For over a decade, scholars of European studies have been studying a phenomenon referred to as the politicization of the European Union, usually defined as the intensification of a political debate, the polarization of opinions, and public resonance. This article extends existing explanatory models by offering a systematic theorization of the role of emotions in EU politicization to establish that emotions are integral to every step of the process. First, they are prerequisites as actors and audiences need to be emotionally invested in an issue to engage in a debate about it. Second, they are drivers since they fuel debates and allow them to get heated and polarized. Third, they are outcomes since politicization will engender new emotional investments and sensitivities. The analytical added value of integrating emotions into explanatory models is illustrated through the case of the Brexit campaign.

Studies on European narratives predominantly focus on which narratives about the EU exist and which are more salient for political actors and audiences. The question remains as to how political actors can strategically utilize those EU narratives at a national level to justify their decision-making and further their objectives. We argue that to render narratives efficacious in convincing audiences of the appropriateness of political decisions, actors engage in Gefühlspolitikemotional politicsrather than Realpolitik by strategically (re)constructing EU narratives and emphasizing their intersections with national narratives and collective memory to construct emotionally compelling stories and moral imperatives. Therefore, how EU narratives are utilized on a national level is more dependent on the national context and their affective appeal than on their actual content. We demonstrate our argument by looking at the case of the German government narrating the EU during the migration crisis. We show how the government anchored the European peace narrative in German collective memory to construct compelling moral imperatives that significantly narrowed the discursive space and let the German government's policies appear as apolitical necessities without alternative.

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Changes in public opinion and civil society over the last decade have shown that citizens, particularly in old EU Member States, have developed more complex attitudes towards European integration. While the European project was previously generally described as a teleological depoliticized project, aiming at building peace and comforting growth, different competing visions of the European project are nowadays acknowledged and surface among the public on occasions, like referendums or treaty negotiations. While EU official narratives are documented by studies on the European institutions or the visions of leaders and parties, their empirical analysis at the citizens' level is still fragmented. Using focus group data in four countries (France, Portugal, Italy and Belgium) and three social groups (21 group interviews), we provide a comparative qualitative answer to how citizens envision European integration. Our results show that, first, official narratives do not fail to reach citizens, but they are also loosened, contested, and do not systematically produce a sense of common belonging. Second, they highlight the importance of socio-economic contexts, as well as national and personal experience in the re-appropriation of these narratives.

This article synthesizes scholarship on narratives and Kleinian defense mechanisms against anxiety to develop a framework that enables a nuanced understanding of ontological security-seeking dynamics in times of crisis. Using the case study of the German narrative of the European Union during the socalled migration crisis of 2015, this article engages with the broader question of how unconscious phantasy influences and guides decision-making processes on a collective level as well as the question of how exactlynarratives help subjects to manage anxiety to maintain a sense of ontological security. We show that, in the case of Germany, the EU offers a highly affective political myth that has guided both the decisionmaking of the government during the crisis and the construction of German self-identity narratives by attempting to introject the good part-object of "Europeanness." Crucially, German self-identity narratives and narratives on the EU were not only inextricably linked but the EU also became an idealized (Kleinian) part-object. During the so-called migration crisis, this fostered processes of projective identification whereby decisions subverting European values and humanitarian narratives as well as general "badness" were externalized and projected onto other member states, most notably the Visegrád states.