The European Commission’s spring 2009 Eurobarometer poll on public attitudes towards the European Union should be the most interesting in a long while. No such survey has been conducted with Europe’s financial system in such precarious condition and its economic outlook so grim. Large drops in output are forecast everywhere: a 4.9 per cent contraction of the economy this year in Lithuania, 4 per cent in Ireland, 2.3 per cent in Germany, 2 per cent in Italy. To some extent, this will surely be reflected in a blacker public mood across the EU.
Yet in their most recent survey, carried out in autumn 2008, the Commission’s pollsters cautioned that “the division of countries by positive and negative trends does not necessarily reflect the economic outlook in these countries, although some countries show a correlation”. People can have good feelings about the EU, so the argument goes, even if their economies are in recession and they’re losing their jobs.
The autumn 2008 poll did show that, across the 27-nation bloc as a whole, the EU’s positive image had steadily slipped over the previous 18 months. After reaching a peak in spring 2007 of 52 per cent – the highest level of the new millennium – it dropped to 49 per cent in autumn 2007, 48 per cent in spring 2008 and 45 per cent last autumn.
Thirty-six per cent of respondents had a neutral image of the EU last autumn, up from 31 per cent in spring 2007, while 17 per cent had a negative image, up from 15 per cent. Overall, this does not suggest that the EU is suffering from a credibility crisis or that there is a surge of public disillusionment, let alone hostility, towards the bloc and its institutions.
Particularly striking are the results for individual countries. The most positive feelings about the EU were recorded last autumn in Romania (63 per cent), Ireland (59 per cent), Bulgaria and Slovenia (both 58 per cent). Slovenia’s high score probably owes something to the fact that it held the EU’s rotating presidency in the first half of 2008. In Romania and Bulgaria, the main factor was perhaps their relatively recent admission to the EU, which more than compensated for any disappointment at EU criticism of them for corruption and mismanagement of EU funds.
The Irish figure is quite remarkable when you consider it was only last June when Irish voters rejected the EU’s Lisbon treaty in a referendum. It tends to support the view that you can be positive about the EU and negative about the Lisbon treaty at one and the same time.
One poll result that seems unlikely to change is the socio-demographic profile of the typical pro-EU European citizen. A person who is positive about the EU is more likely to be male (50 per cent) than female (42 per cent), to be young (aged 15 to 24: 54 per cent, aged 55 or older: 42 per cent), to have spent longer in education and to have “a good objective knowledge” of EU affairs.
Of course, one could ask the question: What precisely is “objective knowledge” of the EU? But that’s for another time.
Across the globe: Gideon Rachman and his FT colleagues debate international affairs on