European Integration versus Russian Euroscepticism: Public Support for the European Union in the Eastern Partnership Countries

The rise of Euroscepticism inside the EU has hoarded the interest of many scholars within the public support for European Union field. This focus on Euroscepticism within the European Union borders, together with the lack of potential candidates that could join the Union eventually, has seen a decrease of interest in the public opinion’s attitudes towards the EU in neighbouring countries. In this paper, I remark the importance of the study of public support for EU in potential candidate members included in the Eastern Partnership (EaP) program (Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine). These countries have seen a clear Europeanisation of their national politics since the European Union integration issue has become one of the most salient issues since the signature of the EaP in 2009. Nowadays, the society and political parties of these former Soviet Socialist Republics are clearly divided depending on their position towards the EU, ranging from clearly pro-EU parties to Eurosceptic parties that see Russia as a more suitable ally. What are the main factors that influence public support for European Union in the EaP countries? This paper aims, using Moldova as a case study, to be a preliminary study that answers the proposed question and tries to improve the knowledge of this field in a region that Russia sees as its unquestionable sphere of influence and the EU as a potential expansion area. This paper relies on two meta-papers to propose several hypotheses according to the three “approaches” that the various authors identify in the public support for EU field (utilitarian, identity, and cue-taking and benchmarking). The preliminary results of the test of multiple hypotheses belonging to the different approaches using multinomial logistic regression point towards the higher influence of cue-taking and benchmarking, and identity-related over the utilitarian factors.