Popular understandings of national identity in Europe: Still a gulf between West and East?

Abstract The paper draws on 2008 and 2017 European Values Study (EVS) data to analyse the differences in popular understandings of national identity between Western and Eastern European countries as well as the changes in popular views over the 2010s. Using latent class analysis (LCA), five categories of respondents are identified according to people's understandings of national identity—anti‐ascriptive nationalists, liberal nationalists, voluntarist‐leaning multiple nationalists, moderate nationalists and ardent nationalists. While on average half of the Western countries' respondents of the 2017 EVS wave thought that ascriptive criteria of national membership (ancestry, place of birth) were not important while voluntarist (respect for the institutions/laws, speaking the national language) were, the corresponding proportion in an average Eastern country was just over 20%. It is argued that persistent and historically ingrained differences in popular conceptions of nationhood between West and East are contributing to policy tensions within the EU, most notably in the management of migration and refugee flows. Furthermore, the article found no evidence that the gap between Western and Eastern Europe in popular nationhood views was decreasing over the 2010s.