Development, Institutions, and Identity: Reshaping Europe’s Post–Cold War Moral Landscape

Post–Cold War Europe has become a scene of a grueling contestation over questions of morality, with key players being the EU and Russia. The legacy of the Cold War on the moral beliefs of European nations and their transformation over the last three decades requires an examination. We advance theory toward the potential role of development, institutions, and identity, associated with the Cold War division and continued differentiation at present. We use the Morally Debatable Behaviors Scale fielded in the World Value Survey and the European Values Study (1981–2021) to analyze the variation in the long-term dynamics of two moral dimensions: (a) dishonest-illegal issues (DII) and (b) personal-sexual issues (PSI). An age-period-cohort analysis reveals that old EU-members, post-communist EU-members, and post-communist non-EU countries have experienced distinct evolutions in both moral domains. The identity approach was supported: old EU members have increased their leniency on PSI and decreased it on DII; new EU members followed the same trends but slower on PSI and faster on DII; non-EU nations experienced no change on either issue. These trends are only partly attributable to the changes in the quality of institutions. Economic development has the expected positive effect only in old EU members, while its impact on PSI dwindles and even reverses as one moves away from Brussels’ sphere of influence. Furthermore, contrary to previous evidence, we find that economic development predicts changes in DII, potentially due to the expansion of moral concern to unknown others.