Popular versus populist perceptions of the EU: Thought communities and pre-conditions for polity formation in a differentiated Union

Populists in the EU seek to promote various types of ‘sovereignist’ narratives about the EU (cf. Fabbrini 2021), i.e. a view of the EU as a weakly institutionalized set of institutions connecting a group of neo-nationalist sovereign states (see also Geva and Santos 2021). Yet, contrary to what sovereignist political leaders may wish for, it is not a given that the broad strata of the population in the EU member states would actually automatically embrace the state-centric narratives and frames when thinking about the Union. Other parameters and factors may be relevant when people conceptualize the Union and their participation in it, their experience of it and their expectations related to it. Building on an earlier study of “thought communities” in six EU member states (Bátora and Baboš 2020), the current paper uses relational class analysis (cf. Goldberg 2011) and analyzes perceptions of the EU as a political order by citizens in six selected member states. These include France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – three founding / large member states and three members of the Visegrad group (two of which represent the most notorious examples of the ongoing ‘sovereignist’ backlash). The analytical framework builds on the EU's three constitutional models as proposed by Fossum (2021) including a) the EU as a regional cosmopolitan government; b) the EU as an intergovernmental political order; and c) the EU as a federal union. Each of the constitutional models contains specific features depending on how the political order is configured along four different dimensions: decisional or law-making differentiation; competence-based functional differentiation; territorial differentiation; and citizen incorporation. Based on this, a survey is developed to test ‘thinking styles’ of the population in relation to the EU qua political order in the six selected member states. Target samples are 1000 respondents per country. Based on the above mentioned earlier study of ‘thought communities’, the assumption is that populist ‘sovereignist’ narratives about the EU do not (or only partially) match with the popular ‘thinking styles’ about the Union – even in countries with a ‘sovereignist’ government in power. By identifying transnationally distributed ‘thought communities’, the paper shows how is integration perceived and what are hence the popular pre-conditions for polity formation in a differentiated Union.