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Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Cross-national differences in support for Turkish EU membership

My forthcoming book includes some graphs showing support in EU member states for Turkish EU accession compared to other applicant states. But I do not break these figures down by member state. Since I have this platform, I thought I would give my readers a taste of this data here instead.

The following graph is from one of the 2008 Eurobarometers (a set of surveys regularly conducted by the EU Commission on a range of topics). It does not include answers from Turkey and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. I have excluded 'Don't know' answers and calculated percentages on the proportion of respondents favoring vs opposing Turkish EU membership.
It is clear that Turkey receives its most enthusiastic support from the new member states from Eastern and Central Europe. After them, Sweden and the UK provides the most support.

As for the resistance to Turkish EU membership, it is by far strongest in Austria, followed by the (Greek) Republic of Cyprus, western Germany, Luxembourg, France, Eastern Germany, and Greece. A majority of all respondents (60% on this crunching of the data) oppose Turkey's accession.

For a qualitative perspective, you can also get a sense of this cross-national variety of views on this issue from the anthology edited by Nathalie Tocci as part of the Italian institute of international affairs (IAI)'s Quaderni English series. (It is available online here). 
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