The main objective of the study was to determine the relationship between patriotism (critical and uncritical) as a dimension of national identity and attitude towards the European Union. The study included 1,407 participants aged 20-90 years of whom 726 were women and 681 men. Data were collected in an oral survey of households, on a probabilistically selected, multistage stratified sample. The principal component analysis extracted two relatively independent factors that are meaningfully related to the two components of the expectations of joining the EU: the first factor relates to the positive expectations of joining the EU or the improvement of the economic and the state situation in general, and we called it the EU optimism, and the other factor relates to the negative expectations of joining the EU or the fear of loss of identity, resources and political independence, and we called it the EU pessimism. In order to check whether it is possible to predict EU optimism/EU pessimism, based on the degree of expression of critical and uncritical patriotism, we conducted a hierarchical regression analysis. In the first block we have included socio-demographic characteristics (gender, age and education), in the second EU pessimism/optimism, and in the third critical and uncritical patriotism. The results showed that in both cases the selected set of prediction blocks is low, but significantly correlated with the criterion and that, with the introduction of variables; critical and uncritical patriotism in the third step, the total explained variance criteria significantly increases. Therefore, we conclude that the contribution of variables of patriotism in predicting EU optimism and EU pessimism is statistically significant.