![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
The democratic foundations of European integration in the foreign and defence realm are increasingly being debated. This article looks at the question of democratic legitimacy from one particular angle, by examining public opinion as measured in Eurobarometer surveys between 1989 and 2009. Based on reflections about the relation between polling results and wider questions of democracy, it examines three aspects of public opinion: general support for a common foreign and a common defence policy; differences among support rates in EU member states; and what roles Europeans would prefer for European armed forces. It turns out that general support for a common foreign policy is high, whereas the desirability of a common defence policy is much more contested. Moreover, citizens across Europe would prefer European armed forces to take on traditional tasks, as territorial defence. An EU defence policy that goes beyond strict intergovernmentalism and is directed towards protecting international law and universal human rights would thus require a significant communicative effort to become accepted.
Acknowledgements
Research for this article was carried out in the project ‘Reconstituting Democracy in Europe (RECON)’, an Integrated Project supported by the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme for Research, Priority 7 ‘Citizens and Governance in a Knowledge-based Society’. Previous versions of this article were presented at two workshops of the RECON project in Oslo in September 2010 and 2011. I thank the participants for their helpful comments and suggestions.
Notes on contributor
Dirk Peters is Senior Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF). His research focuses on EU foreign and security policy, foreign policy analysis and on legitimacy issues in international cooperation. He is the author of Constrained Balancing: The EU's Security Policy (Palgrave Macmillan).
Notes
1. For better readability, I use one abbreviation to refer to both the European Union's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and its Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP).
2. I use the term ‘public opinion’ in a narrow sense, as it is employed in most of the research dealing with the statistical analysis of survey data, to refer to aggregate patterns of attitudes revealed in surveys. The term can also be used in a more demanding sense to signify the opinion of the public, as it emerges from public discourse.
3. For an overview over public opinion research with respect to European integration, see Brettschneider et al. (Citation2003).
4. Höpner and Jurczyk (Citation2012) argue that Eurobarometer questionnaires are deliberately biased in favour of the European Commission's agenda. The design biases they point out, however, do not relate to the Eurobarometer questions on which this paper relies.
5. Note that the view that rightful rule implies a duty to obey is not uncontested in political theory, see e.g. Edmundson (Citation2007).
6. Data-sets for all Eurobarometer surveys are taken from the ZACAT website of GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, available at: <http://zacat.gesis.org>. Codebooks and questionnaires can be found there too. Data for the period until 2002 were taken from the Mannheim Eurobarometer Trend File, which combines data for all main Eurobarometer trend questions from 1970 to 2002 and is available on the ZACAT page as well. In performing the data analysis, data were weighted for certain socio-economic factors and population size, employing the appropriate weight variables provided in the data-sets, which are also used in the Commission's Eurobarometer reports.
7. Since autumn 1990 consistently (and sometimes considerably) more than 80 per cent of those favouring EU decision-making in defence support EU decision-making in foreign policy too. For those supporting EU foreign policy, figures fluctuate a bit more but around 60 per cent of them, sometimes considerably less, support EU decision-making in defence too.
8. All this is based on Eurobarometer data, see endnote 5 above.
9. This was Eurobarometer 45.1. These questions were excluded from the Mannheim Trend file for reasons of comparability. For the same reason EB 45.1 is excluded from the time series presented in this paper too.
10. As many as 21.7 per cent chose this option, compared with 22.6 and 23.0 per cent in the preceding and subsequent surveys.
11. 55 to 64 per cent of those favouring the EU in the first question stuck to that choice in the second. Only 31–40 per cent of those who had chosen the national level in question one did so in question two as well. The switch to newly offered NATO was approximately the same for both groups, ranging from 14 to 20 per cent of those who had chosen the EU level and 13–22 per cent of those who had preferred the national level.
12. There is more fluctuation, though, and a low that persists from autumn 2000 to autumn 2003.
13. Figures in the ‘supporters’ and ‘sceptics’ coumns, again, are averages over countries and not weighted. That is to say, results from small and large countries have the same weights in these columns.
14. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.