Attitudes on (future) EU integration and cooperation among youth: Regional divide?

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The focus of the article is on the attitudes among 8th graders in European countries on future European/EU integration and cooperation. OBJECTIVE: Our objective is to investigate to what extent different background characteristics are related with students’ attitudes, opinions and expectations about sense of European identity, future of Europe (and EU), and student’s endorsement of European cooperation (where part of the scale is also variable “to reduce unemployment”). And how strong is the association between student positive expectations towards Europe and other attitudes related with Europe/EU, and is there clear divide between post-communist countries (newer democracies in Europe) and the rest? METHOD: The techniques used to analyse the data are descriptive statistics, linear and binary logistic regression, Pearson’s and Spearman’s correlation coefficients. Datasets are from last cycle of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS), N = 52,788 students. RESULTS: Results show important differences in perceptions, attitudes and expectations between students in newer and older democracies. These patterns may not always be clear and interpretable, but they show the differences across Europe. CONCLUSIONS: Future direct research are pointing on importance of having in mind that different background characteristics attributes to differences in attitudes’ developments (and that this difers among countries), as well as on very challenging decisions when considering different regions to compare results among them, at that even post-communistic countries in Europe can not always be grouped in one “block”.