1.1 The Purpose of the Book
National parliaments have become the most important and visible arena for public political debate about the state and future of European integration. This is a new development, as policy-making in the European Union (EU) remained out of the spotlight of public debate at the national level well beyond the transition to political union in the Maastricht Treaty. More recently, however, several important and contentious events in EU decision-making have contributed to a more active engagement of national parliaments in the debate on questions of European integration. Events such as the failure of the Constitutional Treaty, decisions related to the Eurozone financial crisis, questions of European foreign policy, and the ongoing enlargement of the EU to and beyond its current 28 Member States have brought European issues into the spotlight of public debate (cp. Cramme and Hobolt 2015; Risse 2014). From a political science perspective, studying the public debate about the EU in parliaments is attractive for several reasons. The stances of political actors and parties can be studied firsthand from statements in parliamentary debate and do not have to be derived from secondary sources such as media reports or expert surveys (Bakker et al. 2012). Parliamentary debate opens up a multifaceted and dynamic picture of party positions as a variety of issues related to the EU are debated, and discussions evolve and can be studied over time. Most importantly, parliamentary debate is arguably the only level of empirical investigation where leaders of political parties engage with each other in a direct and interactive exchange of claims and arguments, in contrast to party manifestos or campaign statements, where no such direct interaction can be observed. In this sense, the study of parliamentary debate opens up an exceptionally rich and promising insight into the political positions of parliamentary parties and their leaders toward a variety of EU-related topics and the contention that evolves between representatives of competing political parties.
So far, little research exists that investigates public parliamentary debate about European integration beyond the quantitative measurement of the amount and length of debates. This book seeks to fill this gap in the literature. The main task of this book is to uncover how public political contention evolves in parliamentary debates, and what forms of political polarization between parliamentary parties can be observed in a comparison of four European legislatures. Against this background, the purpose of this book is to link two debates that currently play a central role for research about European integration: first, the investigation of the effects of EU decision-making on the politics of its Member States, as commonly addressed through the term âEuropeanizationâ (Ladrech 2010; Graziano and Vink 2008); and second, research dealing with the perception that the process of European integration is going through a transformative change through the increased public visibility, political salience, and contestation of its policies and decisions, as expressed through the term âpoliticizationâ (Risse 2015a; Statham and Trenz 2013; Hooghe and Marks 2012; de Wilde and ZĂŒrn 2012; Hooghe and Marks 2009). Through this connection, the book positions itself both in the study of European integration and in the comparative study of parliaments and party systems.
In this context, the book seeks to achieve three specific goals. The first task is descriptive and aims at analyzing the content of parliamentary debates about governance in the EU. This study seeks to specify what aspects of European integration are contested in the public debate between domestic political actors. This includes a clarification of the institutional level of referenceâthat is, to what degree supranational institutions and policies are contested in parliamentary debate in comparison to contention about domestic actors, institutions, and decisions that are addressed in debates about European multilevel governance. Furthermore, this study presents a comparison between different topics of debate that deal either with the EU as a political system or with specific policies conducted within this political system. Through the comparison of these topics, the study seeks to compare political contestation that emerges with regard to relatively fundamental, âconstitutionalâ questions of European integration, and contention that addresses specific decisions taken within the political framework of the EU. To address these questions, the empirical chapters of the book present data to map debates about European integration, and to compare points of reference and degrees of contention to learn more about what aspects of European integration are contested. In essence, this descriptive part of the study aims at a clarification of the question of whether it is the EU and its institutions or just specific decisions and policies that are contested in domestic political debates. The presentation of this empirical data fills a gap in the existing research literature: although the term âpoliticizationâ is now widely used to describe changes in the public perception of European governance, the term lacks empirical specification with regard to the objects and levels of reference of political contention. It is, however, of critical importance whether politicization means an increased contestation of European institutions as such, or just specific decisions taken within them. In order to specify how public debate about the EU in national parliaments results in a contestation of European governance, the empirical evidence collected in this volume presents empirical insights about three aspects of debate: the intensity of contention in a comparison between various issues, the relative frequency of different types of mobilizing argument that are used to justify and contest politics at the EU level, and patterns of political polarization emerging between political parties in the parliamentary arena.
The second task is theoretical. This study combines a discourse theoretical approach with a model of differential Europeanization and insights from the literature on party politics and national parliaments to present an integrated framework for the comparative analysis of parliamentary discourse. This theoretical model is used to investigate two essential aspects of public parliamentary debate, namely the two distinct dimensions of discursive justification and party political polarization. Linking both dimensions, the main question asked in this book is how the use of different discursive frames that are used by parliamentary speakers for the justification and contestation of European politics relates to the emergence of different patterns of political polarization between parliamentary parties. Moreover, beyond the search for generalizable links between discourse and polarization, the theoretical model that will be presented in this study is designed to allow systematic comparisons between debates that differ with regard to topics, types of discourse, involved sets of political parties, and that take place within different national contexts. A second question investigated in this study is how these various context factors influence forms of justification and contestation in parliamentary debates. To explore these questions, the theoretical approach presented here distinguishes two main types of discursive frames used for the public justification of European decision-making: normative arguments that are based on claims about values, conceptions of collective identity, and the normative standards of justice and legitimacy on the one hand, and pragmatic arguments based on claims about the effects of decisions on the gain or loss of political, legal, and economic resources, on the other. This approach builds on discourse theoretical approaches that have previously been used in studies about EU enlargement (Sjursen 2002; 2006a, b, c), but expands this approach to a distinction of six discursive frames that will be used for the empirical analysis of parliamentary debate. Beyond the task of systematization and comparison, the distinction of these discursive frames relates the present study to research that discusses the politicization of European (and globalized) governance in relation to the rising contentiousness of cultural identifications and claims, and investigates the relative salience of economic and cultural frames in public debates on globalization (Kriesi et al. 2012; Kriesi et al. 2008, 2012; Hoeglinger et al. 2012, p. 237ff.; Hooghe and Marks 2009). Distinguishing different forms of justification of European integration according to these six discursive frames, and measuring their relative salience as a source of political contention, can therefore help us to understand what types of mobilizing argument are most important as drivers of public contention about European integration in the public discourse of national parliamentsâparticularly in a comparison of cultural, normative, and resource-based claims. Moreover, the distinction of normative and pragmatic types of argument is used to investigate how different types of political parties frame their position toward European integration, and how their interaction evolves within levels of debate that are framed in different ways. In this sense, one of the main aims of this study is to show that patterns of polarization between parliamentary parties differ considerably in a comparison of different levels of discourseâand therefore, that the emergence of different forms of polarization between parties can be explained through the use of different discursive frames in the political debate. Through its discourse theoretical approach, the study therefore seeks to contribute to both the explanation of the sources of political contention about the EU and the description and explanation of the forms of polarization that emerge through this contention between parliamentary parties.
The third task of the study is comparative. The research question and theoretical approach of this book are primarily aimed at uncovering links between structures of discourse and party political polarization that can be generalized across a variety of cases. However, an additional question considered in this study asks how institutional, topical, and party political factors influence the intensity of contestation and polarization in a comparison between different cases. To explore both generalizable commonalities and case-specific differences, the book therefore investigates parliamentary debates about European integration in the main chamber of parliament of four EU Member States: the Austrian Nationalrat, the French Assemblée Nationale, the German Bundestag, and the British House of Commons. This choice of cases includes considerable variation in several factors that can be expected to influence the interaction and polarization of parliamentary parties: in institutional terms, this selection of cases includes both majoritarian democracies (France, UK) and two of the most prominent examples for consensus systems in Europe (Germany, Austria). Within this distinction, the role of the main chamber of parliament is typically described as an arena legislature in the first two cases, and as a transformative legislature in the latter two cases. Furthermore, the cases differ with regard to the expected polarization of parliamentary parties in relation to European integration. The choice of countries includes cases in which the major mainstream parties have considerable (UK), conditional (France), or only relatively minor (Austria, Germany) differences in their position toward the issue of European integration. With regard to smaller Eurosceptic challenger parties, the four cases include examples where such parties are either absent (UK), present on the political left (France, Germany), or on the populist right (Austria) end of the political spectrum. Against this background, it is important to clarify that within this study, a case considered for comparison is not the entire parliamentary debate in one of the four countries, but specific segments of deba...
