Demographic Strengthening of European Identity

THE EUROPEAN UNION is currently undergoing a major crisis within its institutions. Many observers think the EU is doomed, particularly in view of the current refugee situation, when in many countries the national agenda overrides the European project and the aggregate result is widely perceived as a failure of European-level governance. This skepticism is heightened by the UK referendum on continued EU membership. But few of these observers, focused on short-term political developments and crises, offer any long-term view of the alternatives. Is it realistic to return to the old system of nation states with closed borders and individual currencies? And does a majority of the European population want such an outcome? Being critical of current transnational institutional arrangements does not necessarily imply that the citizens of Europe see no future for continued, or possibly even strengthened European-level collaboration and integration. As Zielonka (2014) states, citizens who have lost trust in the EU are not necessarily happy with the performance of their nation states either. Going back to a pre-EU era might be even less desirable to them than the present situation. This is also confirmed by a recent Europe-wide Bertelsmann Study (De Vries and Hoffmann 2015) that finds that people continue to support the idea of a united Europe and do not see nation states as a viable alternative. The empirical evidence presented in this note suggests that the European population continues to becomemore European-minded, despite the continuing economic and political predicaments. Applying the demographic tools of cohort analysis to the responses provided by recent Eurobarometer surveys on expressed national versus European identity, we revisit previous forecasts of the spread of European identity as they were published in 2006 under the title “The demography of growing European identity” (Lutz, Kritzinger, and Skirbekk 2006) and compare themwith new empirical evidence for 2013. While we find that some elements of the earlier predictions proved to be off-base, the overall predictive power of our underlying demographic metabolism model appears to be sound.