A centre-periphery cleavage in EU politics and its effect on European fiscal solidarity

In current research, European fiscal solidarity is often operationalized as support for an EU policy that combines financial resources of member states to provide support in times of crisis This has led to an underappreciation of the complexities of European solidarity attitudes. Arguably, citizens do not extend the boundaries of solidarity in a neatly uniform manner but employ “shades” of European solidarity. These shades of solidarity have not been systematically analysed and are therefore not well understood. Stereotypes, attitudes on deservingness and ethnic affinity all arguably shape the willingness to show European solidarity. In this context, the question remains: How does the structure of the EU and its institutions shape European solidarity attitudes? I put forward the argument that, within the EU, the willingness to show solidarity is driven, among others, by institutional and economic factors shaped by a centre-periphery cleavage. The process of administrative centralization and homogenization in the EU as well as the continuous enlargement has led to divergences between the geographical and cultural regions of the EU. This creates a power structure that affects citizens’ willingness to show solidarity with one another. On the one side, there is the affluent, 'old' centre of Europe: the geographically centrally located founding member states of the European Economic Community, and the economically prosperous Northern countries. On the other side, there are the Southern and the Eastern peripheries of the European Union that still lag behind economically and/or institutionally. I base my analysis on a survey in 14 European countries commissioned by the European University Institute and YouGov (Genschel, Hemerijck et al., 2020). Here, respondents are asked to express for a range of 34 countries whether they think their home county should provide financial help in case the other country faced an unspecified major crisis. Using multilevel logistic regression, I show that a significant share of variation on people’s willingness to show European fiscal solidarity is not explained by individual attributes of the donor, but by the recipient country and its attributes, and that these attributes are structured by a centre-periphery cleavage.