Rebuilding a Tarnished Reputation

Rebuilding a tarnished reputation European image: the exploration of which variables affect pro- and anti-European Union sentiments in the European Union member states. Master thesis Author: Floris den Biggelaar Student number: S878999 Date: August 2016 Supervisor: dr. A.R.C.M Luijkx Second reader: P.A. Blokker PhD Abstract The European Union seems to have an image problem; Euro-skeptic political parties gain support across Europe and questions about the level of democracy in the EU seem to resonate ever louder. In this thesis we have investigated what kind of image the European Union conjures up among EU citizens along a five point Likert scale ranging from very positive to very negative and we will analyze the impact that various individual level and country level variables have on this image using a multilevel model. We have used data derived from the Eurobarometer, in particular two waves: Eurobarometer 62.0 (2004) and Eurobarometer 82.3 (2014) in order to determine whether the EU-image has changed over the course of ten years and to see whether there has been a change in which variables affect this image. The following individual level variables are included: gender, political preference, education level, age, socio-economic status, life satisfaction and to what degree respondents held the EU responsible for austerity measures. The following four country level variables were included: whether or not a country had to be bailed out by third party aid, the length of the EU membership, the GDP per capita and the mean EU-image in 2004. Our results indicate that there is a reversed composition effect; when we account for country level variables, the differences in EU-image are getting larger. The most important individual level predictor appeared to be one's (self reported) social class, while the mean EU-image of 2004 was the most influential country level variable. We found evidence that the interaction of living in a country that had to accept forced austerity measures and believing that the EU is responsible for the imposed austerity measures leads to a more negative image of the European Union while separately these variables had no statistical significant impact. Acknowledgement I would like to thank my thesis supervisor dr. Ruud Luijkx of the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Tilburg University. He was always available for feedback whenever I encountered problems or had a question about my research. As I have been far from a regular student, he still consistently allowed this paper to be my own work, but steered me in the right the direction whenever he thought I needed it. I would also like to acknowledge Paul Blokker of the department of Sociology at the University of Trento, as the second reader of this thesis. His very valuable comments on this thesis, especially his suggestions and insights on the theoretical background, have been of great value in writing this thesis. Finally I would like to thank M. Waijers MSc for reviewing the text and furthermore I would like to thank my girlfriend, my parents, brother and sisters for their moral support throughout my (fairly long) studies. Introduction In the aftermath of the Second World War, ideas of transnational cooperation in Europe became more prominent. As an important head of state at the very beginning of the European conjunction, Winston Churchill was convinced that only a united Europe could guarantee peace. His aim was to eliminate the European ills of nationalism and readiness to go to war once and for all. With this, Churchill was one of the first to call for the creation of a 'United States of Europe'. Initially, in 1949, the Council of Europe was founded as a first intergovernmental organization that was aimed to promote democracy, human rights and rule of law across Europe. In 1950 the French minister of foreign affairs Schuman proposed to form a community to integrate the coal and steel industries of European countries. A year later France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Western Germany signed the treaty of Paris which created the European Coal and Steel Community. These first steps were to foster economic cooperation with the idea being that countries who trade with one another become economically interdependent and in this way had created an incentive to avoid conflict. At this point however, the ideas of what this pan- European cooperation should lead to were highly divergent. Over the course of the following decades, the European Union not only has expanded the number of member states. Also both the extent to which political decisions are made and the manner in which this was done, have changed greatly. This rudimentary problem of the highly diverse ideas on how to form the European Union has never sufficiently been dealt with, leading to a patchwork of part- and half solutions put together instead of tackling this large debate right at the beginning of the pan-European cooperation in the 1950s. The fact that these cultural differences inhibited the start of a federalization of the pan-European cooperation has been identified as the design flaw of this cooperation; "... the federal approach is the common structure we see when countries want to jointly tackle certain problems or work together in general" (G. Mak, 2016). The cultural differences between for example France and Germany or England and Italy lay at the root of how member states regard the European cooperation and of course how they deem their self-interest best served. At the start of the pan-European cooperation, the strategy on European integration was set by Jean Monnet. According to Featherstone (1994), the approach 2 chosen by Monnet was characterized by technocracy and elitism and over time this lead to a rather thin democratic legitimacy. This has been identified as a key cause for the so called democratic deficit of the European Union and we will elaborate more on this subject later on. In order to mend certain structural problems of the European Union, a review of the constitutional framework of the Union was deemed necessary by the European Council. With ten new member states standing on the threshold of their membership in 2004, the 2001 Laken declaration proposed a commitment to improving the EUs democratic structure, transparency and efficiency. These ambitions were drafted into the 'Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe' (Constitutional Treaty) and this treaty was aimed to replace all existing European Union treaties with a single, consolidated constitution for the EU. Furthermore, the preamble of this treaty listed the reasons for founding the European Union as well as the circumstances in which the EU was founded. However, when this European constitution had to be ratified by the member states, there were two forms chosen to gain public support for ratification of the treaty: ten countries chose to hold a referendum to ask their citizens, while 15 countries chose for parliamentary approval. Spain approved ratification via both options. After a 'Yes' in the Spanish referendum, the two next referendums in France and the Netherlands respectively resulted in a rejection of the treaty. These rejections postponed the further ratification procedures in member states that had not yet approved ratification (the Czech Republic, Denmark, Poland, Portugal, the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom had a referendum planned and the parliaments of Finland and Sweden had not yet approved the ratification of the treaty) and rendered the ratification approval of the countries that had already completed the ratification process obsolete: the Constitution was cancelled in 2005 and the process of restructuring the EU was put on a hold. In order to spark this restructuring back to life, the so called Amato Group was appointed. This action committee for European Democracy, as it was formally named, consisted of 14 high-level European politicians such as former prime ministers, former European commissioners and former foreign ministers and the group backed by the European Commission in their efforts to rewrite the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe in such a way that all member states could ratify the new treaty. This new 'Reform Treaty' was finished in 2007, became known as the Lisbon treaty. It was designed to take the steps towards making the EU more democratic, efficient and 3 transparent and thereby able to tackle global challenges such as climate change, security and sustainable development. These changes were aimed at the European Union´s further development into a world power that can compete with the United States of America and the upcoming world powers that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) were becoming. The Lisbon treaty still was a slimmed down version of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe and after the previously mentioned initial rejection by referendums of the previous constitution, the Republic of Ireland was the only member state to hold a referendum before ratifying the Lisbon treaty. This referendum resulted in a 53.4% versus 46.6% rejection of the treaty with a 53.1% turnout. A 'Post-referendum survey in Ireland', conducted by the Eurobarometer in June 2008 (within two days from the referendum date), indicated that "over half of the people who did not vote in the referendum said this was due to a lack of understanding of the issues" (Flash Eurobarometer 245, 2008). This time the result of a negative referendum did not lead to a nullification of the treaty: negotiations lead to small changes in the treaty and a second Irish referendum resulted in a 67.1% versus 32.9% result in favor of the treaty with a turnout of 59%. In spite of this 'hiccup' the Lisbon Treaty was ratified by all member states in 2009.

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