Adapting narratives of European integration to autocratisation processes in the European Neighbourhood: The case of Ukraine and Armenia (2014-2023)

Sovereigntists in Europe work with notions of religion, visible in the way governments in Hungary, Poland, Italy or Sweden use Christianity as a legitimacy claim to their European condition and as a tactic to define internal or external enemies such as elite or other minorities, primarily Muslims. Religion has been a vehicle for right-wing regimes to define their enemies from the liberal spectrum and to ‘protect’ communal life threatened by a certain ‘other’ that does is framed as not belonging to the ‘European group’. This article looks at how sovereigntist visions of European integration operate in relation to dissensus regarding liberal democracy, by tracing the usages and appropriations of religion in the EU Neighbourhood and their locus in political narratives about EU integration. Using critical discourse analysis of political narratives and interviews, the article builds the argument in three steps. First, it shows how the cooperation between religious institutions is an integral part of European policy, as proven by the role of religious organisations in lobbying at the EU level and this approach has been also carried to the European foreign policy (EFP) abroad. Religion has a specific role in the presentation of European values in the European Neighbourhood Policy. Secondly, it looks at the way these have been appropriated by ‘sovereigntist’ factions in Europe. Thirdly, it discusses how certain cultural discourses of religion from within the EU have become a conduit for autocratisation tendencies in the European neighbourhood, in Ukraine and Armenia.