A more martial Europe? Public opinion, permissive consensus, and EU defence policy

ABSTRACT

EU defence policy has been extremely popular over the past three decades, averaging around 75% public support. In fact, no other policy domain is as popular and robust as the idea of pooling national sovereignty over defence. However, public support for EU defence has been dismissed as mere “permissive consensus”, rather than genuine support. Scholars have often assumed that public opinion towards European integration is passive and shallow, especially over foreign policy issues, where the public has limited understanding of the complexity of issues. Consistent with contemporary findings about the complexity of comparative foreign policy attitudes, the authors contest the permissive consensus logic and demonstrate that European publics have held coherent preferences over the use of force at the European level. The authors conclude that the slow progress of integration in this area is due to the reluctance of elites rather than to the reticence of Europe’s citizens.

KEYWORDS:

• CSDP
• European Union
• foreign and security policy
• public opinion
• European defence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Kaija E. Schilde is an Associate Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. She is the author of The Political Economy of European Security (Cambridge University Press 2017).

Stephanie B. Anderson, Professor of Political Science, Ph.D. University of Cambridge (UK), M.Sc., The London School of Economics, and B.S.F.S. at Georgetown University. Her research focus is on the European Union (EU) as an International Actor, International Relations and Security Issues.

Andrew D. Garner is an Associate Professor at the University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, USA, whose research focuses on the effect of Political, Social, and Media Environments on public opinion and voting behavior.

Notes

1. For variable numbers, variable names, and analysis coding please see the appendix.

2. Mannheim Eurobarometer Trend File. Independent variables: EDUC, POLINT, ECFINFO, OLI.

3. Specifically: “What is your opinion on each of the following statements? Please tell me for each proposal, whether you are for it or against it. (ROTATE)-The European Union member states should have a common defence and security policy.”

4. The list of roles from which respondents were asked to choose was as follows: 1. Defending the territory of the European Union; 2. Intervening in conflicts at the borders of the European Union; 3. Intervening in conflicts in other parts of the world; 4. Repatriating Europeans who are in areas where there is a conflict; 5. Intervening in case of natural, ecological or nuclear disaster in Europe; 6. Intervening in other parts of the world (national, ecological or nuclear disaster, or combatting famine, or cleaning minefields); 7. Guaranteeing peace in the European Union; 8. Taking part in peace-keeping missions outside the EU, decided by the UN (UN troops); 9. Taking part in peace-keeping missions outside the EU, without the UN’s agreement; 10. Defending human rights; 11. Carrying out humanitarian missions; 12. Defending the economic interests of the European Union; 13. Symbolising a European identity; 14. There shouldn't be a European army (SPONTANEOUS).

5. All of the tables below present the unweighted results of our analysis. We conducted an alternative series of analyses using country weights and the results were not significantly different from those presented below.

6. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

7. We also analyzed the Eurobarometer 87.3 (2017) for differences across the “interest in politics” and “knowledge” variables and the results were very similar to those reported in Tables 2 and 3. This survey, however, did not contain the “opinion leader” question and thus we dropped it from the analysis in Table 3.

8. We distinguished soft and hard power using the following categorisation of responses to Q56, about the role of the future EU army. Hard power/unilateralism/military power: Defending the territory of the EU; Intervening in conflicts at the borders of the EU; Intervening in conflicts in other parts of the world; Taking part in peace-keeping missions outside the EU, without the UN's agreement. Soft Power/multilateralism/civilian power: Guaranteeing peace in the EU; Repatriating Europeans who are in areas where there is a conflict; Intervening in case of natural, ecological or nuclear disaster in Europe; Intervening in other parts of the world (natural, ecological or nuclear disaster, famine, or cleaning minefields); Taking part in peace-keeping missions outside the EU, decided by the UN (UN troops); Defending human rights; Carrying out humanitarian missions; Defending the economic interests of the EU; Symbolising a European identity.

9. Measured by Eurobarometer 54.1, Question 29.

10. Variables from the factor analysis were used to create two additive indexes, one for hard power and the other for soft power. The indexes were created by adding the responses to each question (whether they mentioned the role for the European army or not) for the four hard power questions and the nine soft power questions. These two variables were then scaled to range from 0 to 1, allowing for a more direct comparison of the coefficients in the model. These rescaled indexes were then used to create a logistic regression where the dependent variable is whether the respondent supports or opposes having a common European defense and the independent variables are the hard power index, the soft power index, and a control variable for how proud the respondent is to be European (a measure of European identity). We also ran an alternative logistic regression model that used variables created from the factor analysis instead of the additive scales mentioned above. The direction of the coefficients and p-values in this auxiliary analysis were almost identical to those using the additive scales.