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Does Europe Matter? Political Discourses on European Integration

Robert Sata
Central European University
Robert Sata
Central European University

Abstract

While many important social processes cut across national borders and have transnational institutions to regulate them, democratic participation still occurs almost exclusively within individual nation states. While in the last decades European society has experienced a shift from government to governance, a move towards a practice of problem-solving which involves multiple actors, political parties remain key players both on the national and the European arena fostering and maintaining multiple political loyalties in multi-level polities. We believe national experiences matter for European integration; therefore this paper is primarily concerned with how politicians’ conceptions of national identity affect what they say about European integration. In order to be able to assess political party attitudes toward European integration, the paper will primarily rely on qualitative data collected within the EUROSPHERE Project (http://eurosphere.uib.no), which is coordinated by the University of Bergen and funded by the European Commission within the EU''s 6th Framework Programme (http://ec.europa.eu/research/fp6/). Our data sample will comprise 16 countries of the EU and Turkey and Norway as non-members, and for each country three political parties are selected: the two most important parties – government and opposition, plus a maverick party. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with approx. seven individual party members for each party. We claim that political attitude formation is a product of interactive multi-level identity dynamics and as such we need to examine how identities are constructed, how inclusive or exclusive these constructions are. In other words, national identity can both bolster support for and be the most powerful break on support for European integration. Our underlying assumption is that the more inclusive political parties are towards diversity the more likely they will support European integration. We shall identify the homogeneity vs. heterogeneity of political discourses with regards to European integration and the consensus or contestation among these. Based on systematic comparative analysis, we analyze the openness or closure of various kinds of public discourses towards the idea of societal diversity on the one hand, and European integration on the other to assess the potential of more integration across the EU. The key debate regarding political parties and Europe is over the relationship of European integration to the traditional political cleavages, and whether, and to what extent, this constitutes a new basis for party positioning and mobilizing campaigns. Some see party contestation over Europe having few ‘spill over’ effects and only a limited impact on the format and mechanisms of national party politics. Others argue that parties’ positions on Europe cross-cut left/right divisions, so that centre parties tend to be pro-integrationist, with Euroscepticism confined to the marginal poles of ‘extreme left’ and ‘extreme right’, resulting in the inverted ‘U’ pattern that is confirmed as an observable ‘fact’ by many scholars. Another set of explanations places more weight on the impact of ideological differences among parties, arguing that a party’s position on the ‘new politics cleavage’ – GAL (green-alternative-libertarian) versus TAN (traditional-authoritarian-nationalist) – is the predictor of support for European integration. Yet others claim we witness the emergence of a new cleavage in the Rokkanian sense that is restructuring the transformation of the political space. As a first step, we map out and compare the orientations of the party members that enable us to see what are the similarities and differences in experiencing European integration across parties. Using individual level survey data we can contrast political attitudes to those of the individual citizen to see whether patterns of support for European integration are coherent or not, whether politicians are truly representative of their constituents’ preferences. Next, we analyze what is the explanatory power of diversity attitudes on European integration, or how much diversity attitudes predict what parties say about more or less integration. Last but not least, using statistical analysis on our sample, we test whether diversity attitudes interact with any of the established theoretical propositions on the Europeanization of political parties; i.e. whether Western parities are more supportive of European integration than their Eastern partners, or whether government parties tend to be more positive than those in opposition, or whether ideological differences will be responsible for different patterns of attitudes towards integration. Last but not least, our data and analysis should also shed light on the rationale behind the remarkable under-politicization of the European integration dimension within national political systems As such, our paper aims to fill an important theoretical gap within the relevant literature as we hope to draw preliminary conclusions with regards to the ongoing theoretical debate whether ‘Europe’ affects or not national party competition, whether it reinforces only existing political cleavages, or whether it truly constitutes a new potential for party alignment. We will also be able to provide new insight on how politicians themselves experience European integration vis-à-vis the ordinary citizens. Another result with theoretical implication will be the fact that our analysis will not only tell us if Euroskepticism has ideological properties, but we will be able to specify its substantive contents as well. Our paper could thus provide a preliminary answer to not only to how political actors experience European integration but to what extent, if at all, ‘Europe’ plays a role in party competition and the extent to which European integration has penetrated into national systems.