It’s the Economy, not European Identity: The Effect of European Identity and Economic Considerations on Public Support for EU Membership in Turkey and Central and Eastern European Countries

Year 2015, Volume: 14 Issue: 2, 16 - 28, 05.01.2016

A. Burcu Bayram

Abstract

Turkey has long been
characterized as  “too big, too poor, too
Muslim” to be a European country. This assertion permeated the political
debates regarding Turkey’s accession to the Union in the early 2000s, leading
to a Turkey versus the rest dichotomy: Other candidate countries are European,
Turkey is not. A central dimension of this dichotomy was the juxtaposition of
public attitudes toward EU membership in Turkey and Central and Eastern
European countries (CEECs). A frequently evoked claim during the fifth
enlargement of the Union was that the Turkish public supports EU membership due
to its expected economic benefits while citizens in CEECs desire membership
because they identify as European. In this article, I show that this claim was
empirically false. Using data from the Eurobarometer survey for candidate
countries, I statistically demonstrate that both Turks and citizens of CEECs
supported EU membership for economic reasons. European identity played a
negligible role in shaping mass support for EU membership in Turkey and other
candidate countries alike. This study makes a central contribution to the
existing literature by analyzing the relative impact of European identity and
economic considerations on public support for EU membership in Turkey and
CEECs. The results fill an important void in the existing scholarship and
contribute to ongoing political debates on Turkey’s EU membership.

Keywords

European Identity, Economy, Public Support, EU membership, Turkey, CEECs

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