Generational Changes in Attitudes toward the European Union in Poland and Ukraine

Abstract

The European Union serves as an important aspirational and geopolitical reference in the societies of post-communist Central and Eastern Europe and, thus, their pro- and anti-EU sentiments traditionally serve as a synthetic indicator of political values, attitudes, and preferences. At the same time, since at least the 1970s, the social sciences have treated generational replacement as an important factor in political change. Our goal is, therefore, to establish if generational replacement, along with intergenerational differences in attitudes, has contributed to political orientations in Polish and Ukrainian society. While the two countries share a post-communist past, Poland has been an EU member since 2004, and Ukraine strongly aspires to become a member. We therefore hypothesize about the significance of the aspirational role of the European Union. Using an extensive set of survey data, totaling more than one hundred thousand interviews from two decades between 1998 and 2017, we analyze generational change in attitudes concerning EU membership in both countries. The results support our hypothesis, in that they show distinctive patterns in the two societies. While in Poland the youngest cohort has since 2015 became less pro-European than the older Polish cohorts, in Ukraine, the youngest cohort has consistently played the role of an avant-garde in this respect. At the same time, in line with the results of previous research, the analysis elaborates on the “Euromaidan generation” phenomenon.