Original Article

Comparative European Politics (2008) 6, 1–32. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cep.6110119

Distance Matters: Place, Political Legitimacy and Popular Support for European Integration

Mabel Berezina and Juan Díez-Medranob

  1. aDepartment of Sociology, 354 Uris Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. E-mail: mmb39@cornell.edu
  2. bDepartment of Sociology, Universidad de Barcelona, Teniente Coronel Valenzuela 1-11, Barcelona 08034, Spain. E-mail: jdiezmedrano@ub.edu
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Abstract

Theorists of globalization often assume that technology has eclipsed distance as a sociologically and politically significant variable. This article counters this assumption. Based on insights obtained from the literature on regionalist revival and local democracy and on experimental results on the relationship between distance and emotional involvement, we develop a series of hypotheses concerning the role of geographical distance in explaining support for the polity to which one belongs. We then test these hypotheses with Eurobarometer data relative to support for the European Union (EU). The results confirm the article's hypothesis, open new perspectives on the potential constraints faced by a geographically expanding EU, and provide insights on policies that the EU could implement to counter these constraints.

Keywords:

European integration, geography, perception, attitudes, legitimacy, space

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Introduction

Popular media and academic analysis have converged in their conviction that distance embodied in the physical, cultural, and territorial specificities of space has lost much of its salience. The speed of the Internet, the sweep, and pace of economic interconnectedness, the increase in the movement and migration of peoples, and the emergence of supra-national forms of political organization — all of these support the conviction that the 'territorial age has passed' (Maier, 2000). This claim is not entirely new. In 1976, sociologist Daniel Bell coined the term 'eclipse of distance' to argue that both modern aesthetics and psychology privileged the flexible mind over the rooted physical body, a-temporality over linear reality. The theoretical assumption as well as the perception of the 'eclipse of distance' that Bell observed is axiomatic to a broad number of claims that analysts of all stripes now label as globalization (see e.g., Guillen, 2001; Kellner, 2002; Fiss and Hirsch, 2005).

The compression of space and time that geographer David Harvey (1989) identified as characteristic of post-modernity was constitutive of early versions of globalization theory. Regional de-industrialization and ethnonational conflict, however, challenge the utopian vision of market efficiency and cultural unity that a-spatial and a-temporal approaches to globalization presupposed. Recently, sociologists (Gieryn, 2000; Lamont and Molnar, 2002; Griswold and Wright, 2004), historians (Applegate, 1999; Sewell, 2001; Gerson, 2003), philosophers (Casey, 1997), geographers, and urban scholars (Agnew, 1987; Entrikin, 1991; Le Gales and Harding, 1998) have begun to question the degradation of 'place' implicit in much globalization discourse, and to turn to issues of propinquity and scale when talking about economic and political innovation and development (Brenner, 1999).1

The revival of interest in place provides a corrective to the more sweeping claims of globalization theory that neglect actors as agents and subjects of economic processes. Apart from case studies on anti-globalization movements (Ancelovici, 2002; Wieviorka, 2003; Tarrow, 2005), research on how individuals and populations perceive and experience globalization is unfortunately sparse.2 The structural cast of globalization theory makes it difficult to assess how ordinary persons perceive the large-scale economic, social, and cultural change that it describes. Does the average citizen feel and behave in a global way? In particular, does he or she experience the 'eclipse of distance' and the degradation of place?

To address this question, this article focuses on the case of European integration, the economic and political project that began in 1951 with the Economic Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and gained momentum in 1992 with the Maastricht Treaty. Begun as a post-World War II peace and economic reconstruction project among European nation-states, European integration has evolved into a more encompassing, political and cultural project that systematically privileges Europe as a single geographical space.

Europeanization (Borneman and Fowler, 1997; Schmitter, 2001), the term that includes the expanding and sometimes contested process of political and cultural integration, subsumes many of the same issues as globalization — market convergence, cultural homogenization, and supra-national polities. In contrast to globalization, states, elites, and citizens are identifiable agents in the process of European integration. The decision to join Europe and the degree of integration, that is, the acceptance of particular European projects, are often subject to political referenda within individual nation-states (Hug and Sciarini, 2000). These referenda have covered issues such as the ratification of the various treaties, the decision to join the European Monetary Union, and the approval of a European Constitution. Moreover, every 5 years European Union (EU) citizens are called upon to elect representatives to the European Parliament. Europe as a political project offers citizens of individual European nation-states a menu of choices from which to shape national visions of a continental Europe. With respect to European integration, popular sovereignty often determines the limits and dimensions of national sovereignty and structural change.

This article uses Eurobarometer survey data collected in 2004 (Eurobarometer 62.0) to study the effect of distance, as measured by the approximate number of kilometers that the respondent lives from Brussels, on popular support for membership in the EU and transfers of sovereignty to EU institutions. We focus on distance for four reasons: first, physical location is inescapable; second, distance allows us to develop a quantifiable measure of place that, in contrast to purely ethnographic accounts, permits us to generalize to other venues; third, distance involves a perception as well as a physical location — making it subject to issues of political legitimacy; and fourth, as the EU expands, questions related to size and political organization (e.g., inter-governmentalism vs federalism) have become central in the political debate on European integration. Representative public opinion data permits systematic examination of the link between distance and support for European integration and underscores the relevance of geography in a global age.

Our main hypothesis is that proximity to the EU's symbolic and political center is positively related to support for European integration and that this effect is mediated by concerns over national identity, identification with Europe, trust in European institutions, and confidence in the ability to influence EU affairs.

This article proceeds in four stages: first, it summarizes standard approaches to the study of European integration and presents an alternative approach that incorporates issues of geography; second, it operationalizes these issues in terms of a testable model; third, it describes our findings; and lastly, it discusses these findings in the context of Europeanization specifically and globalization more generally.

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European Integration Through the Lens of Globalization

A central claim of the literature on globalization is that technological progress in communications and transportation lowers transaction costs associated with both. Increased mobility in cyber and geographical space is one consequence of globalization that makes place and the distances between places quasi-irrelevant for the organization of economic activity, political rule, and contact between people.

Globalization theory generates three secondary claims that are salient in the context of European integration: first, neo-liberalism is the most appropriate ideology and practice for this global era; second, cultural homogenization is inevitable; and third, the political sphere is becoming increasingly post-national or transnational. Viewing European integration through the lens of globalization translates these claims as follows: first, neo-liberalism with its commitment to competition and shareholder culture will provide greater economic opportunities for European citizens than the corporatist economies of the old social European state; second, as European integration moves forward, cultural homogenization will develop at the European level; and third, national as well as subnational identities will decline in relevance. In short, if this logic holds, interest and culture will push public opinion in the direction of support for European integration at all levels.3

Interest-based approaches to European integration

Interest as a concept captures the micro level of individual behavior as well as the macro level of institutional design (Swedberg, 2005). The conceptual plasticity of interest as an analytical category enables it to capture a broad range of empirical research. Interest has governed rational choice and some institutional approaches to European integration (see, e.g., Moravcsik, 1998; Weiler, 1999; Stone Sweet, 2004). Interest-driven institutional approaches conclude that contemporary realities demand a re-ordering of norms, and rules of behavior, as well as the building of new and the re-framing of old institutions (e.g., Fligstein and Mara-Drita, 1996; Fligstein and Stone Sweet, 2002). Focusing on multilevel governance, they posit new forms of state and market society alliances. Interest-driven institutionalists view Europe as an opportunity space for new forms of governance and the re-organization of markets. In sum, similar to globalization theory, this approach to European integration views the decline of the modern nation-state as inevitable. Meanwhile, interest-driven approaches to support for European integration argue that individuals align their attitudes to the EU with their expectations about how it will impact economically on them (see Hewstone, 1986; Gabel, 1998b).

Structural (Evans (1997), Mann (1997), and Weiss (1998); essays in Paul et al. (2003)) and cultural arguments (Joppke, 1998) have countered the interest-driven focus on the inevitable passing away of the nation-state. Indeed, the trans-European emergence of neo-nationalist movements and the development of anti-globalization movements such as ATTAC suggest that citizens of individual European nation-states do not uniformly view the EU as an opportunity space (Berezin, 2003, 2006). In addition, ethnographic work has challenged the assumptions about economic rationality and behavior that govern the interest-driven approach to support for European integration. Díez Medrano's (2003) research has demonstrated that citizens neither seek nor use economic information when judging the merits and disadvantages of European integration.

Cultural approaches to European integration

In contrast to interest-based models of European integration, cultural approaches focus on the territorially bounded nation-state as the site of public political identities. Cultural analysts tend to focus on Europeanization rather than European integration. One of the major perspectives appearing in the literature on the process and consequences of Europeanization is cultural homogenisation. This perspective views identity claims as increasingly transcending the boundaries of the nation-state. Analysts evaluate cultural homogenization differently. Some, as Gramsci (1978, 277–318) argued in his classic discussion of Americanization in Europe during the early years of the 20th century, view cultural homogenization as oppressive. More recent work (e.g., Meyer et al., 1997) speaks to the circulation or diffusion of cultural products and practices around the globe — what Appadurai (1996) labels a 'global ethnoscope.'

If cultural homogenisation exists, identities should become more and more homogeneous; or, to put it simply, people should become more and more like each other and see themselves as belonging to the same 'imagined community' (Anderson [1983] 1991). The logic behind cultural homogenisation suggests that European integration in the culture sphere should be unproblematic (Laitin, 1997). Survey evidence casts doubt on this prediction. While one can speak of a fairly homogeneous political culture within the EU, as measured, for instance, by the World Values Study (Inglehart, 1997), the increase in the degree of identification with Europe among its citizens has not been commensurate with cultural homogeneity and with progress in institution-building at the EU level. Furthermore, recent research demonstrates that there is variation in the extent to which citizens from different EU countries perceive European cultures as similar (Díez Medrano, 2003; Hooghe and Marks, 2004).

The post-national perspective, a variant of the cultural homogenisation perspective, argues that nation-states are no longer a locus of authority and that there can be a disjunction between the polity in which you reside and the polity to which you have a legal claim (e.g., Soysal, 1994; Jacobson, 1996). In contrast to the post-national position that posits a radical disjuncture between national law and the claims of culture, 'transnationalism' argues for recognition of the need for the nation-state to remain the addressee of the identity claims of various sorts raised by non-nationals (Koopmans and Statham, 1999; Kastoryano, 2002).4

Limits to interest-based and cultural approaches to European integration

Interest-based and cultural approaches capture some but not all dimensions of the social processes that govern popular support for European integration. They do not capture the frequency with which citizens justify their opposition to European integration by using arguments about distance (e.g., by arguing that 'Brussels is too far'). Influenced by the rhetoric and logics of globalization theory and research, interest-based and cultural approaches to Europe share the assumption that place or geographic location is not relevant to political identity and behavior. Despite the fact that European integration is a geographic as well as a political process (Berezin and Schain, 2003; Katzenstein, 2005), the voluminous technical literature devoted to indices of public support for European integration pays virtually no attention to the effect of geography.5

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Spatial Approaches to European Integration: Place, Perception and Affect

Since the 1980s, research on social and political developments in Europe has explicitly and implicitly demonstrated the continuing relevance of geography in a global world.6 Localism as a label captures the diverse strands of this research. Localists emphasize the various interrelated forces that have increased the salience of region (and smaller spatial units) as the locus of political and economic organization.

Research in the localist tradition includes work on ethnoregional mobilization, new social movements, urban studies, and local democracy (Keating, 1998; Brenner, 1999). Each of these four strands of localism has a geographical or spatial component.

The literature on ethnoregional mobilization and new social movements suggest that citizens, 'helped' by regionalist/nationalist organizations and local intellectuals, have rediscovered subnational identities and aspire to achieve congruence between political/administrative boundaries and subnational identities (see Agnew, 1987; Keating, 1998; De Vries, 2000). According to this literature, the citizens' propensity to trust distant government has decreased rather than increased as globalization has broadened the geographic scope of economic activity and brought an ever-growing number of cultures in contact with each other. Since the population tends to identify more with the local than with broader territorial units, a perceptual barrier to the development of support for large multinational polities such as the EU emerges.

The literature on local democracy claims that the population prefers local governance over distant rule. In particular, empirical research demonstrates that the citizens' involvement in the political process increases as the administrative–political units become smaller (Jamil, 1991; Mouritzen, 1991). Authors in this tradition also propose that citizens generally find that political elites who live close to the area over which they rule are more informed about a community's problems, more trustworthy, and easier to access (Mouritzen, 1991; Weir and Beetham, 1999).7

The localist approach speaks to issues of geography in indirect and important ways. It suggests that support for a polity decreases as one moves away from the polity's center. Citizens care about politicians' knowledge of local conditions, accountability and accessibility to local constituencies, as well as their level of identification with the group to which the population of a specific area belongs. These documented concerns provide cogent reasons to expect geographical distance to impact on the citizens' degree of support for their polity.

For all its merits in demonstrating the persistent role of place and distance in a global age, the localist perspective alone does not make transparent, however, what makes citizens' beliefs about the virtues of local autonomy and democracy so powerful. Localism as an analytical category leaves unanswered a series of 'why' questions. Why do citizens trust local government more than government from more distant locations? Why do citizens find social movements that emphasize local identities and the virtues of local government attractive? Why are ethnonational and regional movements emphatically critical of the geographical distance that separates the rulers from the subjects of rule? In short, localism does not tell us about the underlying emotional basis for the political significance of distance.

To understand how geographic locales affect political processes such as support for European integration, we must theorize a relation between perception and physical space, that is, distance. Borrowing from the sociology of cognition (DiMaggio, 1997; Cerulo, 2001), we emphasize the role of perceptual frames. We claim that political frames sometimes get their strength from the fact that they resonate with deeply anchored perceptual frames, which evoke strong emotions. Perceptual framing processes significantly shape people's attitudes toward objects and problems. Taking our cue from the re-emergence of social science interest in physical space, we focus on distance to bring geography to bear on our analysis of public support for European integration. We argue that, in the context of deep uncertainty and insecurity created by globalization, claims about the virtues of local autonomy and government are persuasive because they resonate with negative perceptions and emotions connected with distance (Schudson, 1989). Distance as a concept unites cognition (DiMaggio, 1997) and spatial arrangements or place (Entrikin, 1991). Thus, distance is a relevant frame for the study of political legitimacy (Figure 1).

Figure 1.
Figure 1 - Unfortunately we are unable to provide accessible alternative text for this. If you require assistance to access this image, please contact help@nature.com or the author

Analytical frame for understanding attitudes and behavior.

Full figure and legend (14K)

Experimental research conducted since the 1950s on the relationship between distance and emotions lends cogency to the theoretical expectation that distance matters for perceptions of political legitimacy. This body of research provides critical information on the functional form of the relationship. In 1965, Ekman and Bratfisch proposed that emotional involvement decreases as distance from a point increases and that the rate of decreasing emotional involvement becomes smaller as distance increases, so that beyond a certain distance, continuing reductions in emotional involvement tend to become negligible.8

Our analysis of the strengths and limitations of the various conceptual approaches to the study of contemporary Europeanization suggests that distance might be a significant factor in explaining variation in public support and emotional engagement in the ongoing project of European integration.

The following hypothesis re-states our discussion in formal terms. The further individuals live from the center of power (symbolic or real) the less likely they are to support membership in the polity and transfers of sovereignty to that center.

When focusing on the EU, our discussion leads to the following operational hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1:

The further away citizens live from Brussels, the EU's political center, the less they support membership in the EU. This is so because the further away EU citizens live from Brussels, the more they fear for their national identity (Hypothesis 1a), the less attached they feel to Europe (Hypothesis 1b), the less they trust EU institutions (Hypothesis 1c), and the less they perceive that they and their country can have a voice on EU politics (Hypothesis 1d).

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Brussels: The Center of Europe

Geertz (1983) reminds us: 'Thrones may be out of fashion, and pageantry too; but political authority still requires a cultural frame in which to define itself and advance its claims.....(p. 143).' Evaluating the relationship between geographic distance and support for membership in the EU requires that we locate the EU's political and symbolic center. The establishment of permanent capital cities, which generally but not always coincided with the consolidation of modern national states, provided the cultural frame for modern political authority and identification (Le Gales, 2002, 31–72). State-building efforts since the 17th century and nation-building projects since the 19th century have included the rulers' transformation and use of capital cities for symbolic purposes.

As Mukerji (1997) demonstrated, urbanization projects at the center of the realm became miniature representations of the power and spirit that animated state and nation-building projects. Resulting from the perceived role of capital cities as the geographic center of power, rulers have often been sensitive to the strategic costs and benefits of choosing one city or another as their capital. In Spain, for instance, it was often debated whether Barcelona should become the state's capital in order to ensure the Catalans' loyalty to Spain. In Germany, after re-unification, moving the capital city from Bonn to Berlin was perceived as having implications for Germany's relations with Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. Citizens over the last few centuries have learned to imagine the state as a territorially bounded space, with power concentrated in its capital city.

The EU offers an unusual opportunity to explore how place or geographic location impacts upon the collective assessment of political legitimacy. Brussels is the de facto and symbolic center of power within the EU as its main institutions and officials are located there.9 The European Commission headquarters and the Secretariat of the European Parliament are in Brussels. Diplomatic representatives accredited to the EU reside in Brussels. Most importantly, when people refer to statements and decisions made by the EU they often use expressions such as 'Brussels says...' or 'Brussels does....' Also, it is the city that citizens use as a reference point when criticizing the EU for being 'too far' from where these citizens reside. Brussels as a center of power is unusual because, in contrast to other capital cities, there is a clear differentiation between the EU administration and national administrations; and, secondly, most of the EU's officials are nationals from countries other than one's own.

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Data and Methods

The statistical analysis below tests the hypothesis that there is a negative relationship between geographical distance from Brussels and support for membership in the EU. Furthermore, it examines the extent to which the causal mechanisms invoked in our discussion of localism mediate the relationship between distance and the EU. The analysis uses Eurobarometer survey data collected in the Fall of 2004 in the 25 EU member states (Eurobarometer 62.0). It is the first Eurobarometer to include the 10 new EU members, following their accession in the Spring of 2004.10

Dependent variables

We examine the impact of geographical distance on attitudes toward European integration through two dependent variables. The first one measures whether respondents feel that they would regret a hypothetical dissolution of the EU. It is a measure of affect for the EU as a political community. The question that respondents had to answer reads as follows: If you were told tomorrow that the European Union had been scrapped, would you be very sorry about it, indifferent, or very relieved?

The second indicator measures the respondents' degree of satisfaction with membership in the EU. It is the most frequently used measure of support for the EU (Eichenberg and Dalton, 1993; Gabel, 1998a, 1998b) and can be treated as the positive formulation of the first item described above. The question that respondents had to answer reads as follows: Generally speaking, do you think that [Country's] membership of the European Union is/would be ...? 1. A good thing, 2. A bad thing, 3. Neither good nor bad.

The body of the text focuses on the statistical results based on affect question and the Appendices include the statistical results obtained with the second question. There is a good reason for us privileging the affect question. To say that one would regret it if the EU were to dissolve reflects a stronger degree of attachment to it than to say that membership in the EU is a good thing (especially if one's country is already part of the EU). Although the two items are highly correlated (eta=0.63), the distribution of both variables reflects that the former better distinguishes supporters from skeptics. The traditional measure of support is indeed highly skewed, with 62% of the respondents saying that they find membership in the EU 'a good thing.' Meanwhile, the percentage of respondents saying that they would regret the dissolution of the EU is only 46%. From a statistical viewpoint, a categorical variable without skew is preferable to a highly skewed one.

Distance

The main independent variable in the analysis measures how far respondents live from Brussels.11 On average, respondents were located 1011 km away from Brussels, with a standard deviation equal to 620 km. The variable 'distance' is conceived as an individual-level property. Distance affects individuals' support of European integration by impacting their emotional involvement with the EU, the extent to which they trust EU bureaucrats, and their perceptions of how removed EU bureaucrats are from local problems (Figure 2).


In the statistical analysis, we operationalize distance in two different ways. First, we use dummy variables corresponding to 10 distance intervals. Then, based on the results of the former models, we use the logarithm of distance in more complex ones. A negative coefficient for the effect of this variable on the dependent variables indicates that the farther away from Brussels respondents live, the less they would regret the dissolution of the EU. Our test of the impact of geographical variables also includes a variable measuring whether respondents live in the region defined by their country's capital city or not and another variable measuring the level of urbanization where respondents live. This second variable distinguishes among respondents who live in small towns/rural areas, in middle size towns, and in large towns/cities. We expect residents in urban areas and in the capital city to feel more attached to the EU than do those who live elsewhere.

Intermediate variables between distance and support for European integration

The discussion in the theoretical section above predicts the following mechanisms as mediating the hypothesized relation between distance and support of the EU: (1) Greater fears of losing one's national identity as distance from the cultural core increases, (2) Decreasing emotional attachment to the EU as distance from the EU's capital increases, (3) Declining trust in the competence of EU officials to understand local problems as distance from Brussels increases, and (4) Increasing perception that one cannot impact European policy-making as distance from the EU's capital increases.

To test for the impact of these different mechanisms, the statistical analysis below uses five independent variables, each tapping on one of the four mechanisms just listed. The first item reflects the respondents' answers to the following question: Some people may have fears about the building of Europe, the European Union. Here is a list of things which some people say they are afraid of. For each one, please tell me if you — personally — are currently afraid of it, or not?

The second item reflects the respondents' answers to the following question: People may feel different degrees of attachment to their town or village, to their region, to their country or to Europe. Please let me know how attached you feel to...Europe.

The third item measures the respondents' level of trust in the EU. The questionnaire item read as follows: I would like to ask you a question about how much trust you have in the following institutions. Please tell me if you tend to trust it or tend not to trust it...The European Union.

Finally, to measure the respondents' perceived influence in EU affairs, we rely on the answers to two similarly worded questions: Please tell me for each statement whether you tend to agree or tend to disagree?
—My voice counts in the European Union.
—(Our country's) voice counts in the European Union.

Control variables

Our statistical analysis includes an exhaustive list of individual level and aggregate level control variables that influential studies of individual attitudes to European integration (e.g., Hewstone, 1986; Eichenberg and Dalton, 1993; Gabel, 1998a, 1998b) have found consistently relevant.12 Some of these variables correspond to the interest-based approach outlined above, others correspond to the cultural approach. In general, one would expect many of these variables to be correlated with the distance between the place where people live and Brussels. We thus do not have reason to expect a gross effect of distance in the predicted direction. What we predict, however, is that after holding other variables constant, distance will emerge as a variable impacting on support for the EU.

Interest variables

The statistical analysis controls for two contextual factors highlighted in the literature that may impact on people's attitudes to the EU and are correlated with distance. The first variable measures the degree of EU–trade dependence in the country where respondents live. The data correspond to 2004 and have been published by Eurostat. Earlier studies have shown that support of the EU increases with the level of EU–trade dependence, as measured by the share of total trade a country conducts with the EU (e.g., Eichenberg and Dalton, 1993).

The second contextual variable measures the net budget balance between EU member states and the EU, per inhabitant. The data are for 2003 (European Commission services). We would expect that net-receivers from the EU will display more positive attitudes toward the EU than those that are net payers. Among the former, one finds the main beneficiaries of EU financial support during the last decade, which are Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. In the last 15 years, Ireland moved from being one of the poorest countries in the EU to becoming one of the richest. Testifying to the role of the EU structural funds in increasing the EU's legitimacy, Ireland also moved in the same period from being one of the most Euroskeptical countries to becoming one of the most Europhile ones. The new EU members have been coded 0 on this variable, since at the time of the survey a decision had not yet been made on how much they would contribute and receive from the EU. There is therefore only a small correlation between net budget transfers and GDP/capita, another variable that we included in statistical analyses not included here but that had no impact on support for the EU.

In addition to the contextual variables listed above, the statistical analysis includes individual-level variables that control for variables traditionally used in the quantitative literature on support for European integration. Several dummy variables distinguish respondents based on their current or past (in the case of retirees) main occupation. Manual workers, farmers, and the unemployed have traditionally been less supportive of European integration than the rest of the population whereas professionals, managers, and businesspeople have traditionally been more supportive. The omitted category corresponds to white-collar workers.

The literature on European integration has often emphasized that citizens use the economy's performance as a proxy information about the EU's beneficial impact. This is partly due to the fact that governments tend to blame the EU for bad macroeconomic performance and take credit for good macroeconomic performance (Gabel and Whitten, 1997). In order to control for this factor, the statistical analysis includes two traditional items used to assess the citizens' economic perceptions. The wording for the first item is: What are your expectations for the next twelve months? Will the next twelve months be better, worse, or the same, when it comes to .... your personal job situation?

The wording for the second item is: If you compare your personal situation with five years ago, would you say that it has improved, stayed about the same, or got worse?

In line with prior research, we expect respondents with positive perceptions to have a more positive attitude toward the EU than have respondents with negative perceptions.

Cultural variables

The statistical analysis includes cultural variables in addition to those used to test for the causal mechanisms mediating the effect of distance on support for the EU, as implied in the localist literature. The respondents' level of education operationalized through a set of dummy variables is a cultural variable. The Eurobarometer allows us to distinguish respondents with less than high school education from those with only high school education and from those with more than high school education. The literature has shown that more educated segments of the population tend to be more positively oriented toward European integration than are other population segments, mainly because of their more cosmopolitan experiences and views.

Together with the education variable, we include a measure of cognitive political mobilization traditionally included in empirical studies of European integration (Inglehart, 1977; Janssen, 1991). This variable reflects the respondents' answer to the following question: When you get together with friends, would you say that you discuss political matters frequently, occasionally, or never?

The literature predicts a positive relationship between levels of cognitive political mobilization and support for European integration. In order to assess further whether respondents use their cognitive skills to think about the EU, we include a variable that measures the degree of knowledge respondents have of EU affairs in the statistical models. Respondents had to assess their level of knowledge on a scale from 0 to 10, based on the following question: Using this scale, how much do you feel you know about the European Union, its policies, its institutions?

We expect respondents with more knowledge about the EU to hold more positive views than those of respondents with less knowledge. Generally speaking, the lesser uncertainty with respect to the impact of the EU on one's life created by increased knowledge should compensate for whatever negative information this knowledge may sometimes entail.

Traditional analyses of European integration (e.g., Gabel, 1998b; Díez Medrano, 2003) have shown that supporters of bourgeois or moderate working-class parties support European integration more than do supporters of far-right or far-left political parties. The Eurobarometer 62.0 does not include a variable on the respondents' electoral preferences, but it does include an indicator of self-placement in a left–right (liberal–conservative) ideology scale. Our analysis includes several dummy variables representing the respondents' political views, with centrist views as the omitted variable. We expect respondents who describe themselves as close to the far right or the far left to be less supportive of the EU than are respondents with more moderate political views.

We complement this political indicator with another one that reflects the degree to which respondents trust state political institutions. Inclusion of this variable is warranted in order to control for the effect of the variable that measures trust on the EU, since all the institutions were part of the same battery of items. We would expect respondents who do not trust their state institutions to have displaced their trust toward the EU. This variable has been constructed by adding the number of state institutions that respondents claimed to trust. Justice/the legal system, the police, the army, political parties, the government, and the national parliament are the state institutions included in this list.

Additional control variables

Finally, the statistical analysis includes a set of variables that do not clearly fall within the interest-based or cultural approaches. First, we include a dummy variable to distinguish residents from Cyprus from the rest of the respondents. Cyprus is a very special case from a political point of view. The unsolved conflict between Greece and Turkey over the sovereignty of this small island located at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, coupled with the fact that only the Greek section of the island has become a member of the EU, tremendously increased the stakes of EU membership for the population (Diez, 2002). We would thus expect very strong support for membership in the EU in Cyprus.

Another control variable included in the analysis is age, since we expect older respondents to be less supportive of European integration than are younger ones. Finally, we include gender in the models, although there is no a priori reason to believe that men's attitudes differ from women's. A descriptive summary of all the variables included is appended to the main text of this article (Appendix A1).

To test our hypotheses we have estimated multinomial logit models, using the statistical program Stata 8.0. In order to correct standard errors for clustering within countries, we have used the Huber/White correction.

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Findings

Table 1 presents the results of estimating various multinomial logit models to assess the effect of geographical distance on attitudes toward EU membership. In order to simplify the presentation, we focus on the Regret/Relief variable of support for the EU and on the two extreme categories. Table 1 displays only the coefficients for the dummy variables measuring distance.


Column 1 reports the effect of geographical distance before controlling for other variables. All the coefficients are negative but only the coefficients for the distances between 250 km and 750 km, and between 1751 km and 2000 km are statistically significant. Column 2 reports the effect of geographical distance after controlling for the net budget balance per inhabitant between EU member states and the EU. All coefficients for distance are negative and, except for distances above 2251 km, they are all significant. Furthermore, the magnitude of the coefficients tends to increase as distance increases.

These results reveal that net budget transfers act as a suppressor of the relationship between distance and support for the EU. Indeed, the greatest beneficiaries of EU transfers over the last decade have been countries located relatively far away from Brussels. One can imagine that this suppressor effect will become even greater when the 10 new members, which by Fall 2004 (4 months after accession) were neither net recipients nor net payers (and have thus been coded as 0 on the net budget transfers variable), start to receive structural funds and become net recipients. One reason why the coefficient for distances over 2251 km is not statistically significant is that Cyprus lies in this interval. Once one includes the dummy variable for Cyprus, as in Column 3 of Table 1, the coefficient for distances above 2251 km becomes negative and statistically significant.

Columns 4–6 sequentially add the trade variable, the individual-level control variables, and the individual-level variables that one would expect to mediate the relationship between distance and support for the EU.13 The proportion of the explained variance increases with each consecutive model. The effect of distance remains statistically significant and declining support of the EU continues as distance increases. Furthermore, Column 5, which includes all but the intermediate variables between distance and the dependent variable, shows that feelings of regret decrease rapidly within 625 km of Brussels (coefficient for 501–750 km=-1.28) and then again, but at a slower pace, beyond 1375 km (the coefficient declines from -1.11 at 1250–1500 km to -2.36 at 2001–2250 km). This is exactly what the experimental literature on the relationship between distance and emotional involvement predicts. The fit of the models increases as one introduces new variables and in the end the model in Column 6 produces a very respectable pseudo R2 of 26% (with pseudo R2=1-L1/L0).

In order to assess the role of different control and independent variables in suppressing, increasing, or mediating the effect of distance on support for the EU, we have thus re-estimated the models in Table 1 using a nonlinear transformation of distance that conforms to this functional relationship. The literature (Ekman and Bratfisch, 1965) predicts that the most appropriate nonlinear transformation of distance is the inverse-square root function. Since the loglinear transformation, a very similar function, provides virtually identical statistical results but makes the statistical results easier to interpret, we have preferred to report the statistical results of using this loglinear transformation. Table 2 displays the statistical results of this re-analysis.


Column 1 in Table 2 shows the effect of distance, controlling for all variables except for the individual-level mechanisms that should mediate the relationship between distance and support of EU membership. The model is equivalent to the one reported in Table 1, Column 6, except for the fact that we use the LN of distance rather than 10 dummy variables for distance. The effect for the LN of distance is negative and statistically significant, which means that, holding the other variables in the model constant, the farther respondents live from Brussels the less they would regret a hypothetical dissolution of the EU. The –0.56 logit coefficient means that the odds of regretting the dissolution of the EU, holding other variables in the model constant, are 2.46, 3.63, and 8.94 times greater 50 km away from Brussels than 250 km, 500 km, and 2500 km away from Brussels, respectively.

Our focus in this article is not on the behavior of the other variables in the model. We thus limit ourselves to a brief description of the meaning of the various coefficients. Table 2 shows that, holding other variables constant, respondents from net budget recipient countries are more likely to say that they would feel sorry if the EU were to dissolve than are other respondents. It also says that the higher a country's share of trade with the EU, the greater the chances that respondents from these countries claim that they would experience regret were the EU to dissolve.

Finally, the coefficients in Table 2 tell us that non-Cypriot, younger, relatively more educated, more politically inclined, better informed, and politically moderate respondents, as well as respondents who evaluate positively their past and future economic prospects and those employed in the professions or as business executives, are more prone to say that they would regret the dissolution of the EU than are other respondents.

In this section of the analysis, we are especially interested in assessing the role of specific causal mechanisms in mediating the observed relationship between distance and support for the EU. Columns 2–5 report the coefficients for variables that are used as indicators of these causal mechanisms as they are introduced one by one in the statistical model. Column 2, for instance, confirms previous work on support for the EU (i.e., Díez Medrano, 2003) in showing that respondents who fear for the erosion of their national identity as a result of European integration express less support for the EU than do respondents who do not harbor these fears. Column 3 shows that attachment to Europe is positively related to support for the EU. Column 4 shows that respondents who trust the EU more tend to support the EU more than do those respondents who do not trust the EU. Finally, Column 5 shows that respondents who feel that they personally or their country have a voice in the EU support the EU more than do those who do not feel that they have a voice. All these results are consistent with theoretical predictions.

An important question we want to address by including the variables above in the analysis is whether they explain the impact of distance on support for the EU, as the literature would predict. Columns 2–5 show that the only variables to intervene in the relationship between distance and support of the EU are the ones that measure whether respondents feel that they or their country have a voice on EU affairs. When one introduces these variables in the model the coefficient for the logarithm of distance changes from –0.56 (Column 1) to –0.37. This finding is consistent with the prediction that increasing distance erodes support for the EU because respondents feel increasingly powerless with respect to EU politics.

To address remaining concerns that the observed effect of distance may be spurious and capture recent member status, or some other unaccounted variables, we fitted an additional model that included a dummy variable to distinguish the 10 new members from the remaining ones. The results of this analysis confirmed, however, the results discussed above. We did not find statistical evidence either showing that the effect of perceptions of having a voice in the EU on support for the EU depends on whether respondents belong to the old or the new members. We also estimated additional models with interaction terms. One of these models included a term for the interaction between residence in the capital city and distance. The other one included terms for the interaction between level of education and distance. None of them were statistically significant at the 0.05 level. Further, we estimated the models discussed above using ordinal logit analysis rather than multinomial logit models and obtained the same results. Finally, we replicated all the models discussed here using the traditional variable on support of membership in the EU. The tables for these models, included in the Appendix A2 and A3, confirm the results reported above.14

In sum, the statistical evidence collected for this article demonstrates that distance indeed matters in explaining support of EU membership. Whether we model the effect of distance with dummy variables or through a nonlinear transformation, we find that when one holds other variables constant, the further away people live from Brussels the less they support the EU. Controlling for other factors people who live fairly close to Brussels are more supportive of EU membership than are those living further away. The statistical findings also show, however, that the distance effect is only mediated by people's sense of efficacy in influencing EU politics. Other variables, such as the citizens' fear of losing their national identity, the degree of identification with Europe, and mistrust of EU officials do not seem to explain the negative effect of distance. Once we control for all these variables, the effect of distance is still statistically significant. Whether this remaining statistical effect expresses the independent and direct role of emotions in relating distance to support is something that we cannot answer with these data and statistical method. The finding is certainly consistent with our prediction of a direct linkage between distance and EU support, but other unaccounted control variables may also explain it.

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Distance Matters: Place and Political Legitimacy

In an analysis of the role of distance in foreign relations, Henrikson (2002) argues that globalization has increased the proportion of long-distance relationships. This makes distance more relevant than ever. No matter how instantaneous long-distance communication has become, the geographical space in-between still impacts on these relationships. Henrikson (2002) argues for a decoupling of space and time when reflecting on how the actual distance separating two partners in a relationship impacts on the relationship.

Globalization has created a unique historical opportunity to decouple time and space and examine the real social significance of the latter. Theorists of globalization have tended to miss this opportunity. By taking the metaphor of 'time–space compression' literally, they have failed to notice that space is objectively still there. Space has not shrunk, only the time needed to get from point A to point B has shrunk. Space matters economically, as Harvey notes, because it provides the spatial fix thanks to which transactions overcome space (1985, 145).

Distance matters sociologically, we argue, not only because it takes time to get there, but also because our visualization, our perception, of the space in-between effects our emotions, our beliefs, our attitudes, and, eventually, our behavior. Furthermore, the localist literature we have engaged leads to the expectation that, if anything, globalization has strengthened the emotional and cognitive significance of distance by making citizens more distrustful of rule from afar. Research on European integration from the interest-based or cultural perspective does not capture the effect of distance.

Of the various relationships we examined, the relation between distance from Brussels and support for European integration was consistently salient even after controlling for other substantively important variables. We found that the further an individual lives from Brussels, the less likely he or she is to support European integration. We do not claim that distance is always the most important factor impacting on political legitimacy. Rather, under certain circumstances such as those prevailing in the EU (a multinational bureaucracy, distinct from national bureaucracies and located mainly in Brussels), the common perception that power is located in a supra-national place makes geographical distance politically more relevant.

The special circumstances that make distance relevant in the EU may prevail in other states around the world. States with territorially concentrated culturally distinct groups, however, resemble in some respects the EU, and we might expect distance to play a bigger role in political support in these states than in states where this circumstance is not present (e.g., the United States). In multinational states, as in the EU, it is easier for people to perceive the city where government sits as the site of power — 'foreign' power — than in ethnically homogeneous states or in multiethnic states where ethnic groups are not spatially segregated. Furthermore the fact that, in contrast to the EU, many of these multinational states formed through forced or illegitimate annexation of increasingly peripheral areas, makes the perception as well as the presence of a distance effect likely.

This article makes a distinctive contribution to the study of European integration by arguing that distance matters for political legitimacy. Place — the culturally and politically bounded space in which individuals are rooted — is relevant to the project of institutional change. The results of the statistical analysis presented above have significant implications for the process of European integration. They show that distance matters and that it matters mainly because people who reside far away from Brussels have a lower sense of political efficacy than do those who live close to Brussels.

The statistical results also show, however, that the EU institutions have been successful in countering the negative effect of distance through redistributive policies. The negative effect of distance is not visible until one controls for net budgetary transfers. Countries that are far from Brussels, such as Spain, Portugal, and Greece count among the most Europhile ones in the EU. Yet, as the analysis above suggests, this is partly because they, together with another distant country, Ireland, are the countries that have benefited most from the EU's structural funds. When one holds net budgetary transfers constant, the negative impact of geographic distance emerges quite clearly. This finding suggests that the negative impact of distance on support for European integration can be partly counteracted through economic incentives. From a policy perspective, this finding provides an additional rationale for providing generous financial support to new EU members as many of them are located quite far from the EU's center of political power and one cannot take their allegiance to the EU for granted.

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Notes

1 As a sociological concept, propinquity captured micro-level processes of individual choice. Calhoun (1998) analyzes propinquity with respect to politics and provides a recent summary of the term.

2 Anthropologists, following Appadurai's (1996) seminal work, are in the lead. See also the essays in Burawoy et al., (2000) Global Ethnography.

3 Hooghe and Marks (2004) summarize this literature in terms of rationality and identity — terms that only partially capture the range of processes that they seek to describe.

4 Waldinger and Fitzgerald (2004) develop a nation-state perspective to rethink transnationalism.

5 Gabel's work on European integration (1998b) that operationalizes geography as a control variable is an exception.

6 Agnew's (1987, 2002) work sets the agenda in this area.

7 Empirical results suggest a complex relationship between proximity and legitimacy of rule. Larsen (2002), for instance, finds that Danes who live closer to their local rulers participate more in the political process but do not necessarily find rulers more efficient or trustworthy.

8 Ekman and Bratfisch's article led to a debate in the 1960s and 1970s, which validated their findings (Stanley, 1968; Stanley, 1971; Lundberg et al., 1972; Walmsley, 1974; and Strzalecki, 1978; see also Walmsley and Lewis (1993) and Carbon (1998)).

9 Papadopoulos (1996) provides the history of the development of the EU buildings within Brussels.

10 The Eurobarometer is the only survey that provides comprehensive information on attitudes toward European integration in all of the member states and on most of the variables that have been tested in the literature explaining such attitudes. Studies of attitudes toward European integration (e.g., Gabel, 1998a, 1998b) rely on this survey. Over the years, sampling methods have become increasingly alike and consist of multistage, random (probability) sampling. For more details, visit http://www.gesis.org/en/data_service/eurobarometer/standard_eb/fieldwork.htm.

11 To assign values to respondents for this variable, we used information on the region where respondents lived. We relied on NUK 2 regions as defined by Eurostat, for all countries. To determine the distance between each region and Brussels, we drew concentric circles on a map of Europe, each of them 100 km wider than the previous one, until the circles encompassed all regions in the EU. We assigned to each respondent the mean distance corresponding to the circle in which the region of residence fell. When a region encompassed several circles, we used the distance corresponding to the average of the mean distance for each circle. For the Canary Islands, the Azores Islands, and Madeira, the assigned value corresponds to the distance from Brussels to the main island in each group of islands.

12 The only variable in this literature that we could not use as a control variable, because the relevant items were not included in the Eurobarometer 62.0, is a variable measuring Post-materialist values.

13 Because of the small number of countries (25), one can include a few aggregate variables at a time without incurring serious multi-collinear problems. Therefore, we only report results on aggregate variables used in the literature and whose effect on support has been demonstrated. We also tested, however, for the effect of other aggregate variables that we thought could influence our results. For instance, we controlled for the effect of being a predominantly Catholic or a predominantly Protestant country, with the rationale that Christian–Democratic parties have often conceived of the EU as a contemporary re-enactment of the Holy Roman Empire. Inclusion of this variable did not impact at all on the Distance–Regret (Support) relationship.

14 We also fitted a multinomial logit and ordinal logit fixed effects model, with dummy variables representing all the countries in the sample, which is arguably too conservative a model, for it estimates the net effect of distance holding all national characteristics constant, or what one could call a 'pure' distance effect. The coefficient for LN (distance) in the multinomial logit model (Regret vs Relieved contrast) was negative and significant at 0.08 level and the coefficient for LN (distance) in the ordinal logit model was negative and significant at the 0.05 level.

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About the authors

Mabel Berezin earned her Ph.D., in Sociology at Harvard. She is Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. She is a comparative historical sociologist whose work explores the intersection of political and cultural institutions with an emphasis on modern and contemporary Europe. She is the author of Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Inter-war Italy (Cornell, 1997) which was awarded the J. David Greenstone Prize for Best Book of 1996–1997 in 'Politics and History' by the American Political Science Association and named an 'Outstanding Academic Book of 1997' by choice. In addition to numerous articles, review essays and contributions to edited volumes, she has edited two collaborative volumes: Democratic Culture: Ethnos and Demos in Global Perspective (with Jeffrey Alexander) and Europe Without Borders: Re-mapping Territory, Citizenship and Identity in a Transnational Age (with Martin Schain) (Johns Hopkins, 2004). She is completing a book ms entitled, Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Democracy and Security in the New Europe.

Juan Díez Medrano, Ph.D., Professor at the Department of Sociology of the Universidad de Barcelona since 2003. Obtained his Ph.D., in Sociology at the University of Michigan (1989). Former Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego (1989–2003) and former Professor at the International University Bremen (2003–2004). Author of Divided Nations (Cornell University Press, 1995), Framing Europe (Princeton University Press, 2003), and various articles in journals like American Sociological Review, Social Forces, and Ethnic and Racial Studies. Recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Scholarship (1995) and former Einaudi Chair in European and International Studies at Cornell University (Winter–Spring, 2006).