From Euroscepticism to Resistance to European Integration: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Abstract

This article aims at contributing to the ongoing academic debate about European integration. It stresses the need for an interdisciplinary approach rooted in history and political science. The argument is twofold. Most of the existing literature overlooks the historical dimension of contention over the making of Europe and implicitly makes it a contemporary phenomenon defined as Euroscepticism. This, it is argued, has led to some major analytical deadlocks. Consequently, it is necessary to reframe the debate through the notion of resistances to Europe. Resistances can be defined as manifestations of hostility towards one (or several) aspect(s) of European integration perceived as a threat with respect to one's values. This notion, this paper suggests, is particularly adequate to the study of past and present contention over European integration, which is highlighted with various empirical examples.

French Political Parties in Campaign (1989–2004): A Configurational Analysis of Political Discourses on Europe

“…Then, the consistency of party-based positions is overall limited, attitudes vary a great deal from a field to another (but also within the same field), so that support for the EU in one field (representation) does not necessarily translate into support in another field (policy). Parties divide upon a set of EU issues, so their touchstone of dissent (Taggart, 1998;Crespy & Verschueren, 2009) varies across the analysed dimensions, producing in the end a peculiar pattern that differs from the more traditional patterns of party competition of France. Additionally, variation emerges across time.…”

The Struggle for EU Legitimacy

“…European identity in both mass public opinion and newspaper debates in five member-states, see Risse 2010. For a comparative study of "European Stories" in intellectual debates about Europe in national contexts, see Lacroix and Nicola ï dis 2010; on social theories of Europeanization, see Delanty and Rumford 2005; and for accounts of the ideas, ideologies, and identities underlying specifically resistance to the EU, see Heine 2009, or Crespy and Verschueren 2009. Finally, on self-images projected by the European institutions, see e.g.…”

Introduction: InterpretingBritishEuropean Policy

“…In taking this approach the contributors have actively responded to calls by a series of writers in recent years to expand the empirical basis and theoretical framework for our studies of Euroscepticism. Suggestively for the special issue, we find much to recommend the view that interdisciplinarity, or perhaps more accurately multidisciplinarity (Warleigh‐Lack, ; Usherwood and Startin, ; Vasilopoulou, ), and the exploration of ‘resistances’ to European integration offer fruitful ways forward, especially insofar as appreciating ‘how the phenomenon is rooted and constructed within national political spaces’, within and well beyond political parties (Crespy and Vershueren, , p. 382). Party political discourses feature prominently within the contributions in this special issue, but they do so as part of a multidimensional inquiry into the heritage of Britain's European travails over a much longer period than is acknowledged in the extant literature.…”