those who challenge the European project. Consensus has become contention.

As an illustration, I bring together two strands of the story told in this special issue: citizen attitude toward the EU and party positions on European integration. Figure 2 correlates party voters’ average opinions toward the EU based on the 2019 European Election Study with each party’s position on European integration as coded by the 2019 CHES project for the EU 15 nations.⁶ Compared to earlier periods when most Europeans confronted a party system that fostered a permissive consensus toward the EU, there are now clear party divisions on the European project. For example, the United Kingdom Brexit party and other far-right parties stand out for their opposition to the EU among its voters and the party leadership. Conversely, many Green, Social Democratic, and even some conservative parties—and their voters—are very supportive of the EU. Moreover, there is a high degree of agreement between voters and their party on the topic of European integration (r = .85). This creates an environment where political cues from party attachments likely reaffirm voters’ predispositions toward Europe, thus solidifying and perhaps polarizing positions further in the established Western party systems.

Figure 2.

Party voter and party positions on support for European integration.

All else being equal, this correlation likely exists between partisanship and deeper identities toward the nation or the EU (and thus to the values tied to these geographic identities) at least for West Europeans. European and partisan identities may be less structured and more fluid in the more recent EU member states.

This relationship between party identities and geographic identities can be a potent influence on issue opinions and the interpretation of political events. Geographic identities are beginning to overlap with the cultural cleavage emerging in affluent democracies, reinforced by party cues and social positions (Hooghe and Marks, 2018). European identities thus are more likely to be correlated with positive views of immigration, greater support for further expansion of EU authority, and other cosmopolitan issue positions. National identities appear related to opposition to migration, conservative cultural values, and other traditional values. Thus, these geographic identities can encourage cultural polarization in European societies. If we are wondering about Europe’s future political divisions, we may be seeing them form through these overlapping geographic and partisan identities.

Supplemental Material

sj-zip-1-eup-10.1177_1465116521992878 - Supplemental material for National/European identities and political alignments

Supplemental material, sj-zip-1-eup-10.1177_1465116521992878 for National/European identities and political alignments by Russell J Dalton in European Union Politics

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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