To Europe or Not to Europe? Migration and Public Support for Joining the European Union in the Western Balkans

Abstract

For decades, countries aspiring to join the European Union (EU) have been linked to it through migration. Yet little is known about how migration affects individual support for joining the EU in prospective member states. We explore the relationship between migration and support for EU accession in the Western Balkans. Using data from the Gallup Balkan Monitor survey, we find that prospective and return migrants, as well as people with relatives abroad, are more likely to vote favorably in a hypothetical EU referendum. At the same time, only people with relatives abroad are more likely to consider EU membership a good thing. Our results suggest that migration affects attitudes toward joining the EU principally through instrumental/utilitarian motives, with channels related to information and cosmopolitanism playing only a minor role. Overall, we show that migration fosters support for joining the EU in migrants’ origin countries and that joining such a supranational institution is likely to foster political and institutional development of migrants’ origin countries.

Mass Preferences for the Free Movement of People in Africa: A Public Opinion Analysis of 36 Countries

“…Future researchers must, thus, look more closely at personal or familial migration experiences. Such experiences, as publicopinion research in the Balkans by Ivlevs and King (2020) has shown, can have a robust effect on whether an individual supports regional integration. This article did not investigate how migration desires may have influenced attitudes toward free movement in the AU.…”

“…Third, the findings confirm the work of Lutz (2021), who argued that attitudes toward foreigners undermine support for free movement, shedding new light on the negative implications of anti-immigration attitudes in the AU. Fourth, the analysis identified key determinants of citizen opinion on free movement (e.g., state fragility and linguistic fractionalization) that were previously ignored by Eurocentric public-opinion scholarship on regional integration (e.g., Toshkov and Kortenska 2015; Ferrera and Pellegata 2018; Vasilopoulou and Talving 2019; Ivlevs and King 2020). This article’s results, and their implications for how scholars understand public attitudes toward visa liberalization, are discussed in more detail below.…”

“…Viewing free movement in terms of how it benefits an individual's labor-market returns ignores how cross-national cash remittances in Africa can influence attitudes toward intra-regional mobility. 4 Receiving remittances from abroad has been shown to increase the evaluative well-being of migrant household members staying behind, especially in poorer contexts (Ivlevs, Nikolova, and Graham 2019). Beneficiaries of these remittances may see the opening of international borders as advantageous because they materially benefit from cross-national labor mobility.…”

“…This section presents an analytical framework for examining if and how citizen support for intra-regional mobility in the AU might be influenced by utilitarian-related considerations. In particular, it draws from the public-opinion literature on regional integration — a body of work divided between those scholars who favor utilitarian concerns as predictors of attitudes and those who favor identity-based predictors (e.g., Carey 2002; Hakhverdian et al 2013; Boussalis, Merolla, and Peiffer 2015; Toshkov and Kortenska 2015; Ivlevs and King 2020). Utilizing this analytical framework, a number of different hypotheses are proposed here.…”

“…Simply having family members working abroad may, of course, shape attitudes toward border control. Examining the issue through utilitarian motives, Ivlevs and King (2020) found that having relatives abroad improved support for regional integration in the Balkans. Linkages to these family members may encourage an individual to see the economic opportunities associated with emigration.…”