National identity / National identity and the EU

National identity and the EU

Perhaps the most relevant current example of internationalism relates to people’s openness towards the EU. In the previous section we saw that those with an ethnic component to their sense of British identity are less international in their outlook; what do this group make of Europe? We assess this by using responses to the three following questions:

Generally speaking, would you say that Britain benefits or does not benefit from being a member of the European Union?

Britain should follow European Union decisions, even if it does not agree with them?

Generally, do you think that the European Union should have ... much more, more, as much, less, or much less power than the national governments of its member states?

Overall just one in five (21 per cent) think that Britain "greatly" or "largely" benefits from EU membership, while 15 per cent think Britain should follow all EU decisions. Only six per cent think that the EU should have more power than the national governments of its member states. Factor analysis shows the three questions reliably measure the same underlying concept, so we used them to create a summary scale with, at one end, what we will call the ‘Eurosceptics’ and, at the other, the ‘Europhiles’.[6] The results are shown in Table 4.11, which shows that those who think of national identity in ethnic and civic terms are twice as likely as those who see it in civic only terms to be at the most Eurosceptic end of the scale (36 and 15 per cent respectively). 

National _identity _T_4.11

National _identity _PQ_10

We also carried out regression to check whether these findings hold true once other factors such as age and education are taken into account. The results are presented in the Appendix and confirm that a person’s views about national identity are associated with their views about Europe, in the direction suggested by Table 4.11. Those
who see British national identity in solely civic terms are far less likely to be Eurosceptics than those who see identity as having both ethnic and civic components. Once more the
results also show that Euroscepticism is less likely among
those with higher levels of education. 

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Notes
  1. To obtain each score we added up (summed) the values of the respective variables and then divided the resulting number by the number of questions, to produce a scale from 1 to 5.
  2. Caution should be taken when comparing the 1995 results with those for subsequent years as the construction of the national identity variable in that year was slightly different to the formulation used in 2003 and 2013. Specifically, it did not include “being Christian” but did include “feeling British”. 
  3. The scaled variable was obtained by adding up (summing) the values of the six questions for each respondent, having first reversed the order of the second and fourth questions in Table 4.6 so that for each question agreement indicated an anti-immigration position. The results were divided by 6 to obtain a scale which varies between 1 and 5.
  4. The summary variable was computed in the same way as is described in note 3 above. 
  5. Intriguingly, those whose conception of national identity is neither civic nor ethnic are even more likely to be internationally minded, supporting the conclusion that it is indeed seeing the ethnic component of Britishness as important that is more closely linked to being British-focused.
  6. The summary variable was computed in the same way as is described in note 3 above.
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  • Authors
  • Notes
    1. To obtain each score we added up (summed) the values of the respective variables and then divided the resulting number by the number of questions, to produce a scale from 1 to 5.
    2. Caution should be taken when comparing the 1995 results with those for subsequent years as the construction of the national identity variable in that year was slightly different to the formulation used in 2003 and 2013. Specifically, it did not include “being Christian” but did include “feeling British”. 
    3. The scaled variable was obtained by adding up (summing) the values of the six questions for each respondent, having first reversed the order of the second and fourth questions in Table 4.6 so that for each question agreement indicated an anti-immigration position. The results were divided by 6 to obtain a scale which varies between 1 and 5.
    4. The summary variable was computed in the same way as is described in note 3 above. 
    5. Intriguingly, those whose conception of national identity is neither civic nor ethnic are even more likely to be internationally minded, supporting the conclusion that it is indeed seeing the ethnic component of Britishness as important that is more closely linked to being British-focused.
    6. The summary variable was computed in the same way as is described in note 3 above.
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