Politicisating Europe from Bottom to Top?

This paper in its first part addresses the concept of EU politicisation as it has been developed in the recent literature and discusses analytical strenghts and weaknesses of the state of the art of the conceptual debate. Afterwards, it is suggested that politicisation should be conceptualised in a way that puts a stronger emphasis on citizen and activist action and hence on a bottom-up direction of politicising Europe and a corresponding conceptualisation of politicisation is presented. In the second part of the paper, this conceptualisation is used in discussing the French EU referendum discourse and the German ratification discourse on the EU constitutional Treaty in a comparative perspective. Results show that especially in the French case the outcome of both discourse and referendum can only be suffiently understood and explained is if the bottom-up component of politicisation is systematically taken into account and analysed.