Demonstrators protest against corruption in Budapest, Hungary | Carsten Koall/Getty Images Hungary profits most from EU ‘but doesn’t appreciate it’ Think tank’s report says Hungary does well out of EU membership, but approval ratings among its citizens are low.

BERLIN — Hungary benefits more than most from being a member of the European Union, but its citizens are among the least appreciative, according to a study to be released Wednesday.

“The discrepancy between what the situation [in the EU] is like, when it comes to hard facts, and how it’s being perceived by the population is nowhere as visible as in Hungary,” said Josef Janning, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations' Berlin office, and one of the authors of the study, seen by POLITICO.

The ECFR, a think tank, used publicly available data, mostly from European Commission reports, Eurostat (the Commission's statistics department) and Eurobarometer (surveys of public opinion compiled for the Commission). Its aim was to see if attitudes to the EU had changed between 2007 — before the global financial crisis — and 2014.

It described the report as a "Cohesion Monitor."

“Cohesion, as we understand it, is a two-fold phenomenon ... It’s the personal experience of individuals: whether people are aware of Europe in their day-to-day life, and if they appreciate it. But at the same time, cohesion is made up of the things happening in the background — flow of capital, security policy, etc — which might be invisible to many people, but are equally important when it comes to understanding it," said Christoph Klavehn, a project manager at ECFR.

The ECFR plotted its result in graph form after coming up with 10 criteria for measuring cohesion. Four of the 10 look at people's day-to-day experiences and the rest deal with larger-scale, structural items such as economic ties between countries and involvement in joint military exercises.

The results show one clear outlier: Hungary.

While the country scored very high on structural cohesion — as it profited, for example, economically from its integration into the EU — its individual cohesion scores were very low, which suggests that its citizens don't consider it important to be part of the EU.

“What we observed in the case of Hungary might be an indicator of a country that has begun to sway, a complete disillusionment with politics. My impression is that the country never recovered from the century-old trauma of [the Treaty of] Trianon,” Janning said, referring to the post-World War I agreement that defined Hungary's borders and greatly reduced its size.

“Our results suggest that in Hungary, EU criticism has become mainstream," he said. "There is a high level of frustration with politics, and at the same time there are high approval rates for Euro critic parties.”

Hungary's opposite number in the study was Ireland.

According to the ECFR's data, a great many Irish citizens feel European, but the country doesn't get treated well by the EU, the study suggests. Ireland was forced to implement tough austerity measures after receiving a bailout in 2010. Despite this, individual support for the EU remained high.

“The Irish are going through a crisis that truly cuts them to the quick. And yet they are not losing their prevailing European attitude," said Janning, "This might have to do with the fact that being part of the European Union has always been important to them as a way to emancipate themselves from their former colonial power, Great Britain.”

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