Since the proclamation of Kosovo’s independence, its EU aspirations have become a kind of touch-stone. Political dignitaries visiting Kosovo rarely leave the country without some public statement related to future EU membership intimating that stability in the western Balkans will be cooked up in Brussels – a relatively safe thing to say under the current EU expansion fatigue. Leaving aside the issue of whether the international community thinks that Kosovo could, would or should become an EU member state, we turn to Kosovans themselves and ask them what they think about future EU membership. We are particularly interested in ‘sensitive’ and salient (in the case of Kosovo and in a broader Western Balkans context) factors - the potential role of ethnicity, gender and migration related variables in explaining attitudes towards EU integration. Our paper is based on a survey of 1367 Kosovans, conducted in June 2008 – four months after Kosovo proclaimed independence. The ordered probit analysis points to significant variability in pro-EU sentiment across a number of dimensions. We find that, compared to ethnic Albanians, the Serb minority is significantly less likely to support integration of Kosovo into the EU. Women have a more pronounced pro-EU sentiment. A strong support for the EU is also expressed by people preparing to emigrate.
Since the beginning of the EU, public attitudes toward the concept and the functioning of the EU, and later also towards its expansion, have been of paramount importance. This is not just a democratic nicety but a necessity owing to the fact that EU legislation is without supranational means of enforcement. Thus public support itself has become an important building block of European integration. While the general levels of support for the EU in Kosovo and Western Balkans – the next in line for the EU membership - are well known, the contribution of this study consists in uncovering particular reasons for that support. We establish an important role played by characteristics that, typically, are not subject to an individual’s choice, such as, for example, gender and ethnicity as well as factors that are subject to individual choice, such as migration intentions, thereby contributing to the large literature on the determinants of attitudes towards the EU. We expect that our results, with some variation, are likely to carry over to the whole Western Balkan region. Hardly elsewhere in Europe are the issues of gender, ethnicity and migration more acute than in these “next generation” EU Member States.