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ABSTRACT
Were European public reactions to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in line with the external threat hypothesis? Accordingly, the invasion should have increased the perception of threat from Russia’s territorial ambitions and support for collective defence. We review survey data from a diverse sample of ten European countries, collected before and after the event, showing that this was indeed the case. Threat perceptions and attitudes toward various aspects of collective defence – the general principle, readiness to defend other European nations, and NATO – increased fairly consistently across countries, and the association between perceptions and attitudes also increased. Findings regarding (changes in) attitudes towards defence efforts of the European Union were more ambiguous. We discuss the implications of these findings for the future of collective defence in Europe and the resilience of European societies more broadly.
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Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 It is also realized through a collective defence clause in the Treaty of the European Union (Article 42.7), which is – as of now – less well known and perceived as less reliable than NATO’s famous Article 5 (Tidey Citation2022).
2 For an analysis of the impact of the invasion on cohesion in Ukraine, see Brantly (Citation2024) in this issue.
3 For an analysis of how a non-Western country – China – reacted to the attack, see Pennisi di Floristella and and Chen (Citation2023) in this issue.
4 Furthermore, the second data point is conveniently timed for our purposes, as the Russian build-up of military personnel and equipment – which began in March and April 2021 – had not yet become salient news in Europe. Hence, it is safe to assume that this pre-invasion data point did not capture reactions to this foreshadowing of Russian aggression.
5 Reproduction files for all results shown here are available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/XHT2HC.
6 This question was not asked in the other SecEUrity pre-invasion survey.
7 Similarly, a YouGov poll from January 2022 showed that only about one-third of respondents thought their country “should be willing to use military force if Russia attacks” Poland, Latvia, or Ukraine (Ibbetson Citation2022).
8 The Online Supplement 2 reports trust in NATO in all countries where the Eurobarometer asked this question. As in the country sample shown here, slight increases in trust can be seen in most countries. In its Spring Global Attitudes Survey series, the PEW Research Center annually surveys the proportion of citizens who have favourable a view of NATO (Fagan, Poushter, and Gubbala Citation2023). Comparing the 2021 and 2023 data, popularity increased in most but not all European countries. For example, there were increases in Germany from 59% to 69% (+10), in the UK from 66% to 74% (+8), and in France from 51% to 56% (+5). Note that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine occurred during the fieldwork period of PEW’s 2022 Spring survey, rendering these data unfeasible for our type of before-after comparison.
9 See Online Supplement 2 for results for all countries where this question was asked.
10 Online supplement 2 reports these results. Further evidence of the growing support for common defense policies is the increased approval for the creation of an integrated European army (Smith Citation2022; Genschel, Leek, and Weyns Citation2023).
11 Unlike above, where dichotomized measures were used, here we use the finer measures based on the Likert scales originally used in the survey.
12 Available studies indicate an increasing identification with Europe and rather stable foreign policy postures (e.g. Mader and Schoen Citation2023; Schulte-Cloos and Dražanová Citation2023; Steiner et al. Citation2023), but the data basis of these studies is not broad enough to draw sweeping conclusions. Preliminary analysis of SecEUrity data suggests increased militant internationalist and isolationist views in several of the countries polled. A systematic analysis of these issues is still pending at this time.
13 Full regression tables are reported in Online Supplement 3.
14 This is not surprising, as these attitudes are correlated (Pearson’s r between 0.3 to 0.5). This may indicate that citizens do not distinguish between different facets of collective defence. We could therefore interpret the responses to the three survey questions as reflecting a more general attitude towards collective defence and apply data reduction techniques. Under certain assumptions, this could account for random measurement error and thus allow for more accurate estimates. Corresponding results can be found in Online Supplement 4.
15 We employ an “inference by eye” approach (Cumming Citation2009) and diagnose effect-size differences if confidence intervals do not overlap. Note that doing so on the basis of 95% intervals is a relatively strict approach, since 84% CIs with zero overlap would give p = 0.05 in an interaction model (Cumming Citation2009). Results of such interaction models are reported in Online Supplement 6.
16 For example, the coronavirus pandemic levelled off during the period studied. The significant increase in threat perception from Russia's territorial ambitions could therefore have been favoured by the fact that the perceived threat from the pandemic decreasing over the same period. We would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing this out.
17 In other respects, too, our analysis remains limited. In particular, it focused on changes at the country level. However, the results could differ in subgroups, i.e. depending on individual characteristics (e.g. core postures and expertise).
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Matthias Mader
Matthias Mader is Associate Professor for International Politics at the University of Konstanz. His research interests include political psychology, public opinion and political behavior. He has published widely on these topics. Recent contributions include studies of the impact of Russian illiberal propaganda on public opinion and the link between threat perceptions and support for international cooperation.