While the EU is still paying for the effects of the Great Recession, a new crisis challenged European institutions by amplifying sovereigntists and populists’ arguments against European integration. Immigration crisis increased saliency, polarization and mobilization within national and European political spaces implying politicization of support for the EU. According to some authors, this brought to a step back on EU integration on the whole and over immigration policies (Borzel and Risse, 2017). Particularly, scholars are currently investigating whether Grand Theories of European integration are able to explain these downgrades by defining a role for public 'dissensus' within the politicization process of national political spaces. Specifically, does the relationship between public opinion and party positions explain European ‘dis’-integration on immigration policy? Which one of grand theories of EU integration can better frame this relationship? Does politicization on immigration policy bring to differentiated integration by countries and/or by policy sub-fields?
By recalling the arguments of Grand Theories of EU integration, we first build a theoretical framework defining the role of public opinion within the politicization process and the EU integration tout court. We then proceed by supporting our theoretical arguments through recent empirical findings and by analyzing support for EU immigration policy before and during the immigration crisis in both elite and mass surveys. Our analyses show that identity and instrumental dimensions shaping national political spaces within the Transnational Cleavage (Hooghe and Marks, 2017) plays a crucial role in the politicization process of EU integration on immigration policies as well as on the related policy outcomes.
