During the 1990s, a number of scholarly books and articles appeared in both Europe and North America to help explain the preferences and motivations of European mass publics concerning the European integration process. These scholarly efforts were spawned in large part by the vast amount of survey data generated by the Commission of the European Union in its efforts to monitor public opinion on issues pertaining to the European Union.

This research has taught us much about how Europeans feel about the ongoing efforts to create an “Ever Closer Union” of European states. Three major findings stand out: First, European mass publics, by and large, are neither particularly interested in, nor particularly well informed about, the affairs of the EU; second, utilitarian motivations far outweigh cognitive traits, ideology, or partisanship as explanations for public support; and, finally, the considerable cross-national differences in levels of support have remained relatively constant over the past 30 years. For example, the United Kingdom and Denmark have from the beginning been much more critical of the integration process, while the Benelux countries, and to a lesser extent France and Germany, have consistently been much more favorable.

Yet the precise origins of these cross-national differences have largely remained a mystery. The comparative politics literature, by employing in its explanations statistical models that specify individual characteristics, has tended to focus on factors that highlight the similarities across EU member states. Cross-national differences in levels of support were largely treated as “black boxes” to be accounted for by “dummy variables” inserted into the models.

To explore in detail the sources of these attitudinal differences is precisely the purpose of Juan Diez Medrano's study. He asserts that in order to understand the attitudes of Europeans on these issues, one must thoroughly examine, in each nation, the historical context in which these attitudes have developed. He does so by combining in-depth interviews of European citizens with detailed analyses of the processes through which their attitudes and beliefs have become “framed” within the respective national contexts. Drawing on comparative sociology literature, “frames” are defined as the perceptual lenses through which the European Union, and in particular the integration process, are interpreted by the public. Some of these “lenses” are shared across most or all countries (e.g., the EU as a large market), while others are dependent on sociodemographic or political factors, such as occupation or ideology. Others again are closely connected to the specific national cultures, and it is these that constitute the author's main theoretical interest.

The book focuses on three countries, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom, which together contain almost half of the EU's population. These countries represent a mix of similarities and differences along a number of variables that are important to the understanding of the observed attitudinal patterns. The research thus combined the “most similar” with the “most different” systems designs.

The intensive interviews conducted with 160 respondents in six cities (two from each country) reveal that over 80% of respondents spontaneously mentioned the benefits of the single market as a positive aspect of integration. Most Europeans thus share at least one basic conceptualization of the EU. However, the central puzzle of Medrano's investigation concerns difference: Why is British support for integration so much lower than that of Germany and Spain, even after all individual-level variables have been accounted for? In short, what is inside the “black box?”

Medrano finds the answer to this conundrum in the pattern of differences observed in the interviews: While some themes articulated by the respondents delineated the adherents of the different models of integration regardless of country (e.g., the notion that states have become “too small”), others more clearly distinguished the different nationalities. Although several opponents of integration expressed concern over the loss of sovereignty and identity that it might entail, it was among the British respondents that this line of reasoning truly predominated, suggesting that these anxieties were a major reason for the overall more Euro-skeptical attitudes prevailing in that country. Spanish respondents, by contrast, cited the need to end the country's isolation and to push forward with its modernization as their reasons for support, while West Germans expressed the hope that their country's engagement in the EU would help it overcome the legacy of National Socialism (East Germans rarely mentioned this point, a finding that the author explains in great detail). Thus, whereas the dominant frames tended to enhance support for European integration in Germany and especially in Spain, in the U.K. it was just the opposite.

In order to validate the argument that these frames are culturally constructed, the author undertook in each country an in-depth analysis of editorial opinion, prizewinning novels, history textbooks, and head-of-state speeches covering the entire postwar period. The aim was to correlate the frames identified during the interviews with the themes articulated in these sources. It is impossible in this short review to do justice to the richness of the descriptions and the wealth of evidence presented in support of the argument. Briefly stated, the British reluctance to commit itself fully to the European integration project can be traced to the existence of an alternative set of identities (e.g., Empire) whose persistence resulted in a strong sense of being different from Europe, thus precluding a strong identification with the integration project. While both Spain and Germany had attempted to construct such pan-national identities prior to World War II, these attempts were thoroughly discredited, thus leaving “Spaniards and Germans … more receptive to efforts toward European integration” (p. 255).

Medrano's study constitutes a significant contribution to the literatures on European integration, political culture, and nationalism. It tells a compelling story of the construction of collective identities and of the myths upon which they are frequently based. Critics of the political culture approach will find in this study all the usual shortcomings and logical fallacies, yet these cannot take away from the force of the argument presented in it and from the mountain of evidence in support of it. All but one of the true defects are in fact minor: The interview chapters are too long and the narrative is often convoluted; some of the tables are poorly labeled and explained; and the appendixes provide insufficient information on the methodology, particularly of the sampling process. The major systematic flaw I could detect concerned the sample itself: Since it contains very few hard-core opponents of the EU, even from the U.K., the interview data does not really allow conclusions to be drawn about opposition to European integration. But since the real strength of Framing Europe lies in its contextual analysis, it constitutes without question a significant achievement.