Reasoning Against Europe. Public and Popular Euroscepticism in Ireland, Austria, and Hungary (A Comparative Qualitative Study)
Final Report Abstract
The Eurozone‐crisis has put the European Union (EU) under enormous pressure and has raised increased societal alert regarding the EU’s legitimacy. That the future of the EU depends on its ability to develop a legitimate form of political order is a widely shared view, and a large and vibrant literature scrutinises how far it has come this way. The research funded through my Forschungsstipendium, by contrast, is not about determining how legitimate the EU is, be it in terms of specific normative criteria or in terms of quantifiable support by the European citizens. It addresses a less well‐understood aspect of EU legitimacy: the discursive politics of narrative and argumentative construction and contestation regarding what legitimacy (and its lack) might mean in the case of the EU. These naturally predetermine any assessment of its legitimacy, and are a field of fierce contention. In the book manuscript I worked on as a Forschungsstipendiat I trace the struggle for legitimacy in EU politics, moving from the 1950s to the mid‐2000s. I tell a story of how the EU institutions, Europe’s political leaders, and the participants of public debate in the member‐states fought over what the point of integration was, what form it should take, and how legitimate it was in the form it was being given. I intertwine two levels of analysis. On the one hand, I analyse long‐term patterns and shifts in the discourses of leading politicians as well as the European institutions, most prominently the European Commission, Council, Parliament, and Court of Justice. Here I look at publicly available official documents, speeches, press conferences, policy papers, treaty language, and the like. I combine this, on the other, with short‐term case studies that examine how these discourses were received and contested in national public spheres. In this context I focus on two particular member‐states - France and Germany - and on two moments of exceptionally intense public debate on European integration, one before and one after the 2004 enlargement: the controversies over the Treaty of Maastricht in the early 1990s and the failed EU Constitution in 2004‐05. For the member‐state level, my sources include mainly newspaper articles. Overall, the book charts the discursive landscape of competing ideas on what constitutes legitimacy in the case of the EU. It offers a long‐term discourse‐historical narrative of shifts in this topography of what it was generally plausible to claim in this respect. Throughout the book, the focus is on the content of discourses rather than the actors advancing them. The questions guiding my analysis are: How did different discourses represent the EU and its place in the world? What did ‘legitimacy’ mean in different dis‐ courses? Moreover, how did competing discourses emerge, evolve, and interplay? I investigate how some discourses gained prominence over others, shaping how we make sense of the EU. The interest of including both EU‐wide official sources and case studies of public debates in select member‐state is to explore how competing discourses did or did not travel between administrative‐political elites and public‐domain debates, as well as between different national public spheres. The picture I paint portrays the history of legitimating the EU as a never‐ending contest, which, I argue, is as old as European integration itself. It is the struggle over the ends and goals of integration, as well as a balancing act - which was inescapable given the nature of the integration project - between ‘bringing the people in’ and ‘keeping them out’. Relative legitimacy is a fragile, short‐lived, and contested state of affairs that needs to be re‐established continuously, and the book investigates the dynamics of contestation and social construction involved in the legitimation, contestation, and ultimately the exercise, of political power.
Publications
- 2010. ‘Struggles Over EU Legitimacy. The Case for an Inductive Approach to EU Legitimacy’. Annual Conference of the Council for European Studies, Montreal 16‐18/04
Claudia Schrag
- 2010. ‘The Quest for EU Legitimacy. How to Study a Never‐Ending Crisis’. Perspectives on Europe 40/2:27‐35
Claudia Schrag
- 2010. ‘The Struggle for EU Legitimacy’. Political Ideologies Seminar, Oxford, 23/02
Claudia Schrag
- 2011. ‘Demos, Democracy, and the Conditions of EU Legitimacy in Discourses of the EU Institutions and the French and German Public Spheres’. Dreiländertagung of German, Swiss, and Austrian Political Scientists, Basel, 13‐14/01
Claudia Schrag
