A unified autonomous Europe? Public opinion of the EU's foreign and security policy

Chendi Wang; Alexandru D Moise

doi:10.1080/13501763.2023.2217230

A unified autonomous Europe? Public opinion of the EU's foreign and security policy

J Eur Public Policy. 2023 May 29;30(8):1679-1698. doi: 10.1080/13501763.2023.2217230. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Chendi Wang¹, Alexandru D Moise²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
² Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, Fiesole, Italy.

Abstract

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed the EU into a new phase where both the political elites and the public start to rethink its foreign and security policies. This paper uses a unique survey in seven European countries in the wake of the war to examine European public opinion on how the EU's foreign and security policies should be made and how autonomous they should be. We find that Europeans not only favour increasing military capacity at the national or NATO level but also prefer increasing military capacity at the EU level, though to a lesser degree. We also show that perceptions of both short-term and long-term threats, European identification and mainstream left-wing ideology lead Europeans to favour a more militarily powerful, unified and autonomous EU.

Keywords: EU; EU defence; foreign and security policy; public opinion; strategic autonomy.

Grants and funding

The authors acknowledge financial support from the research project ‘Policy Crisis and Crisis Politics: Sovereignty, Solidarity and Identity in the EU Post-2008’ (SOLID), funded by the European Research Council under the Synergy [grant number 810356 (ERC_SYG_2018)].