European integration volume II: trust matters

Our second piece on European integration deals with trust. An often underappreciated, but nonetheless very important factor in explaining political dynamics. After showing in our previous work that Europe is becoming , slowly but steadily, a more homogeneous cultural entity, we believe that this process w ill run inevitably into resistance if not complemented with a certain degree of mutual trust across the different populations . Do Europeans trust each other? Do European citizens actually feel more European? Do they have trust in public bodies? The next European elections are going to implicitly provide answers to these questions. We try to anticipate the direction with a look at trust. We study interpersonal trust (among citizens), national and European identity and what we believe is the product of the two: trust in institutions, both at the national level (National Parliament, local/ regional authorities) and at the supranational level (European Union, European Parliament, ECB). The Standard Eurobarometer survey represents a useful source at our disposal, providing aggregate and national level covering many different topics from 2012 to 2018. Our main findings are that mutual trust in Europe is hugely correlated with geography (south vs north) and common history, that European identity does not compete with a national one and that citizens tend to trust public bodies physically close to them more .