With the rise of Eurosceptic parties across Europe, the question of how EU attitudes are formed is on the top of the research agenda again, especially after the Brexit referendum in the UK revealed the potential consequences of negative attitudes towards the EU. Previously, similar developments had been described as a 'post-Maastricht blues' in public opinion (Eichenberg & Dalton 2007) and a growing 'constraining dissensus' (Hooghe & Marks 2009) that citizens impose on European integration. But more recently, the populist Eurosceptic surge is understood as part of a general 'cultural backlash' in Western societies (Inglehart & Norris 2016), which implies a growing socio-cultural divide between people with progressive, libertarian & cosmopolitan values and those with traditionalist, authoritarian & nationalist values (Kriesi et al. 2008, Zürn & De Wilde 2016, Hooghe & Marks 2017).
This paper addresses this debate while going even one step further, as it asks whether basic human values (Schwartz 1994) can explain attitudes towards European integration, and second, whether growing Euroscepticism can be attributed to a shift in the individual value structure of EU citizens as a consequence of external influences, such as the Euro crisis and the influx of migrants with different cultural backgrounds. I argue that support for European integration can be explained by values connected to 'openness to change' and self-trancendence, whereas Eurosceptic attitudes are a consequence of values connected to 'conservation' and 'self-enhancement'. Moreover, I hypothesize that citizens have responded to external crises with a shift in their individual value structure thereby creating the rise of Euroscepticism on the aggregate level. I test these hypotheses with data from the European Social Survey (2002-2016), which allows for longitudinal and cross-national comparisons, in order to detect general patterns and intertemporal changes in the relationship between basic human values and attitudes towards European integration.
