The Impact of European Integration on West European Politics

Committed Pro-Europeans Strike Back

Luca Carrieri

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030481025
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030481032
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyses emerging trends in the politicisation of EU conflicts in Western Europe between 2006 and 2019, evaluating the transformative effects arising from multiple crises – the Euro crisis, the migration crisis and the Brexit Referendum. It describes how EU issues have been increasingly emphasised and polarised by various political parties – both the mainstream pro-EU and anti-EU protest parties – and have been transformed into more meaningful determinants of voting. The respective chapters investigate the fluctuations in EU issue entrepreneurship and EU issue voting, identifying which party types have been more likely to benefit from their EU issue proximity to voters, and assessing the growing politicisation of the EU conflict in both South European and North-Western countries. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of political parties, European politics, Euroscepticism and voting behaviour.

© The Author(s) 2021

L. CarrieriThe Impact of European Integration on West European PoliticsPalgrave Studies in European Union Politicshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48103-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Politicisation of European Integration in the Aftermath of the Multiple Crises

Luca Carrieri¹

(1)

LUISS University, Rome, Italy

Luca Carrieri

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

PoliticisationIntervened countriesNon-intervened countriesPro-/anti-EU dimensionMultiple crises

End Abstract

1.1 Party Systems and European Integration

Since the foundation of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957 and until the beginning of the 2000s, the academic literature had continuously highlighted the weak impact of European integration on the national party systems and party competition. According to Mair (2000), who epitomised this view, European integration had little effect, both on the format and mechanics¹ of party systems. Europeanisation did not affect the number of important parties competing in the national elections and only a tiny group of parties were established to primarily mobilise the opposition to or support for European integration. Thus, the anti-/pro-EU conflict did not constitute a new dimension of party competition, while the left–right divide dominated the partisan alignments in Europe, significantly predicting electoral behaviour.

The lack of influence of European integration on the dynamics of party competition was to a great extent due to its peculiar development. The process of European integration had started in the 1950s, involving well-established nation states, being mainly driven by national governments under the pressure of transnational economic interests. The pivotal role of political and economic elites in shaping the European project was accompanied by an extensive popular disengagement. Even if some scholars have underlined widespread citizen approval of the European project (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970), Hooghe and Marks (2009) referred to a phenomenon of permissive consensus, which characterised public opinion trends regarding integration. Indeed, the vast majority of the European public did not fully perceive the political outcomes of the integration, leaving a wide space for national governments to expand the integration project. Consequently, European integration did not assume the status of a political issue for the voters and its saliency remained quite low for the whole period, with no incentive for the political parties to transform it into a dimension of political contestation.

The Maastricht Treaty, which has been widely identified as one of the critical junctures in the European integration process (Fabbrini 2015), triggered a slow downward trend in the popular approval of the European Union project (Eichenberg and Dalton 2007). This Treaty,² not only marked a clear transfer of functions to supranational and intergovernmental institutions, but it also lay the foundations for the European Monetary Union (EMU). However, this sudden shift towards European integration was not complemented by a widespread development of an inclusive European identity (Hooghe and Marks 2009), resulting in elements of discontent towards the EU. For the first time, Eurosceptic sentiments began to emerge across the continent, visible even among the EEC founding member states, which had previously embodied the European project. The signing of the Maastricht Treaty marked an unprecedented watershed in the mobilisation of EU opposition: “hand in hand with an accelerated process of European integration in recent years has come a rise in outright opposition to the European Union (EU) in party systems across Western Europe. Increased Euroscepticism has been the corollary of increased integration” (Taggart 1998, 363). Thus, the popular support for European integration switched from a permissive consensus to a constraining dissensus (Hooghe and Marks 2009), opening up windows of opportunity for the entrepreneurship of anti-European parties.

Some scholars have recently refined these insights by coming up with the Authority Transfer Hypothesis: “The politicisation of European integration is driven by transfers of authority from the national to the European level. Because the Maastricht Treaty represents a very critical event in this process, we expect a significant and lasting increase in politicisation in the period after the Maastricht Treaty” (Grande and Hutter 2016b, 26). However, this hypothesis has found only a mixed empirical backing, with many qualifications occurring in the cross-national analysis (Grande and Hutter 2016a; Hutter and Grande 2014). In spite of the changes in public opinion, the pro-/anti-European orientations remained a “sleeping giant” (Van der Eijk and Franklin 2004) in the immediate post-Maastricht decade, without finding any significant party outlets to express this latent conflict. The political parties that made any radical attempts to emphasise European integration issues failed in their objective to maximise on votes (see: Taggart 1998). Thus, in spite of their potential, EU issues had been quite weak in affecting the morphology of Western European party systems (Bartolini 2005).

1.2 Research Question and Hypotheses

Nowadays, the conflict over European integration appears to be more politicised, affecting electoral choices in Europe. This work attempts to disentangle the complex interplay between the supply-side and demand-side of the EU issues occurring in the aftermath of the multiple set of crises—the Euro crisis, refugee crisis and Brexit referendum. On the one hand, the protest parties, which are outside the mainstream and positioned towards the extreme left–right poles, may have found new incentives for politicising the EU issues. Traditionally, protest parties have been electorally weak along the left–right dimension, being more likely to mobilise the EU conflict to win more votes. On the other hand, the mainstream parties, positioned closer to the centre of the left–right continuum, have not appeared to have had any incentives to politicise this conflict. Thus, these actors have been more likely to deflect the EU issues, maintaining the established conflicts to prevent electoral losses. The outbreak of several exogenous shocks (the Euro crisis, migration crisis and Brexit referendum), unsettling the continent in the last decade, has reinforced this set of strategic incentives and electoral patterns.

As a result, a research question emerges:

In the aftermath of the multiple set of crises, how much has the European integration conflict reshaped the electoral supply and party preferences in the national party systems?

To respond to the question, arguments will be developed on how European integration has affected the party supply and voter preferences for the protest and mainstream parties. By covering both party strategies and voting behaviour, the empirical tests will have a two-fold objective. The first step is to examine the fluctuations of party positioning and emphasis on the EU issues, understanding whether the crises have influenced or not the party supply. The notion of EU issue entrepreneurship (Hobolt and De Vries 2015; De Vries and Hobolt 2012) is adopted to summarise the party position and issue emphasis on the EU-related policies, relying on four rounds of CHES surveys (2006, 2010, 2014, 2017; Bakker et al. 2015; Polk et al. 2017). By observing the cross-time variations of EU issue entrepreneurship, the first empirical part allows for identifying which party type—protest or mainstream—has actually (de-)politicised the EU conflict within the Western European party systems.

Specifically, the first expectation is that the protest parties have tried to reverse their ephemeral voting shares, enhancing their entrepreneurial efforts on the EU conflict. This has been called the Protest Entrepreneurship Hypothesis (H1). By means of this empirical test, the objective is to understand if the protest parties have seized on the crises-related windows of opportunity, politicising the EU conflict. The second prediction is that the mainstream parties have sought to dampen the EU conflict, maintaining the left–right dimension as an asset in electoral competition. In t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The Politicisation of European Integration in the Aftermath of the Multiple Crises
• 2. Politicisation Through Manipulation: Strategic Party Efforts on EU Issues
• 3. How Parties Respond to European Integration? Explaining the Mainstream/Protest Dichotomy
• 4. EU Politicisation in Western European Party Systems: How Mainstream Parties Learned to Stop Worrying and Became Europhile Issue Entrepreneurs
• 5. Voters and European Integration: The Demand-Side of Politics and EU Issue Voting in Western Europe
• 6. EU Politicisation in Western European Political Systems: From a Eurosceptic Punctuation to a Europhile Backlash
• 7. Conclusions: A History of a Europhile Backlash
• Back Matter