Who Wants a European Army? An Assessment of Public Opinion

Assuming that Europeans' attitudes towards the creation of a European army are rooted in preferences for European integration, we distinguish amongst three dimensions of EU polity building to ground these attitudes in those preferences. Our results from surveys in 18 EU member states document that, at the historical juncture of February 2025, when the Americans took their distance from European security needs, a majority of Europeans support the project of a joint European army and that this support is primarily rooted in a combination of preferences for the supranational centralisation of core state powers and for the reinforcement of the EU's external borders but hardly related to questions of identity. In addition, we demonstrate that preferences for EU centre formation and external bordering mediate basic preferences linked to national military capacity building, EU integration attitudes, attitudes about immigration and general left–right orientation.