PUBLIC DISCUSSION AS AN IMPORTANT FACTOR OF THE EUROPEAN AND EURO-ATLANTIC INTEGRATION OF THE CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE Hrushetskyi Bohdan Pavlovich, associate professor of the Department of International Relations and Social Sciences, National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, Ph.D. in Political Sciences, hrushetskyi_bohdan@ukr.net After the collapse of the communist regimes in the Central and Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc countries of the region met the uncertain future, especially in the economic and security spheres. Integration into the European Union was considered as an important means of ensuring the well-being of society by a significant part of their population, and especially by the elites. Society of Central and Eastern Europe, depending on their attitude to the EU, could be divided into three groups. Cosmopolitan optimists (or Euro-optimists) believed that joining this organization would bring dynamic development, improve living conditions and align the level of economic development with the countries of Western Europe. Cosmopolitan neoliberals feared a return via Brussels to the socialist policies. Non- cosmopolitan skeptics (or Europessimists) opposed joining the EU for fear of losing national sovereignty. Europessimists considered the convergence of different economic and social regions of the West and the East difficult, as a result the gaps between both regions should have grown rather than decreased [2, p. 81; 6, p. 69-70]. The ratio of Euro-optimists and Euro-pessimists was not the same in different countries. For example, the Slovenian researcher M. Velikonia notes that in Slovenia accession to the EU was taken for granted, as a return to the state in which it has always been. In Serbia, unlike Slovenia, there was no consensus regarding the stability of the European path [14, p. 14-16]. In independent Slovakia, until the end of 1998, there was no purposeful policy towards joining the EU, although the authorities officially declared their commitment to integration [1, p. 59-60]. In Poland, for the first time, Prime Minister T. Mazowiecki made an official statement in support of European integration back in February 1990 [11, p. 50]. Yet in the mid-1990s. public support for European integration was insufficient for a successful entry into the union. At that time, a small number of the population of Central and Southeastern Europe could rely on Western countries - from 1% in Hungary and the Czech Republic to 7% in Romania [7, p. 25]. The problem of security and national sovereignty was also closely related to European integration. And on this issue the positions of Euro-optimists and Euro-