Friday, March 14, 2014
Diplomat (Omni Shoreham)
As views on the democratic deficit of the EU and its search for legitimacy have changed dramatically over recent years, understanding what and how people think about European integration appears crucial. Our objective in this paper is to reintroduce temporality in the analysis of citizens’ attitudes (Lindberg & Scheingold, 1970). European integration being a process without a clear end goal, we believe the question of time is essential in EU polity and policies. We claim that temporality is important not only to understand institutions and public policies, as shown by recent studies (Goetz et al., 2009) but also to comprehend citizens’ attitudes towards European integration. Recent studies propose a research agenda on EU timescale (JEPP, 2009, 16(2)). They however lack to investigate the effect of temporality at the citizens’ level. We postulate that national visions of Europe derive from different perceptions of what the Union is (present) and where it is going (expected and desired future(s))(Belot, 2000; Medrano, 2012: 193). In the wake of crisis in Europe, citizens’ beliefs that reality will meet their expectations might play as an important role in their attitudes towards the EU as other factors such as utilitarian and identity based factors. Our analyses are based both on quantitative data (Eurobarometer) and on two sets of qualitative data (interviews and focus-groups collected at ten years distance (mid 1990 and 2006) in France and Britain). Through this article, temporality and in particular the conception of future is re-evaluated at the citizens’ level.
