Closer during crises? European identity during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine
利用2020年至2022年对同一批受访者的三次调查数据，发现新冠疫情和俄乌战争期间，欧洲公民对欧盟的情感依恋显著增强，表明对称性危机能促进共同体认同。
Do crises bring us closer together? Many have observed how, during the Covid-19 pandemic, several European societies experienced a ‘rally around the flag’ effect. While this certainly took the form of support for incumbent governments, anecdotal evidence suggests that individuals’ European identification may have been affected as well. In this paper, we exploit the unique timing and panel nature of a survey, whose respondents were interviewed in March/beginning of April 2020, again in July 2020, and finally in November 2022 to analyze whether a change in attachment to Europe occurred between the first and the second wave of the pandemic and with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our results show that the emotive dimension of EU attachment changed over the course of these crises, increasing both during the Covid pandemic and after the invasion of Ukraine. Our results support the view that symmetric crises tend to bring people closer together, suggesting that far-reaching EU-level actions in case of crises create, rather than require, a perception of belonging to an EU-level community.