Who’s dominating whom? Narratives on dominance in the debate on the Future of Europe.

More than decade-long crises that toppled the European Union – financial, migration, deteriorating security in the block’s neighbourhood, Brexit and Covid-19 – revealed its weaknesses and highlighted internal divisions among member states. Alleged EU’s failures had a profound symbolic meaning for societies and domestic politics in many countries paving a way for critics of the EU. The employed narratives of a weak and failing EU unable to deal with crises. Many saw the best response as being a strong nation state in a reconstituted Union. These voices became growingly visible during the debate of the future of Europe that was initiated in 2015 and structured by scenarios included in the White Paper by the European Commission in 2017 (Fabbrini 2019). The main aim of the paper is to analyse the perceptions of dominance featuring in ongoing FoE debates especially triggered by the differenation scenarios. We offer a comparative analysis focusing on two different types of actors. The first consists of sovereignists, populist, Eurosceptic and anti-party actors as well as anti-intellectual movements contesting the current state of European integration and some of the EU core policies. In the second group, we analyse civil society organizations (CSOs) active in the sphere of migration, gender equality and faith-related issues who also engage in the contestation of the EU and its policies. These actors position themselves as facilitating citizens’ input to the FoE debate. Through qualitative discursive analysis the paper investigates in a comparative mode how the perceived dominance within the EU is used by these different political actors to pursue specific visions of (dis)integration through reconfiguring power struggles. Finally, we discuss how the perceived dominance may be interrelated with differentiation in the context of European integration.