National Identities Are Holding the EU Back

In a recent public lecture on the European Monetary Union and its future, Mario Draghi has forcefully argued that it is time for the EU to take some concrete steps towards a political union (15th Annual Martin Feldstein Lecture, National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2023). The challenges faced by European member states are increasingly global: climate change, defense and security, migration, energy, cannot all be tackled at the national level. Even policy areas that in the past squarely belonged to the national domain, like health policy, now require a coordinated European response, like in response to COVID. In the words of Mario Draghi: "The strategies that had insured our prosperity and security in the past – reliance on the US for security, on China for exports and on Russia for energy – are either insufficient, uncertain or unacceptable. The challenges of climate change and migration only add to the sense of urgency to enhance Europe's capacity to act." Following this logic, Draghi advocates the initiation of a political process that leads to a new EU treaty, with the goal of achieving more centralized decision-making in several policy areas, as well as a different form of political representation of EU citizens.

Mario Draghi is not alone in thinking along these lines. The notion that the EU should play a greater role in the provision of these basic pubic goods, and that this requires a centralization of decision-making at the EU level, is widely shared by EU citizens. Already in a 2016 Eurobarometer survey, a vast majority of respondents declared themselves in favor of more European-level decision-making in areas such as defense (80% in favor), promotion of peace and democracy (80%), environment (77%), immigration (71%), and energy policy (69%).

So what is holding Europe back? A common concern is that, although aware of the benefits of integration, citizens of various EU member states are still too different from each other in their views of the world and in their policy preferences. To work effectively, EU political integration requires the formation of transnational political coalitions. But this, in turn, presupposes that views do not diverge too much between member states.
Is this concern justified? Are Europeans really so different from each other? To answer this question, in a paper written a few years ago with Alberto Alesina and Francesco Trebbi, we used survey data to compare the views of European citizens belonging to the 15 core EU member states. The questions focused on a variety of broad issues, such as the role of the state in market regulation and redistribution, gender equality, religiosity, trust and tolerance of others, priorities in child education (Alberto Alesina, Guido Tabellini and Francesco Trebbi, Is Europe an Optimal Political Area?, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Fall 2017). We found that indeed there was a very large heterogeneity among respondents. Europeans do disagree on these issues. But to our surprise, we also found that the additional heterogeneity between citizens of different member states is miniscule, relative to the large disagreement within each country. Additional disagreement is of the order of 5-10% of the average distance in the views of respondents belonging to the same country, depending on the issues.

In other words, when we say that Europeans have different views and different policy preferences, we forget that there is a very large heterogeneity of views within each country. And yet, this internal disagreement has not prevented successful conflict resolution through our national democratic institutions.
In that paper, we also compared the heterogeneity of views within and between different EU member states, with that of respondents within and between different US states, on the same general issues. We found the EU and the US to be very similar in this respect. In particular, heterogeneity between respondents belonging to different states is the same in the EU and the US.
This analysis had two potentially relevant limitations. First, it did not include the member states of Central and Eastern Europe. Due to their past political regimes, these new members may differ more significantly from the rest of the EU. Second, it focused on very general questions, rather than soliciting views on current policy issues. It could be that, while Europeans have similar views of the world and similar value systems, they still disagree on specific policy issues where national interests are at stake. In a recent policy brief written jointly with Alberto Binetti, we have addressed these limitations, by extending the analysis to the entire EU, and also studying opinions on currently relevant policies, such as privacy regulation, immigration, environmental and market regulation, redistribution and civil rights. The results were essentially the same. Again, he found a large disagreement between respondents, but the additional disagreement between respondents of different countries is small (5-10% greater) relative to the large disagreement that there is within each country.

This does not imply that the EU is ready to become a full-fledged political union, of course. But it clarifies the nature of the obstacles in the path towards political unification. The difficulty is not that Europeans differ too much from each other, and that national interests diverge. Rather, the main obstacle rests with our national identities. Due to our histories, traditions, languages and institutions, we identify with our nations. On the one hand, this amplifies perceived contrasts between nations. Our national stereotypes exaggerate the perceived differences between Italians and Germans, or French and Italians, and make us forget that there is not a single Italian, German or French point of view. On the other hand, strong national identities also make it more difficult to strike compromise and resolve conflicts between nations.

But these difficulties are not insurmountable. Identities are malleable, through education, social interactions, public debates. In fact, survey data also reveal that European identity is already strong, although weaker than our national identities. European institutions matter, too. If collective decisions at the EU level are taken with intergovernmental methods, political debates inevitably strengthen national identities. Nationally elected representatives want to show their voters that they have protected the national interest, and can blame failure on other countries. National delegations and intergovernmental methods, by inducing politicians to bring "trophies" back home and claim victory over their foreign rivals, strengthen nationalist tendencies in public opinion. If instead collective decisions at the EU level are taken by institutions elected by all European citizens, the forming of cross-border coalitions would reinforce common European identities.
If the EU heeds the advice of Mario Draghi, and starts to think concretely about how to achieve further political integration, it is important to be aware of what the true difficulties ahead are, and how they can be overcome.