Few European Union citizens identify themselves as Europeans, which is similar to the situation in the former Yugoslav federation where only a small number of citizens declared themselves as Yugoslavs, a study published in the Croatian Political Science Review shows.

The authors, Nikola Petrovic and Filip Fila from the Institute for Social Research in Zagreb and Marko Mrakovcic from the Faculty of Law in Rijeka, used Eurobarometer studies on European identification and drew on the seminal article “Who were the Yugoslavs?” by Dusko Sekulic, Garth Massey and Randy Hodson, published in the American Sociological Review in 1994.

Political Europeans most numerous in Luxembourg

The share of supranational identification changes from year to year, and that latest average for the European Union is 10.6%. The largest number of people who identify themselves as Europeans was recorded in Luxembourg (25.6%), followed by Belgium (18%), United Kingdom (16.1%), Germany (14%) and Spain (13.7).

Similar to the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, some of the countries with the largest shares of Europeans are those that are ethnically heterogeneous, the authors said.

This also seems to be the case with Latvia (10.6% of Europeans), which has the least share of people of the titular nation among the post-socialist member states and the largest share of Europeans in Central and Eastern Europe.

Unlike the Yugoslav case and below-average supranational identification in its most populous republic, Serbia (4.8% of Yugoslavs in 1981 and 2.5% in 1991), the most populous EU member state, Germany, has an above-average level of primary European identification, although it has declined somewhat recently.

In Croatia, 6.0% of the respondents identified themselves as Europeans, compared to 6.9% in Slovakia, 7.7% in Slovenia, 8.5% in Bulgaria, 8.9% in the Czech Republic and 11.5% in Hungary.

The lowest shares of Europeans were observed in Portugal (2.1%), Greece (2.8%), Malta (3.2%), Ireland (4.5%), Cyprus and Finland (4.7% each), Sweden (4.8%), Denmark (5.0%) and Estonia (6.0%).

By comparison, in 1981 the largest number of Yugoslavs was recorded in Croatia and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina (8.2% each), followed by Bosnia and Herzegovina (7.9%), Serbia (4.8%), Slovenia (1.4%), Macedonia (0.7%) and the Autonomous Province of Kosovo (0.1%). In 1991, the number of Yugoslavs increased only in Vojvodina, to 8.7% while drastically declining elsewhere.

Low levels of supranational identification

The low levels of Europeans and Yugoslavs in the two unions were not unexpected because the most powerful advocates of socialist Yugoslavia and the European project were not focused on building supranational identity that would replace the existing national identities among people, the authors said.

The development and wide acceptance of supranational European identity is limited by the fact that the European project has existed only for a few decades, while national identities in Europe have been developed for centuries.

Citizens with a higher social status are more likely to become Europeans, just as in Yugoslavia people who had greater contact with other supranational political communities through migration, marriage or multiple citizenship identified as Yugoslavs and had less exclusive nationality, the study found.

One of the main differences between Yugoslavia and the EU in this respect is the fact that different political affiliations can be connected by the sense of Europeanism.

Although Europe is being increasingly associated with leftist values, this did not stop some of the rightist respondents from identifying themselves as Europeans. For example, in Belgium anti-immigrant views increase the likelihood of people identifying as Europeans.

The increase in the share of Europeans in the United Kingdom and Hungary indicates growing polarisation over the EU issue, and the increase in upward mobility and growing migration in the EU could increase the likelihood of primary European identification, the authors said.