| dc.description.abstract | European solidarity is in high demand as the Covid-19 pandemic delivers a deep and asymmetric shock to EU economies and societies. Will there be sufficient supply? Using new EUI survey evidence on attitudes towards European solidarity, conducted by YouGov in 13 EU member states and the UK (April 2020), this paper explores the determinants of public support for common sharing and explores viable strategies for leveraging them. Our analysis reveals a number of important findings: solidarity is national first, to neighbours next, and only distantly European. Still, European solidarity is more than skindeep. It varies by crisis type, with strong solidarity in case of exogenous shocks like a pandemic and weak solidarity in case of endogenously created problems such as, potentially, debt crises. By and large, European citizens’ view solidarity as a reciprocal benefit rather than a moral or identity-based obligation. In terms of instrumentation, they prefer permanent arrangements of risk and burden sharing to ad hoc mutual assistance. While support for European solidarity tends to be associated with the perception of the own country being a net beneficiary of EU support, there is no clear evidence of a clear North-West versus South-East cleavage, as the common narrative of Northern creditors and Southern debtors implies. Our findings suggest a series of political recommendations to policy makers who wish to increase the supply of European solidarity today: emphasize reciprocity rather than identity; underscore the exogenous ‘natural disaster-type’ quality of the pandemic, rather than national differences in coping with it; focus on the common interest in a broad recovery rather than past debt dynamics. And, finally, ‘talk tough’ to the ‘frugal four’ (Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden). As our findings reveal, these small open economies are unlikely to leave the European Union. | en |
