Southern Europe beyond Euroscepticism: Dimensions of positions towards Europe amid multiple crises

Abstract

Politics in the last decade has become changeable and unpredictable. The socio-political processes that the European Union (EU) and its Member States have gone through in the last decade – from the euro crisis to the more recent COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukraine war and the energetic challenge - have fueled political reactions at the national level, leading to the (re)emergence of a new transnational cleavage (Hooghe and Marks 2017, 2021). Thus, despite the common opposition to European integration among populist and radical parties, the roots and motivations of their criticism are not linear or homogeneous. There exists a sound heterogeneity in the frames that are used to criticize some of the core principles of the integration process, such as shared sovereignty, solidarity, political identity, and other membership-related issues. Populist or/and radical political actors use these issues to activate Europe in national political arenas, which in turn will be reflected in citizens' attitudes towards the process of European integration and its institutions. However, the politicization of European issues in Southern Europe has its specific and differentiated forms. Whereas empirical research on the positions towards European integration in Western Europe has been mainly focused on Euroscepticism and the negative positions on the EU, southern Europe has traditionally been characterized as Euroenthusiastic. Euroscepticism has gone through different stages in parallel with the development of the integration process, but most scholars agree that South European countries have their own path of integration into the Union. Due to the purely economic character of the early stages of European integration, fluctuations in positions towards the integration process were connected to utilitarian factors such as macroeconomic performance, personal economic situation, and citizens' economic perceptions. More recent research shows that utilitarian factors have become less relevant to explain attitudes towards integration, with cultural factors such as identity, perceived cultural threats, fear of immigration or ethnic conflict gaining importance. During the multiple crises from 2011 onwards (economic, refugee crisis, Brexit, the pandemic, the Ukraine war), there is a transfer of distrust from the national political system to the EU institutions, besides the pluralization of positions towards the European integration process depending on regional, partisan, and individual factors. This panel proposal is based on the idea that, when investigating Southern Europe, it is necessary to go beyond the study of Euroscepticism to understand this phenomenon in all its complexity, being necessary new typologies to offer a more nuanced perspective and to accommodate different perspectives towards the EU. Furthermore, it is necessary to test the main theories on the causal dimensions of positions towards the European integration process (utilitarian or cultural) from an empirical and comparative perspective, or create new, differentiated theories if necessary. We propose here, therefore, to pool explanatory papers that help us to understand the main aggregate and individual factors explaining the positions toward the European integration process of parties and citizens in Southern Europe.

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