Historical Patterns of Euroscepticism.

This paper discusses some historical patterns of Euroscepticism across the entire EU in order to analyze the dynamics of the Romanians' attitudes toward the EU against this general background. The paper presents some findings related to the arguably rising phenomenon of Euroscepticism, which were gathered in the context of the proposal of the French and German Ministers of Internal Affairs on 21 December 2010 to delay Romania's accession to the Schengen area of free movement. At the beginning of 2011, we carried out an ample research project for which we used a multi-method research design including a national survey, a content analysis of related media coverage and a series of in-depth interviews with high-profile Romanian political figures. For the purpose of this paper we shall only present the data obtained from the survey (N = 1,168). The first part of the paper is dedicated to the existing literature on Euroscepticism--conceptualization, historical patterns, causes and explanatory mechanisms--, while the rest is dedicated to the results of the survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]