Voices of Europe · Data map 01

The map of trust —
and where it stops.

Across Europe, the European Values Study asks a simple question: do you trust people of another nationality? The answers draw a map. Trust runs high in the Nordic north and thins as you move south and east. Romania sits near the floor — 26%. Hover any country.

Trust in people of another nationality — % completely or somewhat · arranged geographically

The Romanian floor

26%of Romanians trust people of another nationality (EVS, verbatim)

Among the lowest in Europe — comparable to Cyprus, lower than Bulgaria, and roughly a third of the Nordic level. Trust here is warm at the centre, cold at the edges.

← Lower trustHigher trust →

The pattern is almost geological. Trust drops as the circle widens — from people you know, to neighbours, to people of another religion, to people of another nationality. The question is never whether it drops. It is how steeply.

In Romania, the slope is a cliff.

This isn't a moral failing — it is a historical inheritance. Societies that lived through communism, occupation and discontinuous borders learn to trust narrowly: the family, the village, the known. A century of broken institutions teaches you to ask who someone is before you let them in. But the cost is real: generalised trust is the soil in which civic institutions grow. Where it's thin, everything else has to compensate.

Source & method. European Values Study 2017 (EVS5). Romania's figure — 26.0% trust in people of another nationality — is reproduced verbatim from EVS dissemination material. Other country values are illustrative of the documented EVS gradient (Nordic-high → Eastern-European-lower), not exact per-country table reproductions; the direction and ordering follow EVS findings, the precise tick is editorial. A later build will replace these with exact per-country EVS calculations from the open GESIS dataset. This map is a narrative reading, not original statistical research.