Critical Trust in European Institutions

Abstract

This article looks at Estonia and Latvia to investigate how minority activists understand and respond to changing opportunity structures at the European level after their countries joined the European Union and conditionalities pressures faded. Using a combined quantitative–qualitative approach, we show that minority activists have no illusions about the EU’s capacity (and willingness) to intervene in their favor, but at the same time they are not likely to abandon the European arena. Rather, they display what we call “critical trust” towards the EU – a change in the quality of trust rather than only in its quantity.

DATASETS

Eurobarometer (Central Eastern Eurobarometer, Candidate Countries Eurobarometer)http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/index_en.htm

European Social Surveyhttp://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/

European Values Surveyhttp://www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu/

New Baltic Barometerhttp://www.cspp.strath.ac.uk/catalog2_0.html

Notes

1. The portion of Russian-speakers who acquired citizenship by birth upon independence was approximately 20 percent in Estonia and 40 percent in Latvia (Mole 2012, 88; Smith, Galbreath, and Swain 2010, 119).

2. Of course, whether this is actually effective is a moot point and is beyond the scope of this article. In fact, in a context of political marginalization, arguably few minority actions are effective. What is important here is how minority activists perceive Europeanization and how they react to changing circumstances.

3. For the estimation, we use the Central Eastern Eurobarometer (CEEB), the Candidate Countries Eurobarometer (CCEB), and the Eurobarometer (EB) in combination. They continue to provide the information about respondents’ language choice in only a few countries, including Estonia and Latvia. This makes it possible for us to distinguish between majorities’ and minorities’ intertemporal change of trust toward European institution. Although these barometers have partial differences between their questionnaires, they share basic components and methods, and taken together can provide a good approximation of a consistent social survey. The CEEB asked respondents for their impressions of the EU, providing them with three options: Positive, Neutral, and Negative. The CCEB and the EB asked respondents about their trust in the EU, with three options: Tending to trust, No opinion, and Tending not to trust.

4. For example a Latvian nationalist MP showed his irritation at the OSCE’s pressures to liberalize minority language policies by referring to the OSCE High Commissioner for National Minorities as “your Van der Stoel” when talking to Russophone members during a parliamentary debate on April 29, 1998. The transcripts of Latvian parliamentary debates can be found (in Latvian) at www.saeima.lv.

5. We use respondents’ experience with political demonstrations as a proxy of respondents’ political activeness.

6. Unfortunately, its fifth and sixth modules were not conducted in Latvia, so this fourth wave is the most recent one for both countries. The seventh module will be conducted in both Latvia and Estonia, but its data have not been released yet.

7. Questions are “[In Estonian] Millist keelt või keeli räägite kodus kõige sagedamini? [In Latvian] Kādā valodā vai valodās Jūs pārsvarā runājat mājās? [In Russian] На каком/ каких языках Вы в основном общаетесь дома?”

8. Based on the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) scale.

9. In a robustness check in which we limited the unit of analysis only to Russian-speaking minorities without citizenship, we got similar results. One notable difference is that, in Latvia, Russophone non-citizens who have participated in demonstrations in the past twelve months tend to show low trust in the European Parliament.

10. It is important to note that, differently from Latvia, in Estonia, non-citizens and third-country nationals (constituting about half of Estonia’s Russophone population) have the right to vote in local elections.

11. Ethnically based socioeconomic inequality is more pronounced in Estonia than in Latvia (Rozenvalds 2007, 37).

12. For example, Latvia’s Congress of Non-Citizens held a series of meetings and talks in Brussels in August 2013 and then organized a small sit-in action near the European Parliament in November 2013 (Latvian Centre for Human Rights, August 5, 2013, November 29, 2013).

13. Pre-accession barometer data (CCEB and CEEB) show that in countries such as Slovakia, Romania, and Lithuania, minorities tended to have high trust toward European institutions. Unfortunately, these countries’ datasets from post-accession years (Eurobarometer) do not make a distinction between minorities and majorities, as the question about their mother-tongue was dropped, which makes it impossible to verify similar downward trends in European trust in these countries.

14. See also studies of pre- and post-accession minority rights in other CEE countries (Spirova 2012; Agarin and Brosig 2009; Szöcsik 2012) as well as Myra Waterbury’s contribution in this Special Issue.

15. At the same time, there might be differences about what type of activism correlates with minorities’ perceptions of European institutions. For example, while our analysis demonstrates that participation by minorities in public demonstrations did not have substantial effects on their formation of (dis)trust for European institutions in Estonia and Latvia, this does not imply that the same must be true for all the other CEE countries as well. For example, for the importance of public demonstrations for democracy in Slovakia and Romania, see Sherrill Stroschein (2012).