Comparing public attitudes on EU membership in candidate countries: the cases of Croatia, Macedonia and Turkey from 2004 to 2011

^*Instead of referring to the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia we use the shorter term Macedonia.

Abstract

Past enlargements of the European Union (EU) have demonstrated that public attitudes on European integration can influence the course of accession processes. Beyond the literature on public EU support in member states and former candidates, the dynamics that shape public attitudes on EU membership within recent candidate countries have not been systematically examined. Analysing nine Eurobarometer (EB) surveys from 2004 to 2011, we argue that evaluations of EU membership in Croatia, Macedonia and Turkey are shaped by utilitarian considerations, belief in various political institutions as well as the fear of losing national identity. The economic crisis of 2008 has changed public opinion towards EU membership in all three countries, but Turkey appears to have been affected the most compared to Croatia and Macedonia.

Keywords:

• Public opinion
• European Union
• enlargement
• Croatia
• Macedonia
• Turkey

Notes

^* Instead of referring to the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia we use the shorter term Macedonia.

1. Croatia joined the EU on 1 July 2013. During the research for this article, it had a status of candidate and later acceding country; therefore we still treat it as an EU candidate.

2. Other potential determinants of public opinion on EU membership include the effects of material assistance from the EU (Osterloh 2011) and the influence of media coverage (Osterloh 2011; Vliegenthart et al. 2008). We limited our study to those determinants that can be examined for current candidate and acceding countries on the basis of EB surveys.

3. In comparison, the GNI per capita of the EU countries varied between 28,476 and 30,541 US dollar between 2004 and 2011 (Worldbank 2012b).

4. Religious attendance is the only suitable question to measure the influence of religious identity in the EB surveys at hand. We acknowledge that for the case of Turkey with Islam being the dominant religion, this is a problematic measure as women do not take part as men in the regular communal worship ceremonies.

5. In comparison, the unemployment rate in the EU amounted to 8.9% in 2009. The EU’s GDP decreased by from 2008 to 2009 by 4.4% (Worldbank 2012d, 2012e).

6. ‘Don’t know’ answers were excluded from our analysis as missing values.

7. The coding of independent variables is listed in Table A1 of Appendix 1.