Focus on Germany European Sovereignty Ipsos survey on behalf of the Fondation Jean-Jaurès and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Survey conducted by Ipsos on behalf of the Fondation Jean-Jaurès and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Some 8,000 people were interviewed over the internet via Ipsos’ Ac­cess Panel between 28 December 2020 and 8 January 2021, making up eight samples of 1,000 persons representative of the national population aged 18 and over in France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Spain and Swe­den. The sampling was carried out in accordance with the quota method(sex, age, occupation, rural/urban location, region). This summary presents the results for Germany. SOVEREIGNTY? A POSITIVE NOTION HIGHLY VALUED IN GERMANY »When you hear the word ›sovereignty‹ what ideas or images spontaneously come to mind?« While the French overwhelm­ingly associate the term»sovereignty« with the semantic field attached to royalty(»king«,»queen«,»monarchy« and so on), the responses recorded»beyond the Rhine« outline a set of views that are significantly more favourable towards the idea of European sovereignty: independence, the state, freedom, au­tonomy, power, self-determination, security, trust, strength and so on. The term»sovereignty« overall evokes»something generally positive« for three-quarters of Germans(73 %), whereas the figure is below 50 %, on average, in the eight countries in the survey, and only 29 % in France. The Germans also provide the largest number of respondents, alongside the Poles and the Lat­vians, who regard the term as»modern«(31 %), while less than 10 % regard it as»outdated"(50 % go for»neither one nor the other«). This differs considerably from the scores recorded in France and Italy, where the majority regard sovereignty as»out­dated«(49 % and 53 %, respectively). The lack of political affil­iation in relation to sovereignty is another distinctively German feature: only 3 % of those asked consider the term»left-wing«, 5 %»right-wing«, while the consensus of a large majority (77 %) is that it is»neither left-wing nor right-wing«(15 % had no opinion). In the other countries opinions are more divided, and while the majority of Europeans(58 %) do not attribute any political affiliation to the word, for the remainder it is rather as­sociated with the right(23 %) than with the left(6 %). Finally, when asked to choose from a list the two words that they most associate with the term»sovereignty« more than half of Germans opt for»independence«(mentioned by 63 %) and »self-determination«(53 %), with»freedom«(35 %) taking third place. Once again, the Germans look favourably on the no­tion, in contrast to southern Europe. In France, Italy and Spain, the words»power« and»nationalism« come to mind instead. EUROPEAN SOVEREIGNTY: TWO WORDS THAT GO TOGETHER WELL Do the largely positive connotations observed in Germany indi­cate stronger support for the concept of»European s­ overeignty«?