Keywords

1 Introduction

This chapter explores the notions of EU citizenship among young adults in the peripheral regions of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. We follow the political culture approach, assuming the stability and legitimacy of the EU and the process of European integration as linked to the congruence between the institutional structure and the related beliefs and attitudes of the population (Almond and Verba 1963; Easton 1975).

In particular, we focus on EU citizenship, which encompasses both institutional and attitudinal elements. The institutional part of EU citizenship is, in the seminal formulation by Marshall (1950), the legally defined status that bestows all members of a community equally with civil, political, or social rights. Regarding political rights, the Treaty on the European Union from 1993 (TEU) has constituted EU citizenship for all those inhabitants who are nationals of a member state (Article 8.1 TEU) by introducing the following political rights: the right to vote and to be elected both in municipal and European Parliament elections, the right to approach the embassy of any EU member state abroad, and the right to petition the European Parliament or to apply to its ombudsman (see also Lorenz and Anders 2023; Karolewski 2023).

The attitudinal elements of EU citizenship encompass issues of belonging, in particular to the community of the EU, and the dispositions for political participation (Bellamy 2008). Belonging to the EU is considered a postmodern notion, differing from traditional, mostly national concepts of citizenship in at least three respects. (1) It is necessarily defined by civic rather than ethnic or national criteria (Wegscheider and Rezi 2021) due to the multi-national character of the EU. Belonging is less based on the imagined sameness (Anderson 1985) of the members of a community in terms of a common ancestry, ethnicity, language, or culture, but established through a common legal and political framework and social and political participation. (2) Accordingly, EU citizenship does describe not only a legal status but also “acts of citizenship” (Isin 2008). Even non-citizens, according to the law, can conduct these acts, thereby claiming citizenship (Karolewski 2010; Bauböck 2001; Bayer et al. 2021).Footnote 1 (3) EU citizenship is a multi-level concept, since EU citizens are simultaneously citizens in at least one of the member states of the EU. Thus, acts of citizenship and feelings of belonging can be addressed at the local, regional, national, or EU level and interact with each other. Due to these interactions, the notions of EU citizenship can be derived from the lower levels, or they can offer an alternative or amendment (De Vries 2018). For instance, electoral participation at the EU level can follow the patterns at the respective national level (derivation), i.e. the same parties are elected at both levels, or the EU level offers an alternative venue to voice political protest, i.e. other parties are elected (Hix and Marsh 2011; Boomgaarden et al. 2016).

Along these lines, we formulate five research perspectives guiding our exploration of the notions and evaluations of EU citizenship among students in East Central Europe (ECE).

2 Theoretical Framework and Research Perspectives

2.1 Political Participation

If political participation is indeed a core element constituting EU citizenship, the respondents’ readiness to participate at the EU level is an indication of this postmodern conception of EU citizenship based on civic criteria. Accordingly, a lack of readiness for political participation potentially indicates alternative notions of citizenship. We have therefore investigated the readiness for political participation among students in ECE.

2.2 Institutional Knowledge

Given that political participation requires knowledge about the legal rights and possibilities to participate and that the multi-level structure of the EU extends this required knowledge, the importance of (political) education for postmodern EU citizenship has been acknowledged (Inglehart 1970; Hooghe and Marks 2005; Faas 2007; Bayer et al. 2021). In order to be able to actively exercise their rights, citizens need to understand how their different rights (liberal, political, and social) at the different levels overlap or exclude each other and how the institutions of the EU work (Bauböck 2001; see p. 218 in Sommermann 2004).

We have therefore investigated how much students know about their rights as EU citizens and the relation between these rights and their readiness to participate. This is in line with Eurobarometer surveys on citizenship or the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS), where knowledge and understanding of citizenship or civic engagement are examined (Schulz et al. 2018).

2.3 Belonging

In traditional conceptions of citizenship, citizens constitute a community based on imagined sameness regarding, for instance, ethnic criteria. While in postmodern civic conceptions, citizenship can be acquired through participation in the social and political institutions of a given community, traditional conceptions define citizenship as something inherited through ancestry. Since ancestry cannot be acquired, traditional conceptions are more exclusive compared to civic conceptions, which allow for gaining citizenship by practicing it.

Traditional notions of citizenship are usually linked to the nation-state, while EU citizenship is conceptually linked to the idea of European integration as a postmodern cosmopolitan project designed to transcend national borders (de Wilde et al. 2019). Accordingly, participation in this project could not be restricted to any kind of national community but need to be open to all people claiming their participation. However, EU citizenship is legally linked to national citizenship: people who are not citizens of an EU member state cannot be EU citizens. Likewise, even respondents who base EU citizenship on civic criteria may restrict it to citizens of the member states of the EU. Moreover, the multi-level interaction between national and EU citizenship needs to be considered. If national belonging is considered primordial to EU citizenship, political participation at the national level should be restricted to citizens of the nation-state. In contrast, if respondents give more weight to their EU citizenship compared to their national ones, they may support the political participation of citizens from other EU member states even at the national level in their own country. We have therefore investigated students’ ideas about the inclusiveness of political participation to delineate the relation between traditional and postmodern components of EU and national citizenship.

2.4 EU Citizenship and Political Support

EU citizenship is embedded in the wider realm of political support for the EU, or the lack thereof, i.e. Euroscepticism (Boomgaarden et al. 2011). In this respect, the attitudinal dimension of postmodern EU citizenship integrates political support for the community of Europeans (belonging) and support for the regime (political participation) (Ibd., Easton 1975). Research on public opinion has demonstrated that attitudes towards European integration are not unidimensionally consistent pro- or anti-European but include ambiguity. Citizens reject particular dimensions of the EU or European integration, but favour others. We have analysed the linkage between the notion of EU citizenship and the general support for the EU and European integration. We assume a postmodern notion of citizenship to be closely linked to more favourable attitudes towards the membership of one’s own country in the EU, due to the border-transcending character of the EU.

2.5 The Regional and National Context of EU Citizenship

Marshall (1950) emphasised that citizenship includes equal rights for all citizens. In his liberal understanding, equality is restricted to legal equality, so that differences in the actual exercise of rights do not matter for citizenship. Others (e.g. Turner 2009) have argued that such liberal conceptions obscure the inequalities in political participation and self-identification as citizens, which indicate a stratification of citizenship along social, political, or regional divisions.

In this chapter, we are particularly interested in the regional dimension of citizenship, since the regional clustering of economic, demographic, and social disparities has been demonstrated to be particularly strong in ECE (Lang et al. 2015). In general, the differences between regional centres, usually the bigger cities, and their peripheries have deepened in ECE countries after the end of communism. As mentioned also in the introductory chapter of this volume, regions that were already peripheral in socialist times also remained peripheral after 1989, even though the local situation has often improved (see p. xxviii in Pascariu and Pedrosa 2017). In line with this, feelings of relative deprivation vis-à-vis the growth centres are potentially more relevant for these regions than in the peripheries of western EU member states (see p. 6 in ESPON 2017).

We take the issue of peripheral regions in two respects into account. (1) The survey was conducted among young people attending schools in regions that are defined as peripheral according to spatial-infrastructural, demographic, and economic conditions (see section data and methods below). These regional conditions interact with collective and individual perceptions and interpretations. The perceptions and attributions of peripheries and centres are thus not objective entities but the outcomes of individual and collective negotiations embedded in regional and national discourses. Accordingly, we have analysed the subjective perceptions of students about the peripheral status of their region that may coincide with or deviate from the attributed peripheral status.

We assume that the peripheral status of one‘s own region of living reduces the possibilities for social and political participation. The subjective perception may add to this effect by reducing the incentives to participation due to feelings of futility. Further, if regional marginalisation causes feelings of deprivation among the inhabitants of these places that “don’t matter” (Rodríguez-Pose 2018), the emotional attachment to one’s own nation and the EU may be reduced, if they are blamed to be responsible for this marginalisation. The multi-level character of EU citizenship may, however, produce opposing effects too. If a peripheral status of one’s own region is perceived, its causes or the hitherto failed attempts to deal with it may be attributed to one’s own national government rather than to the EU, and the latter may appear as an alternative to overcome this peripheral status (de Vries 2018). Thus, we may also find stronger EU citizenship among students who see their own region of living as peripheral.

We have further considered each country’s peculiarities given the differences between the five countries regarding their political and economic situations, their political cultures, and the pathways of transformation to democracy after communism and into the EU afterwards. For instance, earlier studies have shown a generally lower level of political participation in ECE, compared to Western Europe but also country differences that can be traced back to the respective communist legacy (Coffé and van der Lippe 2010). Finally, we compare the results occasionally with the general population to explore the peculiarities of students in peripheral regions.

3 Data and Methods

Between autumn 2021 and spring 2022, within the framework of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at Leipzig University, structured interviews were conducted with students at selected schools in five EU member states: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. All participants were in the final years of their secondary school education, about 17 years old and attending either a secondary school or a vocational school. They were asked to express their views on European integration, to answer a range of factual questions about EU institutions, as well as to evaluate the European electoral process. These questions were mostly drawn from the Standard Eurobarometer (European Commission 2020a) and the Flash Eurobarometer 485 (European Commission 2020b), which were implemented in February and March 2020 and paid special attention to Europeans’ notions, knowledge, and evaluation of EU citizenship.

Field work was preceded by a multi-stage sampling process to ensure only people in peripheral regions participated in the survey. In spatial-infrastructural terms, peripheries are defined as having an impeded access to regional centres and infrastructural services like schools, supermarkets, and administrative offices due to a longer average travel time and lower population density (ESPON 2017). In economic terms, peripheries are regions that underperform regarding GDP, innovations, knowledge-based industries, etc. when compared to national averages. Demographically, peripheral regions are defined by outmigration and an overaged population. Socially and politically, peripheries are perceived as downgraded, left behind, disadvantaged or even marginalised with impeded social participation and reduced access to political decision-making.

We created an index to measure the economic, demographic, and infrastructural living conditions at NUTS 3 level. This index encompassed GDP in purchasing power standards per capita, the employment rate, and the median age, as well as the time spent to reach the next regional centre and the accessibility of several services of general interest (SGIs, e.g. supermarkets, gas stations, and pharmacies). Regions that performed poorly in comparison to the national averagesFootnote 2 got higher scores, and the two regions with the highest national scores were entered into the sample. We then preselected two towns with 20,000 to 30,000 citizens within each of these regions and contacted local secondary schools there. On site, field teams conducted group discussions (see Kirtzel and Lorenz 2023), while the remaining students completed the structured interviews.

In total, 265 persons completed the survey. Sample size varied between countries, e.g. because of the different class sizes. With 82 completed questionnaires, Romania provided more than twice as many participants as Slovakia (29) or the Czech Republic (37), while Poland and Hungary also provided 61 and 56 questionnaires, respectively. To avoid an overrepresentation of particular countries, we applied post-stratification weighting (Table 1).

Table 1 Participants per country and corresponding weights
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We checked any difference in the results for statistical significance and reported the differences only if they reached a statistical significance at the 5% level but included remarks about potentially interesting results at the 10% level as well.

4 Empirical Results

4.1 Participation in the Elections to the European Parliament

Our research focuses on students who have not yet voted in the EU elections, which limits their experiences in political participation. Accounting for this status, we derived questions from the Eurobarometer (European Commission 2020b) and asked for a number of measures that the students considered suitable to encourage their own participation in the upcoming elections to the European Parliament. If someone is not willing to participate politically, no measure will be sufficient to increase his/her readiness to do so, while the higher the general inclination to vote, the more measures should be considered to foster participation. Accordingly, the stronger the support for each measure and the higher the overall number of measures supported, the higher the students’ actual inclination to vote should be, and vice versa, even though responses in the surveys do not capture any planned action.Footnote 3 The measures cover four areas: information/transparency, the changes in electoral rules, the descriptive representation of candidatesFootnote 4 and how citizens can influence elections more (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
A grouped bar chart of measures to increase one’s own political participation in the elections to the European parliament. The highest bar is for, more information is provided on the impact of the European Union on your daily life.

Support for measures to increase one’s own political participation (%)

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The overall support for the multiple measures among students in ECE reveals a notable ranking. The top four measures are supported by at least three quarters of the students in the ECE countries investigated (Fig. 1). Students judge that more information about how the EU impacts their lives is the most important measure for fostering their own electoral participation, which may imply that students feel insufficiently informed about this impact. Among the other top four measures are more information about the political parties and their candidates running in European Parliament elections, online voter registration, and the greater involvement of citizens in the EU decision-making process. With the exception of online registration, the top three measures among the general population in the EU and the students in ECE correspond (ibid.).

Further and more detailed information on the candidates for the President of the European Commission, the voting procedures, financial issues, or the relations between national and European parties is less appreciated as encouragement. But each of these more controversial measures is still supported by a majority of students. Among these more debated measures are reforms of the electoral process itself: While harmonisation of the electoral periods between the member states as an incentive is very controversial among students, a majority of around 63% state that they would be encouraged to vote if there were more young candidates.

In contrast, the two other measures of descriptive representation—more women and citizens from other member states as candidates—find no majority support among the students but are the most contested measures. Again, the three least appreciated measures among students in ECE and in the general EU population correspond. Support for transnational lists—the most contested measure—amounts to only around 43% in both groups (ibid.).

Based on this information, we established a (mean) index counting each measure that students evaluate as encouraging their own electoral participation. The index ranges from 0 (no measure) to 1 (all measures),Footnote 5 and the overall mean for students is 62. On average, students consider almost two-thirds of the measures suitable for increasing their electoral participation, which seems to indicate a general inclination towards political participation among students in the peripheral regions of ECE. There are remarkable country differences: Polish students support almost 75% of the measures, which is the highest level of support; Czech students support only 54%, which marks the lowest level. Students from Romania (57%) and Hungary (60%) are closer to their Czech counterparts, while students from Slovakia (65%) rank in the middle. A similar pattern of country differences regarding the importance of political participation has been demonstrated by earlier research (Coffé and van der Lippe 2010).Footnote 6

Regarding the concrete measures, the country differences are especially pronounced (and statistically significant only) for the more contested ones (Fig. 1). In particular, while a majority of students in Poland and Slovakia support the idea of citizens from other EU member states running as EP candidates in their own country, a majority in the remaining three ECE states in our sample reject it. The same pattern appears for more female candidates and a harmonisation of the electoral rules. It is further similar for more young candidates, but this idea finds more support than the previous measures, even in Hungary, Romania, and the Czech Republic. As a national peculiarity, a majority of Czech students reject more transparency in financing as an issue suitable to increase their voting inclination.

The issue of foreign citizens running as candidates is both the most contested measure within and between countries and a core indication of the relation between traditional and postmodern EU citizenship. This justifies a closer look. The general population (surveyed in 2020) and the students in Hungary and the Czech Republic both reject the idea of foreign candidates with a majority of around 70% in each country and group. Students in Poland and Slovakia are more supportive of this measure compared to their respective general populations (42 resp. 36), while the latter is more supportive (62, ibid., 107) than the students in Romania. Thus, students in Hungary and the Czech Republic are in line with the general population in their rejection of postmodern EU citizenship, while students are more postmodern in Poland and Slovakia but less postmodern in Romania.

4.2 Knowledge About Citizenship and the Political Process

Students do not seem to be well informed on various matters related to the EU (Table 2). Over the course of the interview, they were asked a dozen factual questions about EU citizenship, a EU citizen’s rights, and cross-border electoral participation: How one acquires EU citizenship, under which conditions EU citizens could take up residence in other member states, whether they could seek help from all member state embassies in case of emergency abroad, or if they could participate in elections within other member states. These were all yes or no questions, including a third “I don’t know” option.

Table 2 Answers for factual questions on the EU
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Counting wrong answers and “don’t knows” as a lack of knowledge, participants on average answered only half of the questions (53%) correctly, scoring about as good as a random coin toss. Average scores were almost identical in all countries and across various sociodemographic traits. In particular, students in secondary schools did not score significantly higher than students in vocational schools.

Some issues seem to be easier to answer than others. In particular, basic knowledge about EU citizenship (“I am both a citizen of the EU and my country at the same time”) as well as practical matters such as the right to take up residence in member states seem to be much more accessible to the participants. Here, a broad majority—85 and 76%, respectively—gave the correct answer. In other areas, knowledge is less widespread among students. Unsurprisingly, given their hitherto lack of personal involvement, students are especially ill-informed about the institutional process of political participation. Only a third of them (34%) knew about the possibility to sign a citizens’ initiative, and less than one out of five (18%) knew that EU citizens could not participate in foreign national or regional elections (7%). Only 38% of the students knew it would not be possible to opt out of EU citizenship as a national of a member state.

Institutional knowledge is linked to students’ attitudes towards the EU. Students who answered that their country should remain in the EU on average scored about 7% better on factual questions than those that chose the “leave” vote. Higher scores also go along with participants expressing a slightly stronger emotional attachment towards the EU—at least at a 10% significance level—while bearing no such effect on national attachment.

4.3 Postmodern and Traditional Notions of Belonging

Students were also asked to give their normative ideas on the rights of European citizens: Whether they would consider it justified for EU citizens of another EU member state to participate in national elections and referendums in their country of residence, if these people should be allowed to vote and stand as candidates in regional elections in their country of residence, and if EU citizens should be allowed to choose between participating in the national elections of their country of origin and their country of residence. As a measure of robustness, this last question was posed twice and rephrased (“Should they be only allowed to vote in their country of origin?”) a second time. Given that suffrage is a core feature of citizenship in democracies, these questions measure whether students consider foreign EU citizens as legitimate members of their own national polity. This indicates students’ notions of EU citizenship. In postmodern civic citizenship, all members of a polity should be equipped with equal rights, no matter their origin or background. In traditional citizenship, nationally defined communities remain an important point of reference. In this sense, foreign nationals, even if they are EU citizens, are considered outsiders.

On each issue, the majority of students expressed postmodern notions of EU citizenship: 76% of them say they would consider it justified for foreign EU citizens to participate in national elections within their country of residence, about the same share (72%) say EU citizens should be allowed to vote and stand as candidates in the regional elections of their country of residence, and 69% said EU citizens should be allowed to choose between the national elections in their country of origin and their country of residence, with a similar share (61%) giving the same answer in the control question. There are no significant differences between various sociodemographic traits except for perceived peripheralityFootnote 7: The worse students rate their region’s quality of life in comparison to national standards, the more they deem foreigners’ participation in regional elections as justified, ranging from 62% approval among the most optimistic up to 84% approval among those who consider the regional quality of life worse than in other parts of their country.

A closer look, however, raises the question of whether students might have had some trouble understanding what they were being asked. While similar shares expressed postmodern views both in the question of whether EU citizens should be allowed to choose between national elections and in the inverse control question, these were not necessarily the same people: the two items have a correlation coefficient of only −0.4.

4.4 Political Support for the EU: Attachment, Benefits, and Politicisation

The surveyed students in peripheral regions in ECE are moderately attached to the EU. About two out of five people (43%) declared to feel at least some level of emotional attachment to it (Fig. 2), while about two out of three participants (68%) expressed attachment to their own country. These results are in line with sentiments among the general population, although weaker for both items. As we know from the Eurobarometer (2020b), 60% of the people in the EU feel at least some level of attachment to the European Union, while a staggering 92% say the same for their own country. Similar to the general population (Clark and Rohrschneider 2019), attachment to the EU and to one’s own country is not mutually exclusive, but moderately positively connected. The more students express attachment to the EU, the more they are attached to their own country, and vice versa. However, the connection is only moderate (r = 0.22).

Fig. 2
A bar chart of reported attachment to the E U or country. The highest bar of E U is not very attached and the highest bar of the country is fairly attached.

Reported attachment to the EU/country

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Along the same lines, students are not overwhelmingly convinced of the benefits of European integration. When confronted with the statement that their country could “better face the future outside the European Union”, only half the participants disagree, around one-third say they don’t know, and about one out of five students agree.

Responses vary by education (Fig. 3). Among students in secondary schools, 61% say their country should remain within the EU, putting them close to the results among the general population (66%). In comparison, students in vocational schools are much less convinced: 57% of them “don’t know” whether their country should leave the EU, with about one fifth choosing each the leave and the remain option.

Fig. 3
A bar chart of our country could better face the future outside the E U. The highest bar for college track is disagree and the highest bar for the vocational track is don't know.

“Our country could better face the future outside the EU”

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Perceived peripherality also weighs in on this issue. Students had been asked to rate the quality of life in their region in comparison to other regions within their country, with a majority of 57% rating it as “just as good as elsewhere in my country” and about one fifth each saying the quality of life was worse (22%) or better (21%) than elsewhere. When faced with the hypothetical option of leaving the EU, those showing a great deal of satisfaction with their regional quality of life were more inclined to be in favour of the leave vote (33%), compared to students who evaluated regional life quality on par with (16%) or worse than in other parts of the country (12%).

The perceived politicisation of EU integration, i.e. the controversial discussion of this issue among the population, differs between students in different countries (Fig. 4). About half of the surveyed students (46%) said people they knew talk about the advantages and disadvantages of EU membership. However, these numbers vary greatly: from a mere 28% in the Czech Republic to 56% in Romania and a staggering 70% in Poland.

Fig. 4
A stacked bar chart of how people I know address the advantages and disadvantages of the E U. The highest bar for yes is in P L 60% and for no is in C Z 80%.

“How people I know address the advantages and disadvantages of the EU”

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Finally, we assume that students’ political support for EU integration is linked to their notions of EU citizenship: The more someone emphasises the need for national boundaries for democratic participation, the lower the overall support for EU integration as a border-transcending project should be. Empirically, however, there is no link between the notion of citizenship and political support for EU membership. Students who expressed more traditional views on citizenship, i.e. rejecting foreign EU citizens from national elections, are not more likely to say their country would be better off without the EU than students with a postmodern notion. This lack of connection between the notions of citizenship and the evaluation of the EU might be based on the lack of relevance of the questions on electoral participation in the daily lives of students. Moreover, this result underlines the multidimensionality of attitudes towards the EU: No matter which notion of EU citizenship students share, they are equally in favour of EU membership, implying that students in peripheral regions in ECE can be in favour of EU integration, while still upholding the need for exclusive national polities.

5 Conclusion

This chapter investigated how young people at the brink of political maturity in ECE think about EU citizenship and European integration in general: how they feel about EU integration and multi-level communities, whether they are informed about their rights and the possibilities connected to EU integration, and what might encourage them to take part in it. Drawing on questions from the Standard and the Flash Eurobarometer, we have interviewed 265 students in peripheral regions in five countries.

Our starting point has been the political culture approach, applied in particular to the correspondence between the legal regulations (structure) and the normative and attitudinal notions of EU citizenship (culture). The surveyed students displayed a general readiness for political participation at the EU level, a moderate emotional attachment to the European Union, and a widespread acceptance of the political participation of foreigners in their own country even at the national level. Accordingly, the majority of the surveyed students share a postmodern notion of citizenship that corresponds with the legal regulations and the normative conceptions linked to EU integration as a border-transcending process based on the democratic equality of its members, no matter which member state they come from.

However, there are caveats to this interpretation due to the obvious ambiguities in their attitudes. Students’ attachment to their own nation is more pronounced than their attachment to the EU; their knowledge and understanding of the political rights EU integration entails are partially fuzzy and revolve mainly around the possibility to travel and work within the EU, students feel not sufficiently informed about EP elections, they have no actual experience in political participation at the EU level, and they are not enthusiastically rejecting the idea that leaving the EU would be advantageous for their own country.

Further, the notions of citizenship are moderately stratified along the lines of nationality, education, and the subjective perception of the peripheral status of one’s own region. Support for postmodern notions of citizenship seems to be particularly strong in Poland and Slovakia compared to the other ECE countries in the sample, in particular to Hungary and the Czech Republic. The kind of education, i.e. vocational or college, does not matter for political knowledge about EU citizenship, but is positively linked to the general support for EU membership in one’s own country. This result implies that education in school has its impact not so much via information but via other channels like the selectivity of the school system, accompanied by an outlook on occupational and social advancement, etc. While all the surveyed students live in regions defined as peripheral regarding statistical measures, only a minority perceive their region as disadvantaged. This subjective dimension matters, nevertheless, for their notion of EU citizenship. Especially those students who perceive their own region as advantageous, compared to other regions, have less knowledge about EU citizenship, perceive their own country’s exit from the EU as more advantageous, and are less—although still by a majority—in favour of foreign candidates on domestic party lists in the EU elections. A cautious interpretation might be that these students attribute the perceived superiority of their own region to their respective national government and perceive the EU as endangering this status by, presumably, either redistributive or neoliberal measures that challenge the regional economy, or through increased immigration.

Finally, EU citizenship appears as a discrete dimension in the multidimensional pattern of attitudes towards the EU. No matter whether students share a postmodern or a rather traditional notion of EU citizenship, they are equally in favour of EU membership, implying that even nationally derived notions of EU citizenship can be compatible with a general support for EU integration. This result provides tentative empirical support for the assumption of postmodern citizenship conceptions: Not every incongruence between the political-legal structure and political culture endangers political support.

The reported results are the first explorations into the issue of EU citizenship among students in the peripheral regions of ECE. Although the sampling procedure was designed for multi-stage random sampling, some (self-)selectivity at the level of the students cannot be ruled out nor controlled for due to our lack of knowledge about the target population. Since external validity is restricted and cautious generalisation is required, the results should be considered preliminary tendencies that may serve as a starting point for further research. This research should include students from non-peripheral regions to allow comparisons and, hence, the identification of the peculiarities of peripheral regions.