Understanding Public Opinion Attitudes Towards the European Union Amid Threats and Crises
摘要
This concluding chapter synthesizes the volume’s findings on how diverse global challenges shape public support for the European Union. Moving beyond a monolithic view of crises, it shows that public attitudes vary across crisis types—event-driven, structural, and recurring—and are deeply conditioned by national contexts, elite framing, and perceived EU responsiveness. While symmetrical and transnational shocks such as COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine often generate rally-around-Europe dynamics, recurring or identity-charged issues like immigration foster Euroscepticism. Structural threats like climate change elicit more diffuse, norm-based support. The chapter advances the concept of “contingent legitimacy” to describe how public trust in the EU is not stable, but context-dependent and shaped by institutional visibility, credibility, and framing. It concludes by reflecting on the implications for EU governance, calling for communicative, flexible, and multi-level responses to sustain legitimacy in the age of polycrisis, while acknowledging methodological limits and future avenues of research.