1 Once upon a Time...
As the European Union (EU) has changed from an economic entity to also a political one, so has the public opinion towards the EU. While support for the EU used to prevail among its citizens, Euroskepticism has spread across Europe nowadays. This change in public attitude became most apparent when the referendum on the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe failed in the Netherlands and in France in 2005. Many studies have been conducted to understand the attitude formation towards the EU. Basically, there exist two different approaches: economy- and identity-based theories. In general, the economic position takes a cost-benefit perspective, in which people who benefit from the EU you are more supportive. Some researchers have focused on individual-level economic characteristics such as education and income (see Inglehart 1970; Gabel 1998), others on macro-level economic predictors like inflation and unemployment rate (see Anderson 1998; Eichenberg/Dalton 2007 to be discussed).
In contrast, identity-related approaches assume a strong relationship between psychological well-being and support for the EU. In particular, anti-immigration attitudes, fear of cultural threat and exclusive national identity have been considered predictors for Euroskepticism (see Hooghe/Marks 2004; McLaren 2007 to be discussed). Few scholars try to combine both approaches because they do not view them as adverse, but as complementing each other (see Garry/Tilley 2009 to be discussed).
Thus, the purpose of this essay lies in reviewing three different articles on the public attitude formation towards the EU. All of which take varying standpoints. Examining these studies reveals their advantages and disadvantages in how they ...
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...ssell J., 2007: Post-Maastricht Blues: The Transformation of Citizen Support for European Integration, 1973–2004. Acta Politica 42 (2-3): 128-152.
Gabel, Matthew, 1998: Public Support for European Integration: An Empirical Test of Five Theories. The Journal of Politics 60 (2): 333-354.
Garry, John/Tilley, James, 2009: The Macroeconomic Factors Conditioning the Impact of Identity on Attitudes towards the EU. European Union Politics 10 (3): 361-379.
Hooghe, Liesbet/Marks, Gary, 2004: Does Identity or Economic Rationality Drive Public Opinion on European Integration? Political Science and Politics 37 (3): 415-420.
Inglehart, Ronald, 1970: Cognitive Mobilization and European Identity. Comparative Politics 3 (1): 45-70.
McLaren, Lauren M., 2007: Explaining Mass-Level Euroscepticism: Identity, Interests, and Institutional Distrust. Acta Politica 42 (2–3): 233–51.
The European Union has been helped economically ever since World War II. Right after World War II’s end, Europe was struggling to hold on. The countries of the modern-day European Union thought it would be a good idea to come together and help each others struggling economy. To this day, this decision has had a very positive outcome on the EU’s economy. As shown in Diagram 1, the European Union combined together has the world’s highest GDP at 18.3 Trillion USD as compared to the United States’ 17.4 Trillion USD GDP and China’s 10.4 Trillion USD GDP. The idea
A Democratic Deficit in the EU The question over the legitimacy of the EU has been a nearly continuous debate and many commentators appear to agree that the EU suffers from a severe ‘democratic deficit’. There are many reasons why this perception is so widespread. As a multinational body it lacks the grounding in common history and culture upon which most individual polities can draw.
Nationalism at its core is the support of a country. The goal of a country is to have some sort of resonance within the individuals that reside there that call themselves citizens. If the citizens don’t feel any connection with their country, they may move to find one that they feel closer too. Once found, they may support the country over others, defend it within conversations of politics or just find groups that have the same ideals they do about the country. This papers purpose is to illustrate the pros of nationalism as well as its cons.
...: Reassessing Legitimacy in the European Union. Journal of Common Market Studies, 40 (4), pp. 603-24.
The European Union (EU), since the initial foundation in 1952 as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and throughout periods of development, has been considered one of the most advanced forms of regional integration. It, based on numerous treaties and resolutions, has strived to promote values such as peace, cooperation or democracy, and in 2012 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for having “contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe” (Nobel Media AB, 2012). Despite its struggle for promoting democracy, the EU itself has long experienced scholarly criticisms that it suffers the democratic deficit, from which its democratic legitimacy is undermined by observable problems in political accountability and participation. As the importance of legitimacy in a democratically representative institution is hardly debatable, the criticism of whether and why the EU lacks democracy has been given a considerable gravity in academia.
Nationalism is the idea that a people who have much in common, such as language, culture and geographic proximity ought to organize in such a way that it creates a stable and enduring state. Nationalism is tied to patriotism, and it is the driving force behind the identity of a culture. Nationalism had many effects in Europe from 1815, The Congress of Vienna and beyond. In the following essay I will describe many of the consequences of nationalism on European identity, as well as some of the conflicts that it created.
The European Union stands on the threshold of unparalleled change over the coming years. The next waves of enlargement will be unprecedented in nature and continental in scale. This process has gained so much political momentum that it is now irreversible.
National identity is often viewed in a positive light as a sense of love for one’s country. Furthermore, national identity has the ability to unite a group of people through their agreed feelings. However, the sense of national identity establishes differences between national identities. For the Polish nation one main characteristic of national identity is the sense of victimhood. Throughout much of Poland’s history Poland has been attacked frequently.
Eurozone crisis can be seen as the most important economic problem of the European Union in the history. Because of that crisis the currency union have faced the possibility of separation which is an extremely critical issue not only economically but also politically. Until the subprime crisis which became prominent by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008, the economic level of the EU members were similar. When the bankruptcy occurred those countries started to differentiate in a very significant way. Total government debt and also problems of banking sector lead many countries to negative GDP growth, high unemployment rates and more importantly social unrest.
Senior, Nello Susan. "Chapters:4,15." The European Union: Economics, Policies and History. London: McGraw-Hill, 2009. Print.
As I was doing some research for this project I found that the government did this kind of survey in Lithuania, to find out what was general public opinion before Lithuania became EU member. In 2003 over 91% did the survey and almost 64% agreed with Lithuania going for EU membership. The same survey was repeated few years later. What did not surprise me was that people opinion changed after accession to EU. In the survey done in 2008 over 75% of the Lithuanians agreed that Lithuania has benefited from EU membership.
The enlargement of the European Union (EU) in 2004 and 2007 has been termed as the largest single expansion of the EU with a total of 12 new member states – bringing the number of members to 27 – and more than 77 million citizens joining the Commission (Murphy 2006, Neueder 2003, Ross 2011). A majority of the new member states in this enlargement are from the eastern part of the continent and were countries that had just emerged from communist economies (EC 2009, Ross 2011), although overall, the enlargement also saw new member states from very different economic, social and political compared to that of the old member states (EC 2009, Ross 2011). This enlargement was also a historical significance in European history, for it saw the reunification of Europe since the Cold War in a world of increasing globalization (EC 2009, Mulle et al. 2013, Ross 2011). For that, overall, this enlargement is considered by many to have been a great success for the EU and its citizens but it is not without its problems and challenges (EC 2009, Mulle et al. 2013, Ross 2011). This essay will thus examine the impact of the 2004/2007 enlargements from two perspectives: firstly, the impact of the enlargements on the EU as a whole, and thereafter, how the enlargements have affected the new member states that were acceded during the 2004/2007 periods. Included in the essay will be the extent of their integration into the EU and how being a part of the Commission has contributed to their development as nation states. Following that, this essay will then evaluate the overall success of the enlargement process and whether the EU or the new member states have both benefited from the accessions or whether the enlargement has only proven advantageous to one th...
...e that the citizens of the nations within the EU have trouble understanding themselves. However when the history it is broken apart, we can begin to understand where the EU origins are, and have some insight into the future of the organization, and the challenges that they face as the worlds largest Supranational Organization
The Europea n Union is certainly one of the most powerful and organized organisations in the world, nowadays, it regroups about 500 millions people all over 28 countries in the European continent. On the contrary a very strange structure and some political and economical arrangements were done during the past years making the EU law sometime confusing and frustrating for some other countries. During this essay we will explain how the European Union is structured, explaining the most important institutions and how these institutions interact with each other knowing that sometimes exceptions are made for someone’s and not for others. Creating problem between parties. The aim of this essay is to understand the EU structure and assess how the EU laws are applied to such an organisation. We will answer the two questions basing our research and work on “Law for business students“ written by Alix Adams and some other resources as well.
.... According to Pippa Norris, an individual's degree of nationalism is constructed in a young age and it is based on “the international context of the time “(stone and Muir, 2007:5), for example, citizens who were born in the 1940s in the time of the World War II will have a stronger sense of Britishness than the ones born in the time of globalization and conflicts over the EU. The younger generations identify less with Britain than their parents or grandparents. The Home Office Citizenship Survey consider age to be the most powerful driver of “belonging to Britain” and the survey show that people over 75 years old feel the strongest identification with Britain (Heath and Roberts, 2008). If the same trend of a weak national allegiance among younger generations remains in the upcoming years, the British national identity will sure be weakened (Stone and Muir, 2007).