Europeanisation and Renationalisation E-Book

• Herausgeber: Verlag Barbara Budrich
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 553

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The book explores how the European Union and its members have been renegotiating Europeanisation and renationalization in response to the multiple crises they faced over recent years. The authors highlight varying understandings of 'crises' in different national and supranational policy and institutional contexts. They show how in some cases these have challenged the legitimacy of European Union norms and institutions and even triggered disintegration, while in others these crises have served as sources of inspiration for European social innovation and political development.

Leseprobe

Ulrike LiebertAnne Jenichen (eds.)

Europeanisation andRenationalisation

Learning from Crises for Innovationand Development

Verlag Barbara BudrichOpladen • Berlin • Toronto 2019

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Table of Contents

Anne Jenichen and Ulrike Liebert

1. The double-edged nature of crises – sources of decline; resources for development

I. Europeanisation versus Neo-Nationalism in Times of Crisis

Joachim Schild

2. France’s European politics in the face of the polycrisis

Ben Crum

3. Living with anti-pluralist populism in Europe: Insights from the Dutch 2017 elections

Vratislav Havlík

4. Europeanisation or renationalisation? The Czech Republic facing the euro-, economic and refugee crises

Dimitri A. Sotiropoulos

5. In the wake of the economic crisis: the empowerment of (un-)civil society in Greece

Stefan Wallaschek

6. The politics of solidarity in Europe’s migration crisis: Media discourses in Germany and Ireland

Sezin Dereci

7. Civil society as an agent of Europeanisation in EU accession countries: Comparing Turkey and Serbia

II. Reexamining the Crisis of European Integration

Anne Jenichen

8. The British EU referendum and ethnic minorities: Lessons for European integration

Natascha Zaun

9. EU decision-making in asylum policy: Lessons from the ‘refugee crisis’

Florian Wittmann

10. State capacity in crisis: EU conditionality and administrative reforms in the post-communist new member states

Petra Guasti and David Siroki

11. European Human Rights between transnational order and domestic politics

Andreas Heinrich and Heiko Pleines

12. Towards a common European energy policy? Energy security debates in Poland and Germany; the case of the Nord Stream pipeline

Gabriele Abels

13. Theorising European integration and Europeanisation through a gendered lens

III. European Innovation and Development

Dennis Zagermann

14. The European Central Bank in the euro crisis: The case of the OMT program

Tilmann Morata Liebert

15. Global climate change governance from Paris to Montreal: Enabling factors for ambitious EU climate action

Anders Hentschel

16. The European governance of economic and monetary crises – lessons for democratic legitimacy

Gesche Lange and Ulrike Liebert

17. The European Parliament in hard times: potentials and constraints of governing the Euro crisis

Laura Landorff

18. Intergroups as alternative venues to the European Parliament for civil society

Adriana Ciancio

19. What democracy for the European Political Union? Lessons for a European party system

Conclusion

Ulrike Liebert

20. Europe’s unfinished journey: diverging narratives, innovative concepts and political development

Authors’ notes

Index

1. [9] The double-edged nature of crises – sources of decline; resources for development

Anne Jenichen and Ulrike Liebert

Introduction

This book contributes to the ‘debate on the future of Europe’ that the European Commission launched in 2017 and that supposedly will not end when the European elections in 2019 are over. The aim of this debate is to respond to the shocks of 2016 – a year of horrors for the European project, given the unexpected triumph of anti-European forces, first witnessed in the Brexit referendum in the UK in June and then in the US presidential elections in November. The present contributions are written in the vein of hope that it actually might be possible to learn from external and internal shocks and policy failures – and that such lessons will be useful for confronting the future. They are the outcome of individual efforts and collective discussions focusing on the years 2016 and 2017 on the part of European researchers, politicians and policy makers connected to the Jean Monnet Centre for European Studies at the University of Bremen. Their aim is to take stock of responses to the multiple crises the European Union has been struggling with over the past decade. The shared interest is to provide answers to a set of common questions: How can we gain a more nuanced understanding of the different facets of such ‘crises’, of their double-edged nature as sources of decline and destruction, but also as resources for innovation and development? In this vein, we aim at bringing together analyses of the successes and failures in managing the various crises with innovative ideas and propositions regarding the present and future development of the Union. Each of the chapters draws on state-of-the-art theory, methods and evidence. However, in the present context, the authors are more interested in enhancing the general public understanding and assessment of the EU’s responses to the crises, rather than contributing more narrowly to social scientific research.

In the second decade of the 21st century, the post-war European project provides proof of a complex crisis that has fulled pessimistic as well as optimistic narratives concerning the future of the European Union. Following the [10] negative story-lines in response to the crisis, the deepening of European integration has allegedly stalled, and disintegration is looming large. Neo-nationalism has become salient on the European political agenda, with the British decision to leave the EU as its ultimate culmination to date. Member states are more reluctant to ‘pool’ their sovereignty in sensitive domains of national identity that include control over money, borders, and citizenship identity. National governments are less willing to delegate competences to supranational entities, let alone financial and fiscal powers. By contrast, the more optimistic accounts draw on past experiences of EU crises which have frequently advanced Europeanisation, meaning the progressive harmonisation of shared legal norms and common public policies across the member states. In the present constellation, the Europeanisation agenda suggests that the EU is not in decline but is reinventing itself as a unique engine of change, driving cooperation, coordination and convergence of member states, the structural and cultural diversity of which may have become more pronounced as a result of the crises. In the perspective of Europeanisation, neo-nationalism and the agenda of re-nationalisation cannot provide solutions to the crises. Rather, nationalistic forces appear as a crucial part of the problem, as they aggravate the power asymmetries between nationally fragmented democratic governments vis-à-vis the transnational drivers of economic, social and cultural globalisation.

The EU’s recent crises and geopolitical conflicts are cases in point concerning the dramatic challenges that global dynamics have posed to European policy makers. These started with the outbreak of the sovereign debt crisis in the euro area at the end of 2009, continued with conflicts with Russia over energy security in 2009 and annexation of the Crimea in 2014, the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015 and the Brexit referendum in 2016, followed by a surge of anti-EU populist forces elsewhere, within as well as outside the EU, including Austria, the Netherlands, France, and most recently the U.S. under the Trump presidency. These multiple predicaments have jeopardised the EU’s roadmap for an ‘ever deeper Union’, undermined its commitments to open societies, and weakened solidarity among member states as well as citizens. The EU’s era of peoples’ permissive consensus in support of European policy makers has given way to falling levels of trust and invigorated nationalist populist Euro-scepticism, hampering common solutions to joint problems, whether in the area of immigration, of economic stagnation, security or global warming. Nevertheless, although rare, crises are not anomalies but normal occurrences in any complex and dynamic system such as the EU.

This introduction starts with clarifying the notion of ‘crisis’ that informs the present book. It then gives an overview of the twenty chapters contained in the three sections, dealing firstly with the domestic dynamics of Europeanisation versus neo-nationalism, turning secondly to re-examining the EU’s crises and, finally, critically reflecting on a selection of cases where European innovation and development have occurred.

[11] Towards a nuanced understanding of ‘crisis’ in the European context

Drawing on multi-disciplinary approaches to crisis management, crises are generally considered to be normal events in the development of organisations. Irrespective of their size or age, organisations regularly have to adapt to a changing environment. Moreover, they have to correct internal anomalies. Both are challenges to the status quo, which can manifest themselves in either abrupt or cumulative crises (Hwang and Lichtenthal 2000; Roux-Dufort 2009). An organisational crisis is conceived here as ‘a low-probability, high-impact event that threatens the viability of the organization [which] is characterized by ambiguity of cause, effect, and means of resolution, as well as by a belief that decisions must be made swiftly’ (Pearson and Clair 1998: 60). Consequently, crises should not be interpreted as purely negative incidents because ‘these events can also be an opportunity to redesign and restructure a faulty system and turn it into a better one’ (Carmeli and Schaubroeck 2008: 192).

Over the EU’s sixty years of development, the recent crises have not been the first occurrences to challenge its institutional system. One major example was the ‘empty chair crisis’ in the mid-1960s, when France, due to its opposition against the planned introduction of majority decisions in the Common Agricultural Policy, stayed away from negotiations in the then European Economic Community’s Council of Ministers, thus bringing the whole organisation to a standstill and exposing shortcomings in how the Council was working. The crisis was solved by the ‘Luxembourg compromise’ in 1966, which reformed decision-making in the Council and allowed for vetoes against resolutions if a member state believed such a resolution to be against its national interest (Palayret, Wallace and Winand 2006). Another crisis occurred when in 2005 the majority of French and Dutch citizens taking part in referenda rejected the ratification of the European Constitutional Treaty, eventually resolved by a compromise leading to the Treaty of Lisbon (2009).

Even though both predicaments have been conceived as major blows against European integration, the most recent difficulties are of a much greater magnitude that puts the whole European project potentially at risk. They feature many attributes of a transboundary crisis: ‘These crises have no clear beginning, escalate suddenly, and, in unforeseen directions, exploit linkages between functional and geographical domains’ (Boin 2009: 368). In the context of the EU, these kinds of transboundary crises impact all levels of the European multi-layered system of governance, spilling over from one policy sector to another, for instance, from the financial to the fiscal and monetary to the asylum and the border regime. The ‘refugee crisis’, for example, has divided the EU (Culik 2015), and moreover has put those euro area states hardest hit by [12] the sovereign debt crisis under additional pressure. Consider Italy and Greece, member states already under strain due to the debt crisis, where the largest number of refugees first arrived from Turkey and North Africa. Under the prevailing EU common asylum system, these states were responsible for processing asylum applications and for taking care of the asylum seekers within their territory. Given both countries’ scarcity of resources and weak administrative capacity vis-à-vis the scope of the challenge, after unsuccessfully demanding solidarity from European governments, they started to directly forward refugees to other member states (see Zaun’s and Wallascheck’s chapters in this volume). This practice quickly fuelled dissatisfaction with the Schengen regime and its main pillar: the free movement of people among European member states, creating momentum for populists to fuel a full-blown crisis of legitimacy of the EU.

According to Jürgen Habermas (1973), a legitimacy crisis results from a loss of confidence in the ability of administrative institutions to effectively govern. In fact, trust in European institutions has dramatically decreased since the beginning of the debt crisis, with a further dip occurring during the ‘refugee crisis’ and slowly recovering since then (Eurobarometer 2018). In the current situation, the EU is at a critical turning point. The crisis, like any other legitimation crisis, ‘can be resolved only through recalibration, which necessarily involves the communicative reconciliation of the actor’s or institution’s social identity, interests, or practices with the normative expectations of other actors within its realm of political action’ (Reus-Smit 2007: 172; see also Liebert, ch. 20). As Mlada Bukovansky (2002: 233) already observed more than ten years ago, ‘the Concert of Europe shows that legitimacy contests may in the end be managed by political leaders, if those leaders are able to learn the relevant lessons of the day and cobble together an order that takes into account both traditional claims and those of newly empowered (and/or newly dissatisfied) sociopolitical actors.’ Learning from crises, however, is a difficult task, particularly if there are no authoritative and widely accepted explanations of why and how the crisis happened and if the proposed solutions are contested (Boin 2009: 374). This is true regarding the crises that have afflicted the EU since 2010, all of which are at the centre of contention between opposed views. Many of these conflicting views are characterised by the dichotomy of ‘Europeanism vs. neonationalism’. Though certainly not new, this dichotomy now shapes the EU’s politics of crises more strongly than ever before. Highlighting this aspect enables us to capture the major conflict line at the heart of the current political crises. A closer look into the contentions between nationalist and pro-European responses to the crises serves to illustrate the point about this reinforced division.

[13] Europeanisation versus neo-nationalism in times of crises – cases of innovation and development

This book is structured in three parts: The first section ‘Europeanisation versus neo-nationalism in times of crises’ deals with the new political conflict line that increasingly shapes the domestic politics of the member states. The second part ‘Re-examining the crises of European integration’ explores some of the most pressing challenges to European unification from different, innovative angles. The final section ‘European Innovation and Development’ makes the case that the EU’s responses to crises, conflict and change were not only marked by policy failures but have also brought about important instances of innovation and development.

The country case studies and comparisons included in section I. ‘Europeanisation versus neo-nationalism in times of crises’ demonstrate that the emerging battle field between the forces of Europeanisation and those striving for neo-nationalism is neither limited to East-Central European member states nor to the EU-28 but reaches also into candidate and neighbouring states. Moreover, these struggles are not only fuelled by rising right-or left-wing populist political parties: they also have divisive effects within moderate, mainstream and governing political parties, and they can mobilise all sorts of civil as well as non-civil societal movements and organisations. To illustrate these points, each chapter looks more closely into the different national contexts of France, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Greece, Germany and Ireland, and Turkey and Serbia.

Here, France is certainly a prominent case in point. It became a most dramatic battle ground for pro- versus anti-European contentions, epitomised by Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in the French 2017 Presidential elections. As in the UK in 2016 as well as in Italy in 2018, these confrontations have been driven by the EU’s ‘polycrisis’ (Schild, ch. 2). Yet, most importantly, they have fuelled not only despair and anger against the EU but also new hopes for the future of Europe. The winning presidential candidate, Emmanuel Macron, succeeded in communicating his fresh ideas for strengthening the European Union across Europe.

The Netherlands, by comparison, signals less drama and more a normalisation of anti-pluralist populism, even if it does not come out victorious. Exhibiting clear parallels with anti-pluralist movements in other European countries, the Dutch experience raises fundamental questions for the EU as a whole (Crum, ch. 3).

A more peculiar case is the Czech Republic. Despite its close ties to the German economy and while prospering throughout the times of the euro crisis, [14] the economic case for European integration has not contained nationalist populism among the elite and ordinary people, as the domestic politics of the fugee crisis has demonstrated (Havlik, ch. 4).

Greece, although situated at the lowest end of economic prosperity in the Union, and despite conditions of austerity, recession and social hardship, did not avail itself of calls for neo-nationalism (cf. Ellinas 2013). Paradoxically, successive governments have been complying with three euro-area programmes, even including anti-austerity coalitions built by the extreme left and right wing parties. In addition, Greece has witnessed the unexpected growth of civil society engagement in different fields of society severely hit by austerity policies and the influx of refugees fleeing from civil war and terrorism in neighbouring regions (Sotiropoulos, ch. 5).

Finally, two member states that were better capable of fighting off the financial crisis and the rise of Eurosceptic forces, Ireland and Germany; here the contentions about the EU’s immigration crisis have revealed deeper political conflicts surrounding the scope and meaning of ‘solidarity’ (Wallaschek, ch. 6). Within the EU, the pro-active agents working for Europeanisation include many civil society organisations. This is also the case beyond the EU, in candidate countries. Depending on whether they are supported not only by the EU but also on the home front, conditions for NGO’s will vary widely, as the comparison of the Western Balkans and Turkey demonstrates (Dereci, ch. 7).

Section II. ‘Re-examining the crises of European integration’ explores some of the most crucial challenges to European unification, including Brexit and the European ‘refugee crisis’ as well as the Nord Stream pipeline. It includes contributions that emphasise different angles that have received relatively little attention to date in the prominent crisis narratives but are pivotal to political support for the European project. For instance, the ‘remainers’ lack of attention to the EU’s achievements for minority integration in the UK’s Brexit referendum campaign provides a telling angle for understanding its negative outcome. Arguably, the EU could and should have strengthened its already highly acknowledged role in combating racial and ethnic discrimination and expanded its contribution to minority protection. This would help to avoid perceptions of it being a ‘white club’ and make European identity inclusive of all citizens on its territory (Jenichen, ch. 8). Another impediment is the weak state capacity that helps to explain non-compliance and set-backs to joint intergovernmental decision-making, for instance in the field of the European common asylum system. Here, effective implementation of the EU’s asylum policies has been blocked notably by Hungary and Poland, but also Austria and France. Although the EU has sought to draw lessons from these failures of asylum policy in favour of a more realistic concept, real advances are still required (Zaun, ch. 9). The weak administrative systems of several member states are a result of insufficient Europeanisation processes during the accession period that have been further aggravated by the financial and economic crisis. These [15] are critical impediments to the effective implementation of European policies in countries such as Greece, and more generally in the newer member states of East-Central Europe where the rule of law, state administrations and democratic institutions are not yet sufficiently consolidated (Wittmann, ch. 10). Apart from administrative weaknesses, the dynamics of domestic politics can also play out against a common European regime. As critics of the widely-used but misleading term ‘refugee crisis’ have noted, at its core this is a crisis of humanism, humanitarianism, and human rights. It consists of heated contestations within domestic contexts about whether and to what extent EU member states should commit themselves to the protection of the civil and political rights of refugees and minorities as codified in the European Charter of Human Rights, and how to follow up on them in practice. In this respect, Bulgarian domestic politics is a telling case that illustrates the difficulties of translating European Human Rights norms into effective protection for those who need it most (Guasti and Siroki, ch. 11). Moreover, some promising European projects can be buried under conflicting national interests. In the aftermath of the Crimea conflict and in the context of EU-Russia geo-political tensions, the problem of energy security has gained saliency on the EU’s political agenda. In this context, the case of the North Stream pipeline has become a particularly contested issue. Hence, a closer examination of the diverging views of Poland and Germany will shed light on the opportunities and constraints regarding the prospects for a European Energy Union (Heinrich and Pleines, ch. 12).

In sum, with regard to theorising how conflictive European integration has become across a variety of policy domains, a broader conversation between the orthodox theory schools and more heterodox approaches is needed (Abels, ch. 13): For instance, conceiving Europeanisation through a ‘gendered lens’ offers a promising way for re-interpreting contemporary right-wing populist struggles as a backlash. Arguably, neo-nationalism brings gender-biased interests and identity constructions to the fore vis-à-vis the EU’s acquis comunautaire, hence its achievements over the past fifty years in building norms, policies and institutions aimed at advancing gender justice, from the principle of non-discrimination and equal rights to the ‘mainstreaming’ of equal opportunity and equal treatment policies across a variety of policy fields (Abels and Mushaben 2012).

The final section III. ‘European Innovation and Development’ presents a selection of cases where the EU has been presented with demands for – and arguably did advance, even if not yet fully accomplish – innovative proposals in response to the crises. These European political developments range from the financial and euro crises, climate governance and trade policy to the democratisation of European governance, namely in fields where the member states are divided and the European Parliament has remained weak. These developments can be found in three fields, in particular: First, in the field of Economic and Monetary Union, the pro-active course of action adopted by the [16] European Central Bank came under critique as a backstop for stabilising EMU against present and future imbalances. Yet, President Mario Draghi’s bond-buying programme and monetary policy have proven to be pivotal for the survival of the euro area (Zagermann, ch. 14). Second, the global governance of climate change is probably the field where the EU can be lauded most for its achievements, namely regarding the Paris Agreement of 2015 on an international framework and timetable for emissions reduction. Notwithstanding, in more technical fields, ambitious climate action by the EU is more difficult. This poses the question of what the specific ‘enabling factors for ambitious EU climate action’ actually are (Morata Liebert, ch. 15). Third, the field of democratising European governance includes several issues where democratic innovations are at stake. Many critics of the EU’s crisis management have taken issue with the democratic deficits of the euro area’s emergency regime. The ECB, the Eurogroup and the ‘Troika’ have been criticised as technocratic supranational supervisory agencies with a blind eye towards social justice that reign into the democratic autonomy of national sovereigns in fiscal, economic, labour market and social matters (see Hentschel, ch. 16). By contrast, in these matters, the European Parliament can be qualified as a democratically legitimated agent for European social policy development – one that was partially successful, albeit constrained by the intergovernmental politics of the Employment and Social Affairs Council (Lange and Liebert, ch. 17). Moreover, the European parliamentary practices have developed interesting institutional innovations. In particular, the EP’s so-called ‘intergroups’ build informal, yet institutionalised cross-partisan channels for civil society participation in European parliamentary activities, from legislation to the control of European agencies and the executive (Landorff, ch. 18). Nevertheless, the innovative measures that the MEP’s have advanced for strengthening the European political party system remain shelved, and hence wait to live up to the requirements of a democratic European political Union (Ciancio, ch. 19).

Summing up the various efforts to develop the EU politically reveals a number of weaknesses: notably, deficits of harmonizing standards of social security, democratic transparency, control and legitimacy and rule of law. Arguably, the intergovernmental piece-meal approach to managing the euro-crisis has strengthened the technocratic character of EMU at the expense of democratically elected institutions. EU reforms are needed in order to re-build what has been lost due to the crisis: the popular, social and transnational trust that is the necessary foundation for a more resilient EU. At this point in time, it appears doubtful whether its shortcomings can be overcome within the present institutional arrangement of the EU multi-level polity. Therefore, during the next legislative term 2019-24, European leaders and citizens will have to address the difficult choices between alternative scenarios and options for developing the joint problem-solving capacities of the European Union. The European Union’s unfinished journey remains uncertain and open ended, depending [17] on the diverging narratives and which properties of crises will prevail: the sources of erosion and neo-nationalism – or the resources for political innovation and the development of more resilient forms of Europeanisation (Liebert, ch. 20).

The starting point of this book was this double-edged nature of crises as sources of decline as well as development. Its chapters contribute to the debate on the future of Europe by discussing lessons learnt and identifying possible innovations arising from different aspects of the crises. Its empirically based reflections address a range of key issues that need to be resolved if the unfinished project of European integration is to cope with its challenges in sustainable ways. Arguably, the key conclusion that can be drawn from these chapters and which is confirmed by the unfolding Brexit tragedy reads as follows: Instead of holding onto ‘extreme’ solutions such as fully-fledged political federalism with a European central state and a setback to nationalist protectionism, Europeans are capable of seeking for more pragmatic solutions and creative compromises. This requires the Union citizens and the European political leaders to take the lessons from the EU’s failures over the past decade to heart. They need to overcome the current tensions between Europeanisation and neonationalism for the sake of a political development of Europe that constructively learns from the past. In this case, the crises would not represent sources of decline but rather important resources for Europeans to construct their path forward in the 21st century.

References

Abels, Gabriele and Joyce Mushaben eds. (2012): Gendering the European Union: New Approaches to Old Democratic Deficits (Gender and Politics. Palgrave.

Boin, Arjen (2009): The New World of Crises and Crisis Management: Implications for Policymaking and Research. In: Review of Policy Research, 26(4), 367-377.

Bukovansky, Mlada (2002): Legitimacy and Power Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Carmeli, Abraham and John Schaubroeck (1998): Organisational Crisis-Preparedness: The Importance of Learning from Failures. In: Long Range Planning, 41, 177-196.

Culik, Jan (2015): Fencing off the east: how the refugee crisis is dividing the European Union. In: The Conversation, September 16, available at: https://theconversation.com/fencing-off-the-east-how-the-refugee-crisis-is-dividing-the-european-union-47586 (last accessed: 10 April 2017).

Ellinas, Antonis A. (2013): The Rise of Golden Dawn: The New Face of the Far Right in Greece. In: South European Society and Politics, 18(4), 543-565.

[18] Eurobarometer (2018): Report: Public opinion in the European Union, Standard Eurobarometer 89, Spring 2018, available at: http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm/Survey/getSurveyDetail/instruments/STANDARD/surveyKy/2180 (last access: 28 January 2019).

Habermas, Jürgen (1973): Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.

Hwang, Peter and J. David Lichtenthal (2000): Anatomy of Organizational Crises. In: Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 8(3), 129-140.

Palayret, Jean-Marie; Helen Wallace and Pascaline Winand, eds. (2006): Visions, Votes and Vetoes: The Empty Chair Crisis and the Luxembourg Compromise Forty Years on, Brussels: P.I.E-Peter Lang.

Pearson, Christine M. and Judith A. Clair (1998): Reframing Crisis Management. In: Academy of Management Review, 23(1), 59-76.

Reus-Smit, Christian (2007): International Crises of Legitimacy. In: International Politics, 44, 157-174.

Roux-Dufort, Christophe (2009): The Devil Lies in Details! How Crises Build up Within Organizations. In: Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 17(1), 4-11.

[19] I.Europeanisation versusNeo-Nationalism in Times of Crisis

2. [21] France’s European politics in the face of the polycrisis

Joachim Schild

Introduction1

Polarising debates on European integration are by no means new in France. The country looks back on a rich history of highly divisive debates on Europe, the most important of which were the battle fought in 1954 on the European Defence Community (EDC), the Maastricht referendum in 1992, won by a narrow margin (51 per cent yes against 49 per cent no votes), and the referendum on the ‘Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe’ in May 2005, rejected by a clear majority of Frenchmen (55 per cent).

Today, the conditions for the politicisation of European issues and for the spread of Eurosceptic attitudes could hardly be better. For several years, the EU has found itself in a deep crisis mode, a situation referred to as a ‘polycrisis’ by the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker:

“This European Union has faced its worst economic, financial and social crisis since World War II. And it is still struggling with the consequences. I have often used the Greek word ‘polycrisis’ to describe the current situation. Our various challenges – from the security threats in our neighbourhood and at home, to the refugee crisis, and to the UK referendum – have not only arrived at the same time. They also feed each other, creating a sense of doubt and uncertainty in the minds of our people” (Juncker 2016).

The European Union’s (EU) political and economic performance in dealing with the Eurocrisis and the below average performance of euro area economies compared to the rest of the EU have raised doubts in the minds of many citizens. The traditional narrative of European integration as a project producing more prosperity for all has been questioned. Economic integration in general and the way the euro area crisis was handled in particular have created winners and losers and redistributed wealth and opportunities.

Moreover, citizens could observe in 2015 the collapse of the Dublin regime assigning responsibilities to member states for handling asylum seekers. They [22] also saw the failure of the Schengen regime to avoid external border controls and to uphold internal freedom of movement in 2015. A more or less uncontrolled number of asylum seekers entered the territory of the European Union. This has put a big question mark over one of the core European achievements that had been highly valued by citizens according to all opinion polls: the freedom of movement inside the Schengen area.

This European ‘polycrisis’ has fed Eurosceptic tendencies both in French public opinion and in French political parties’ discourses. Recent developments have to be seen against the backdrop of a longer-term drop in French mass public support for European integration and a rising salience of European issues in inter-party competition. Citizens and parties tend to blame the French economic decline and the persistently high unemployment rates of the last decade at least partly on the European Union and its responsibility for the ‘austerity policies’ that successive French governments had to adopt.

To what extent does the executive face tighter domestic constraints on its European policy-making since the breakdown of the ‘permissive consensus’ at the time of the Maastricht Treaty? And how did the current polycrisis affect domestic conflicts on Europe in France? In order to find answers to these questions, we first look at the evolution of public opinion on issues of European integration. In a second step, we assess the politicisation of European issues in French party politics by looking at the salience of ‘Europe’ for the main French parties, at the evolution of their overall stances towards European integration and at the level of intra-party conflict on Europe. Finally, we will assess in how far European integration constitutes a major issue dimension that will structure domestic political conflict in a more durable way.

Attitudes in mass publics towards the European Union2

Already before the start of the financial market crisis, support levels for the European Union among French citizens have dropped compared to earlier decades. Graph 1 displays the long-term evolution of net support3 measured by the Eurobarometer trend question: “Generally speaking, do you think that (your country's) membership of the European Community (Common Market) is a) a good thing, b) a bad thing, c) neither good nor bad”. Three observations stand out. Firstly, France follows more or less the European long-term downward trend (see trend line for France). Secondly, the early 1990s marked a turning [23] point, heralding the end of the ‘permissive consensus’. Thereafter, support for European integration never again reached the same level as in the 1970s and 1980s. Thirdly, French support levels were above the European average in the 1970s and 1980s but fell persistently below the European average since the early 1990s (see Graph 1).

Graph 1: Net support for European integration 1973-2011 (in per cent)

Question: Generally speaking, do you think that (your country's) membership of the European Community (Common Market) is ...? A good thing, a bad thing, neither good nor bad.

Source: Standard Eurobarometer 1-75

Unfortunately, the Eurobarometer surveys do not ask this trend question any longer in EU member states. Hence, we have to make use of other trend questions in order to assess recent trends. We chose two questions repeatedly asked during the last years, one on the image of the EU and the other one on citizens’ trust in the EU.

The EU’s image clearly deteriorated in France during the last years since the start of the global financial crisis in 2007 (see Graph 2). This trend is by no means specific to France. Positive images nevertheless still prevailed in public opinion until very recently. In the fall 2016 Eurobarometer, negative images turned out to be slightly more widespread than positive ones (31 negative, 29 [24] positive images and 39 per cent of respondents picking the neutral answer category). Immediately before the start of the financial market crisis in 2007, fully 52 per cent still had a positive image of the European Union (see Graph 2).

Graph 2: Positive or negative image of EU (in per cent)

Question: In general, does the EU conjure up for you a positive or a negative image? (in %)

Source: Eurobarometer EB59-EB86

The picture is still darker when we look at trust levels (see Graph 2). Fully two thirds (65 per cent) of the French population did not tend to trust the European Union in fall 2016, up from 34 per cent back in 2007 (Eurobarometer 68).

Graph 2: Trust in the European Union (in per cent)

Question: Please tell me if you tend to trust or if you tend not to trust the European Union (in %)

Source: Eurobarometer EB59-EB86.

[25] It seems plausible to assume that the more negative images and lower trust levels derive from more negative evaluations of the EU’s performance in times of crises. One of the European Commissions’ biannual Eurobarometer survey questions asked respondents to evaluate in a very general way the overall performance of the EU. Do they think “the EU makes the quality of life better in Europe”? According to a recent Eurobarometer survey (Eurobarometer 83, spring 2015), only 40 per cent of the French population (as opposed to 51 per cent in the EU-28) share the idea that the EU makes their lives better whereas as many as 49 per cent explicitly reject this view (versus 39 per cent in the EU-28).

Political actors tend to politicize European issues along the lines of domestic political conflict, shaped in France by the socio-economic and the sociocultural cleavages. So, we might ask in how far we find negative evaluations of the European Union’s performance that might be linked to these two cleavage dimensions.

One of the potential reasons for the relatively negative evaluation of the EU’s overall performance reported above can be found in the EU’s perceived impact on the employment situation in France. Asked whether or not the “EU creates the conditions for more jobs”, as many as 58 per cent of the French respondents answered in the negative (EU-28 average: 40 per cent). Only 30 per cent subscribed to this statement (EU-28 average: 49 per cent, data from Eurobarometer 83, spring 2015).

However, these increasingly negative attitudes did not translate into a dwindling support for European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). 68 per cent of respondents still support the Euro and the EMU, according to the Eurobarometer survey of autumn 2016 (Eurobarometer 86, fall 2016). The right-wing populist National Front (Front national, FN) party, which makes the case for leaving the Eurozone, does not find substantial support in French public opinion on this key issue.

The overall picture we find in France is one of a declining number of citizens seeing the EU as a helpful framework for dealing with their most pressing problems. The IPSOS public opinion research institute asked repeatedly whether the French think that the decision-making power of France or that of the EU should be strengthened in order to “address effectively the major problems of the coming years”. In 2015, only 14 per cent of a representative sample of respondents came out in favour of a strengthening the EU’s decision-making power (down from 38 per cent back in 2012) whereas no less than 72 per cent considered it more appropriate to strengthen national decision-making power in order to effectively address major problems in the coming years (up from 56 per cent back in 2012, see Graph 4). This is a clear trend towards a ‘renationalisation’ of public opinion.

[26] Graph 4: To address effectively the major problems of the coming years… (in %)

Source: Ipsos/STERIA und Ipsos/Logica Business Consulting.

These critical attitudes regarding the problem-solving capacity and the socioeconomic consequences of European integration provide a fertile ground for political strategies of Eurosceptic parties. The same holds true for the sociocultural dimension regarding attitudes towards immigration. According to the Eurobarometer 83 survey from spring 2015, French citizens score slightly above EU average (58 per cent for France, 56 per cent for the EU-28) in expressing negative feelings towards immigrants from outside the EU. In an IPSOS survey, dating from May 2015, no less than 67 per cent of the respondents subscribed to the view that there are “too many immigrants in France”. And a majority of 54 per cent think that the “Islamic religion is not compatible with the values of the French society”. Surfing on widespread anti-immigration attitudes, the right-wing populist FN could fully exploit the European refugee crisis of 2015 to broaden its support base. This major European crisis in conjunction with the terrorist attacks in Paris in January and November 2015 provided the FN with a formidable window of opportunity which it was able to translate into a strong showing at the polls in 2015. In the regional elections held in December 2015, the FN came out as the most important French political party attracting no less than 28 per cent of the vote in the first round of this election.

Critical attitudes of mass publics towards European integration and EU policy outcomes influence both inter- and intra-party conflict in France, as they [27] can be easily linked to the sociocultural as well as socio-economic issue-dimensions of domestic political debates.

Party stances and party competition on European issues

Party stances and differences between competing parties on Europe can be analysed by using different data sources. Apart from party manifesto data and data gained from newspaper analysis, we dispose of expert surveys. The Chapel Hill expert surveys (Bakker et al. 2015) on party positions towards issues of European integration provide us with data for several French parties since 1999. Hence, we are able to track changes over time.

First, we look at the salience of European issues for different parties. How much variation over time can we observe? In their study of public debates on European issues during national election campaigns in France from 1974-2012, based on newspaper content analysis, Hutter and Kerscher (2014) could show that the salience of European issues followed a clearly upward trend over time. Guinaudeau and Persico (2013) likewise pointed to a rise of European issue salience during the 1990s that started with the Maastricht referendum debate and showed no signs of lasting decline thereafter.

The Chapel Hill expert surveys conducted in 1999, 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014 provide us with a more nuanced picture. Experts had to evaluate the relative salience of European integration in the parties’ public discourse in a given year on an 11-point-scale, ranging from 0 “European Integration is of no importance, never mentioned” to 10 “European Integration is the most important issue”. As graph 5 shows, none of the parties for which we have data since 1999 ranked below the neutral middle category of 5. By the end of the 1990s, no established French party could afford to ignore European integration issues. The evolving salience of Europe does not show a clear trend for the two mainstream centre-left and centre right parties, the Socialists (Parti socialiste, PS) and the neo-Gaullist (Le Rassemblement pour la République and L'Union pour un mouvement populaire, RPR/UMP) now Les Républicains. It went somewhat down from 2010 to 2014. The opposite holds true for the populist right and left wing parties, the Front national (FN) and the Left Party (Parti de Gauche, PdG). They both scored above 8 on the 11-point issue salience scale (FN 8.5 PdG 8.1). The Greens (Les Verts), for which we unfortunately have no data for 2014, came close to the FN level in 2010.

[28] Graph 5: Salience of European issues

Source: Chapel Hill surveys 1999-2014.

In the 1980s, European integration issues did not have high currency in the FN’s discourse. Similar to other fringe parties (Taggart 1998), the FN played with Euroscepticism without making it a core identity marker. Over the past two decades this has changed profoundly. In the 2014 European Parliament Election, the FN “claimed effective ‘ownership’ over the European issue, winning the bulk of the Eurosceptic vote to top the electoral field” (Goodliffe 2015: 324). Nowadays, this does not only hold true for European Parliament elections. In the national presidential election campaign in 2017, the FN’s candidate Marine Le Pen has made widely use of European issues to distinguish herself from her mainstream competitors. It is not by coincidence that the first of her 144 policy proposals presented to the voters deals with France’s membership in the EU. She promised to restore the French people’s sovereignty – monetary, legislative, territorial, and economic – and to hold a referendum on French membership after negotiations with the EU (Le Pen 2017). The same holds true on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the presidenatial candidate of the left-wing populist 'France Unbowed' (La France insoumise) and former president of the Left Party (Parti de Gauche), [29] also campaigned strongly on European issues, trying to make the 2017 presidential election a “referendum on Europe”4 and playing with the idea of a leave referendum in case the European Union cannot be changed along his preferred lines.

The way the Front National, the Left Party and France Unbowed have made always more use of European issues during the last years testifies to their capacity to react on the ‘supply side’ to evolutions on the ‘demand side’ of voter’s political-ideological and policy preferences. But we assume the causal arrow to point both ways: The more salient the ‘supply’ of Eurosceptic discourses by political parties will grow the more they will reinforce Eurosceptic public opinion. With the rising salience of and more polarisation on European issues, we can expect that mass public attitudes towards European political themes will become more structured and less superficial than in the past. If this holds true, Euroscepticism becomes more embedded and institutionalised both in public opinion and in the party system.

For mainstream parties the attempt to make Europe a highly salient issue in public debate comes at a price in case they are internally split on this issue. This was true for the neo-Gaullist party in the 1990s, especially on the occasion of the Maastricht referendum in 1992. And this was also true for the Socialist Party (PS) in the 2000s, especially regarding the 2005 referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty.5

The divisive influence of European integration issues on intra-party competition was arguably strongest felt by the French Socialist Party. The PS faced the most dramatic manifestations of an intra-party split, first when it called for a referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty within the party in December 2004 and, five months later, when it campaigned in the French referendum for EU constitutional treaty change (Petithomme 2012; Schild 2005; Wagner 2008).

This pronounced internal split on European integration issues has been made well visible by our expert survey where experts were asked to locate parties on a 11-point-scale ranging from 0 “Party was completely united” to 10 “Party was extremely divided”. No other party was ranked higher than the PS in terms of internal divisions on Europe since 2006, a long-term consequence of the 2004-5 referendum experience (see Graph 6).

During the years of the Euro-crisis, the attitudes towards the EU and its management of the euro area crisis have become another sensitive touchstone of intra-party dissent and power struggles. Criticisms of the “austerity-cumstructural-reform-approach” of Germany towards the sovereign debt crisis in the euro area and the policy of fiscal consolidation at the domestic level in [30] France served as mobilising devices and identity markers for the Socialist Party’s left wing. A substantial minority of the Socialist party group in the National Assembly was no longer willing to lend support to its own government and therefore voted, among others, against the French stability program for cutting budget deficits.

Graph 6: Level of intra party dissent on European integration

Source: Chapel Hill surveys 1999-2014.

Mainstream parties also contributed to the abovementioned trend of embedding European issues in domestic political debates. Put under pressure from their more extreme competitors, the PS and Les Républicains (LR, the former neo-Gaullist UMP) took up some elements of the extreme-left or –right wing’s critical discourses on the EU and “played” with Euroscepticism (Rozenberg 2011). Sure, the centre-left and centre-right mainstream parties are still to be found on the pro-EU side in French debates on European issues. The results of the Chapel Hill expert surveys display, however, a drop of their support for European integration between 2010 and 2014 (see Graph 7).6 This might reflect the criticisms of both candidates for the presidency in 2012, the then sitting president Nicolas Sarkozy and his challenger François Hollande, as “the two candidates in the second round of the elections went ‘EU-negative’ to rally additional votes. Sarkozy mentioned, on the one hand, his intention to suspend the Schengen agreements, unless changes in its implementation were made. Hollande, on the other hand, proclaimed his commitment to renegotiate the [31] European Budgetary Pact that EU member states had just agreed to in December 2011” (Vassallo 2012: 79).

Graph 7: General party support for European integration

Source: Chapel Hill surveys 1999-2014.

In fact, after his election, François Hollande could not deliver on his (unrealistic) promise to renegotiate the Fiscal Compact. This failure and his efforts to cut back the French public deficit to bring the country back into line with the rules enshrined in the Stability and Growth Pact contributed to a revolt of the “frondeurs” from the Socialist Party’s left-wing in the National Assembly. At several occasions, some dozen socialist Members of Parliament voted against their own government and even tabled a motion of censure against it. One of them was Benoît Hamon who won the primary as the left candidate for the French presidency in January 2017. He stands for a clear break with the legacy of the previous Socialist President Hollande in both economic and European policies. Never since the time of François Mitterrand has the Socialist Party base chosen to be represented in the race for the highest political office in France by a contender that was more sceptical about the EU’s current trajectory than Benoît Hamon.

A similar kind of critical discourse with Eurosceptic overtones could also be observed inside the French Republican Party (the former UMP). Some of the contenders for the party’s primaries to select their presidential candidate took an even more critical stance than the party ever did in the past. This was true for the former president Sarkozy. To a lesser extent, this was also true for François Fillon who made the race in the primaries by developing a public [32] discourse with strong Gaullist accents stressing French sovereignty, independence and the need to redress France.

The reinforcement of these elements of soft Euroscepticism in the discourses of both mainstream parties, PS and Republicans, can be attributed to the institution of primaries for selecting each party’s candidate to run for the highest French State office. This type of electoral contest with low participation rates (compared to presidential elections) provides a fertile ground that helps cultivate more radical political positions beyond the party’s mainstream. This was especially true for the political left. The winner of the Socialist primary, Benoît Hamon, had always held a marginal position inside the PS and would not have had the slightest chance to be selected as the PS’s official candidate by a party convention.

This soft form of Euroscepticism on the part of the mainstream centre-left and centre-right parties created incentives for the challenger parties and candidates to adopt always harder Eurosceptic stances, as the 2017 election campaigns for the presidency and the National Assembly demonstrated. This holds true for both the Front national’s candidate Marine Le Pen and candidate of France Unbowed, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

The former Minister of the Economy during the Hollande Presidency, Emmanuel Macron, was the only candidate to make unambiguously the case for deepening European integration.7 This liberal, centre-left candidate embraced both European integration and globalisation, standing for a France that is culturally and economically open to the world. This stands in contrast to a trend in French political discourse on Europe that has grown ever more sceptical over time (Rozenberg 2011; Schild 2009). Therefore, both Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen became the most likely candidates for the second and decisive round of the presidential elections. Such a configuration of candidates for the presidential elections would perfectly embody the growing salience and increasing degree of polarisation about issues of European integration in domestic French politics. While Macron appeals to younger, cosmopolitan, urban, highly educated and professionally successful and dynamic parts of the French society, Le Pen finds strong support among the left behind, the ‘losers’ of globalisation and European integration in the lower, less well educated strata of society, in rural regions and in declining industrial areas. Dubbed ‘integration-demarcation cleavage’ (Kriesi et al. 2008), this line of conflict is rooted in the social structure and has the potential to restructure domestic politics and the party system in France in a more durable way in the future.

[33] Conclusions

Our analysis of trends in public opinion, in party stances and party competition on issues of European integration makes amply clear that the room of manoeuvre for the French president and the French government has shrunk over the past years. France provides a clear example of a trend from a ‘permissive consensus’ to what Lisbeth Hooghe and Gary Marks called a ‘constraining dissensus’ on Europe (Hooghe/Marks 2009). When designing its European policy, the French executive has to look more than ever to its societal and political support base. This change can be referred to as a kind of ‘domestication’ of French European policy, where domestic political considerations gain always more importance (Schild 2008).

At the level of political parties, two conclusions are in order. Firstly, fringe or challenger parties do not use European integration issues only to distinguish themselves tactically from their mainstream competitors. On the contrary, European issues or the Europeanisation of national policies moved towards centre stage in their discourses. This makes Europe much more salient in public debates which thereby become always more polarised. Secondly, a process of clarification among mainstream parties might be underway. As the presidential campaign in 2017 made clear, they can no longer play down European issues in an attempt not to stir up their internal divisions as their challengers attack them precisely on this issue dimension.

So far, the French case has provided evidence for a positive correlation between the level of politicisation – in terms of polarisation and salience of European issues – on the one hand and the spread of Eurosceptic attitudes among mass publics and political parties on the other hand. Front National (renamed ‘Rassemblement National’ in 2018) gives European issues the highest public visibility and, at the same time, it is the most Eurosceptical among all major parties. Moreover, it has gained a lot of electoral ground since the start of the European ‘polycrisis’.

What can we then learn from the French experience? Our tentative conclusion is that the idea to pursue a strategy of politicisation of European issues in order to strengthen the European Union’s legitimacy is based on a questionable empirical assumption, namely that higher degrees of politicisation might lead to higher support for European integration.

Political actors with a strong strategic interest in politicising European issues can be found mainly among Eurosceptic challenger parties and also in the Eurosceptic wings of mainstream parties. The more institutionalised opportunities these actors find to publicly express their Euroscepticism – making use of referenda and primaries for candidate selection – the better are the conditions for them to succeed.

[34] It remains to be seen in how far counter strategies to confront Eurosceptics and globalisation sceptics head on, such as developed by Emmanuel Macron, remain successful both in winning elections and in fighting the rampant Euroscepticism in French society. Ultimately, this could lead to a restructuring of the party system as the European cleavage might further gain importance for inter-party competition.

References

Bakker, Ryan/Edwards, Erica/Hooghe, Liesbet/Jolly, Seth/Koedam, Jelle/Kostelka, Filip/Marks, Gary/Polk, Jonathan/Rovny, Jan/Schumacher, Gijs/Steenbergen, Marco/Vachudova, Milada/Zilovic, Marko (2015): 1999–2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey Trend File. Version 1.13 Available on chesdata.eu. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Goodliffe, Gabriel (2015): Europe’s salience and ‘owning’ Euroscepticism: Explaining the Front National’s victory in the 2014 European elections in France. In: French Politics, 13, 4, pp. 324–345.

Guinaudeau, Isabelle/Persico, Simon (2013): EU politicization through the lens of salience: How the EU enters the French, British and German electoral agenda (1986-2009). In: French Politics, 11, 2, pp. 143-168.

Hooghe, Lisbeth/Marks, Gary (2008): A postfunctionalist theory of European integration: From permissive consensus to constraining dissensus. In: British Journal of Political Science, 39, 1, pp. 1-23.

Hutter, Swen/Kerscher, Alena (2014): Politicizing Europe in hard times: Conflicts over Europe in France in a long-term perspective, 1974–2012. In: Journal of European Integration 36, 3, pp. 267-282.

Kriesi Hanspeter/Grande, Edgar/Lachat, Romain/Dolezal, Martin/Bornschier, Simon/Frey, Timotheos (2008): West European Politics in the Age of Globalization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Le Pen, Marine (2017): 144 engagements présidentiels, URL: https://www.marine2017.fr/programme/

Juncker, Jean-Claude (2016): Speech by President Jean-Claude Juncker at the Annual General Meeting of the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises. Athens, 21 June 2016 (http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-16-2293_en.htm).

Petithomme, Mathieu (2012): Containing the sleeping giant in EU referendums? A comparison of the strategies of confinement of EU issues of the RPR (1992) and the PS (2005). In: French Politics 10, 2, pp. 105–133.

Rozenberg, Olivier. (2011): Playing softly with Euroscepticism: The 2009 European Elections in France, in: Robert Harmsen/Joachim Schild (eds.): Debating Europe: The European Parliament Elections 2009 and Beyond, Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, pp. 51-68.

[35] Schild, Joachim (2005): Ein Sieg der Angst – das gescheiterte französische Verfassungsreferendum. In: Integration 28, 3, pp. 187-200.

Schild, Joachim (2008): Die „Domestizierung“ französischer Europapolitik. In: Frankreich-Jahrbuch 2008, hrsg. vom Deutsch-Französischen Institut, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 29-49.

Schild, Joachim (2009): Europapolitik in einer verunsicherten Gesellschaft. In: Joachim Schild/Henrik Uterwedde (eds.): Die verunsicherte Französische Republik. Wandel der Strukturen, der Politik – und der Leitbilder? Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag 2009, pp. 193-218.

Taggart, Paul (1998): A touchstone of dissent: Euroscepticism in contemporary western European party systems. In: European Journal of Political Research, 33, 3, pp. 363-388.

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Abbreviations

Title

Abbreviaton

European Defence Community

EDC

European Monetary Union

EMU

European Union

EU

Les Républicains

LR

L'Union pour un mouvement populaire

UMP

Front National

FN

Parti Socialiste

PS

Parti de Gauche

PdG

Rassemblement pour la République

RPR

Annotations

1The manusript has been finished in February 2017.

2I would like to thank Lena Helmer for her support in compiling and visualising the data used in this article.

3Here, the percentage of ‘bad thing’ is subtracted from the percentage of ‘good thing’ answers in order to obtain a measure of net support.

4Le Nouvel Observateur, 24 August 2016: Mélenchon veut faire de 2017 un ‘référendum’ sur l’Europe (URL: http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/topnews/20160824.REU9926/melenchon-veut-faire-de-2017-un-referendum-sur-l-europe.html).

5For a comparison between these two French referenda on Europe, see Vassallo 2008.

6Experts had to evaluate the “overall orientation of the party leadership towards European integration” in a given year and locate the party on a 7-point scale, ranging from 1 “strongly opposed” to 7 “strongly in favour”.

7See his speech at the Humboldt University in Berlin on 10 January 2017 (URL: https://plone.rewi.hu-berlin.de/de/lf/oe/whi/forum-constitutionis-europas/2017/rede-macron)

3. [37] Living with anti-pluralist populism in Europe: Insights from the Dutch 2017 elections1

Ben Crum

1. Introduction

Never before did a Dutch election attract as much attention from foreign media as the one on 15 March 2017. Journalists swarmed to the Netherlands, driven by one big question: Will Geert Wilders win? Wilders became a topic of particular interest thanks to the dramatic votes of 2016: the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. The prospect thus lured that the Netherlands would see a similar dramatic turn-around, one that would be indicative of a transnational ‘rise of populism’. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte qualified – and dismissed – such expectations as a ‘domino theory’ which suggests that with one or two countries falling prey to populist movements, the rest will follow automatically (Jonker 2017).

Eventually, Wilders was not the big victor of 15 March. He got 13.3 percent of the vote-share, corresponding to 20 of the 150 seats in the Dutch Lower House, which is five seats more than he got at the previous elections in 2012 but four less than his best result to date in 2010. What is more, the Freedom Party certainly did not become the biggest party, and it was effectively sidelined from the government to be formed. Ironically, soon, commentators started to float a reverse domino theory, in which the relative loss of Wilders was prefigured by the win of Alexander Van der Bellen of the presidential elections in Austria and followed in May 2017 by the victory of Emanuel Macron over Marine Le Pen in the French presidential elections.

However, if anything, the experience of the Dutch elections signals the normalization of anti-pluralist populism, even if they do not come out victorious. While for a long time, anti-pluralist populist parties could still be treated as an aberration and a rather marginal phenomenon, recent elections indicate that [38]