Eurosceptic or Euro-ambivalent? Eurocrisis and citizens’ attitudes of continental and Southern Europe towards European integration and the Euro.

Have European citizens become increasingly Eurosceptic during the Euro crisis and thereafter more politicized, turning their backs on European integration? Though many journalists, politicians and academics argue that they have, this paper suggests that reactions to European integration cannot be reduced uniquely to a rise in Euroscepticism, but that ambivalence need also to be brought into the picture when studying citizens’ attitudes towards the EU and the Euro. As the enhanced politicization of the European integration has marked the EU post-Maastricht development and particularly the last European elections held in 2014, this text aims at understanding how the Euro crisis and the (macro) politicization that followed has impacted on the acceptance and the appropriation of the political order by lay citizens. This article draws on evidence from survey data collected in May 2014 (CED-EU14; Sauger & al., 2015), just two weeks after European elections, that includes seven countries from continental and Southern Europe: Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. The article proposes regression analyses of this non-polarized category of citizens that consider their country membership and the Euro as neither a good nor a bad thing. It concludes that alongside the well-documented phenomenon of Euroscepticism, one also observes reinforcement in the indecision of ordinary citizens over the last decade. These ambivalent positions reveal differences with hard Euroscepticism and Europhilia; both in terms of support for EU membership and support for the Euro currency