Resurgent nationalism and Euroscepticism have increasingly characterised the electoral processes and the political discourse since the outbreak of the Eurocrisis in 2011. Recent scholarship on Euroscepticism and nationalism points at resurging national identities, rather than economic factors, as likely causes of the surging opposition to Europe. However, the interdependence between the construction of identities and economic factors is often neglected in studies that regard identities as independent variables in explaining anti-EU sentiments. We argue that this picture is incomplete, and that in light of the crisis there is a strong rational for taking a different perspective on this issue. The Eurobarometer survey of public opinion shows quite consistently that Europeans regard economic prosperity as an important component of what the EU "means" to them. It seems therefore reasonable to hypothesise the existence of a link from economic conditions to the European identity. This Paper aims to fill the gap in the literature by analysing the impact of the Eurocrisis on the construction (and fragmentation) of European identities. To do so, we build a panel of about 800 observations by breaking 4 waves of Eurobarometer data (from 2004 to 2015) down to the regional level, in order to capture a more precise picture of both the long-term process of de-industralisation and the crisis-related economic malaise.
