Closer during crises? European identity during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Abstract

ABSTRACT Do crises bring us closer together? Many have observed how, during the Covid-19 pandemic, several European societies experienced a ‘rally around the flag’ effect. While this certainly took the form of support for incumbent governments, anecdotal evidence suggests that individuals’ European identification may have been affected as well. In this paper, we exploit the unique timing and panel nature of a survey, whose respondents were interviewed in March/beginning of April 2020, again in July 2020, and finally in November 2022 to analyze whether a change in attachment to Europe occurred between the first and the second wave of the pandemic and with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our results show that the emotive dimension of EU attachment changed over the course of these crises, increasing both during the Covid pandemic and after the invasion of Ukraine. Our results support the view that symmetric crises tend to bring people closer together, suggesting that far-reaching EU-level actions in case of crises create, rather than require, a perception of belonging to an EU-level community.