Walter Ruijgrok was already an adult when the European Union was formally created at the end of 1991. The 54-year-old, who works for an association of Dutch power companies in The Hague, Netherlands, is unambiguous when talking about the organization. “I think the EU is absolutely necessary.”
Nearly 400 miles east on the streets of Berlin, Jara Moravec, a 29-year-old Czech filmmaker who previously lived in London before making the German capital his home, speaks of feeling more European rather than Czech. The EU, he says, represents the idea of solidarity, one reason why he believes last year’s vote in the United Kingdom to leave the EU was a misguided mistake.
“The world has changed and you can’t be as powerful as a single nation as they used to be when they were bigger powers,” he said. “Ignoring this reality is just not going to take them anywhere, so they are running against a wall.”
In many ways the opinions from Ruijgrok and Moravec represent the shifting views across much of Europe. The EU, an institution that has faced sharp criticism over a lack of representative democracy, may be experiencing a somewhat shaky rehabilitation of its image. Public sentiment about the organization has rebounded from 2016, according to results from a Pew Research Center survey released on Thursday.
The survey in 10 countries for Pew, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, represents a major shift of public sentiment in Europe following last year’s Brexit vote in the U.K.
Why the change? The impact of the past year’s political events in the U.K. and the U.S. are also shaping Europeans’ views, says Dan Hamilton, the director of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University.
“There’s a scare factor from the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump,” said Hamilton, who also is the Austrian Marshall Plan professor at the Transatlantic Center. “There is a very sober appreciation of not wanting the European experiment to fail.” Since the U.S. presidential election last November, right-leaning political parties in Austria, the Netherlands, France and the U.K. underperformed, falling short of anticipated victories.
The study for Pew was conducted among 9,935 respondents in France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom from early March to mid-April. The 10 European Union member countries account for approximately 80 percent of the EU population and 84 percent of the organization’s economic might.
In addition to the marked increase of favorable views toward the EU, other major findings in the Pew survey include:
— Less than one out of five people in the nine continental countries — a median of 18 percent — want their own country to leave the EU.
— At the same time, a majority of people in the nine continental countries — a median of 53 percent — support having national referendums on continued EU membership.
— While the views of the EU are improving, Europeans remain divided over the organization’s handling of economic issues.
— People have a generally positive view of Germany — the exceptions being in Greece, where 76 percent of respondents reported negative views, and Italy, at 43 percent.
— Despite generally favorable views of Germany, many people across Europe are concerned about the country having too much clout in the EU.
People questioned in the Pew survey generally say Britain’s departure from the EU will have an adverse impact for that country and the organization, though British citizens are more divided. Aidan Price, a 34-year-old British game designer, is returning to his homeland after living in Hong Kong for seven years. He has a favorable view of the EU but is anxious about how Brexit will affect the U.K.
“Ultimately I think it will have a negative (impact) on the U.K., as it will reinforce the ‘us and them’ mentality that was already prevalent,” he said in an email response to questions. “Economically, I think we have already seen a negative impact,” he said, citing various factors, including a drop in the value of the British pound.
“Personally, I underestimated the importance of the EU before I came to live in Germany permanently,” added James Barber, a 30-year-old British teacher living in Berlin. Living in Germany, he said, enabled him to obtain a free graduate education.
Many of the Pew findings may appear contradictory, but they represent a larger theme of wishing for continued European unity on one hand, but remaining strongly skeptical about mainstream institutions and political parties, said Bruce Stokes, Pew’s director of global economic attitudes and one of the study’s co-authors.
“People want to have their voices heard. There’s a feeling among Europeans that ‘They (officials running the EU) don’t listen to us.'” As proof of that wariness of the EU, Stokes pointed to the April referendum in the Netherlands, where voters rejected closer EU ties to Ukraine.
The Pew survey also showed that few political parties in Europe have widespread appeal, a view expressed in the recent French elections, where Emmanuel Macron was voted in as president, and parliamentary candidates from his newly formed party gained widespread approval.
Such results show that the idea of politics as usual in Europe faces strong public opposition, says Hamilton of Johns Hopkins. “The political class in Europe, like the U.S., has lost a lot of credibility.”
That view also was expressed in a separate global survey released in March. In that study, nearly two-thirds of all respondents agreed at least moderately that there is a leadership crisis in the world. An even sharper majority — nearly three out of four respondents — said a new generation of leaders is needed around the world.
In the Pew survey, many Europeans disapprove of the EU’s handling of refugees. Sharp majorities want their own governments to control migration from outside the EU (a median of 74 percent) and from within the organization (a median of 66 percent). In The Hague, Julia Nicolaescu, a 32-year-old corporate lawyer who has lived in the Netherlands since she was a young child, voiced the views of many critical of the EU over refugees: “Everyone talks about the problem, but nothing happens.”
And while the Pew survey shows improved views of the EU, skepticism of the institution remains strong, particularly in smaller countries, Hamilton says. Critical issues lie ahead, including how to tackle terrorism, migration flows, managing the crisis from the Russian annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and the Greek debt crisis. Most critical, he says, will be the relationship between Paris and Berlin.
“Without France and Germany, Europe doesn’t seem to really move ahead.”
Christopher F. Schuetze in The Hague, Netherlands, and Sarah Hucal in Berlin contributed reporting.
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Europeans More Favorable to EU, Survey Finds originally appeared on usnews.com
