It’s the Economy, not European Identity: The Effect of European Identity and Economic Considerations on Public Support for EU Membership in Turkey and Central and Eastern European Countries

Turkey has long been characterized as “too big, too poor, too Muslim” to be a European country. This assertion permeated the political debates regarding Turkey’s accession to the unio‎n in the early 2000s, leading to a Turkey versus the rest dichotomy: Other candidate countries are European, Turkey is not. A central dimension of this dichotomy was the juxtaposition of public attitudes toward EU membership in Turkey and Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs). A frequently evoked claim during the fifth enlargement of the unio‎n was that the Turkish public supports EU membership due to its expected economic benefits while citizens in CEECs desire membership because they identify as European. In this article, I show that this claim was empirically false. Using data from the Eurobarometer survey for candidate countries, I statistically demonstrate that both Turks and citizens of CEECs supported EU membership for economic reasons. European identity played a negligible role in shaping mass support for EU membership in Turkey and other candidate countries alike. This study makes a central contribution to the existing literature by analyzing the relative impact of European identity and economic considerations on public support for EU membership in Turkey and CEECs. The results fill an important void in the existing scholarship and contribute to ongoing political debates on Turkey’s EU membership.