POLONYA: IDEALIST AVRUPALILIKTAN PRAGMATIST AVRUPA BIRLIGI ÜYELIGINE/POLAND: FROM IDEALIST EUROPEANNESS TO PRAGMATIC EUROPEAN UNION MEMBERSHIP

In the first years after the regime change in 1989, the people of Poland were accepting the European Union membership as a final destination that would end a value-based and centuries-old aspiration of being considered (Western) European, and supporting with high percentage. However, the new conditions surfaced in the second half of the 1990s pushed such an idealism of Europeanness into the background and, turned EU membership into a matter of cost-benefit analysis and pragmatic evaluations for people. When the value-based and idealist perception about the Union lost its effect, then, skepticism and opposition about the EU increased discernibly. This perceptional change about the Union has continued after the accession to the membership, and increasing support about the EU after 2004 has, to a large extent, become the result of pragmatic approaches heavily based on economic utilitarianism. This study investigates the changing of EU perception and evaluation among the Polish people from an idealist perspective to a utilitarian one through the aforementioned three periods and, attempts to explore the possible impacts of such change.