Transnational Sovereigntists: How the European right mobilizes across borders to contest EU reform

The recent intensification of discussion on potential EU institutional reform, including the revision of EU treaties, has mainly been studied from the perspective of pro-EU progressive forces who seek to respond to geopolitical challenges such as the Russian war against Ukraine, qualitative shift in transatlantic relations resulting in security crisis as well as the prospective EU enlargement. Much of academic attention has been also devoted to studying the dynamics of the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) concluded in May 2022, followed by the 2023 European Parliament’s (EP) report proposing amendments to the existing treaties. What remains unexplored, however, is the Eurosceptic response and discursive mobilization vis-à-vis the integrationist reform endeavor. Over the last two years, this lacuna has become even more salient, because while mainstream EU leaders (e.g. President of the Commission, Polish or German governments) have opted for depoliticization of the EU reform agenda in order to appease right-wing Eurosceptics in the context of future elections, the latter ones have effectively capitalized on the momentum to engage in a transnational counter-narrative spanning not only beyond national arenas and political parties, but also across continents. One illustration of this dynamic has been a sovereigntist counter-proposal to the aforementioned EP’s EU reform project prepared by the Polish Ordo Iuris Institute and Hungarian Mathias Corvinus Collegium, first presented at the American Heritage Foundation in Washington (March 2025) and then at the event organized by the MEPs from the Patriots for Europe group at the EP premises (June 2025). Against this background, the aim of this paper is to explore the anatomy of the unfolding right-wing response to the EU integrationist reform agenda, focusing on its actors, arenas and discursive mechanisms. Combining process tracing and discourse analysis, the paper seeks to unravel the transnational evolution of the sovereigntist counter-offensive looking at who its main entrepreneurs are, how their narrative is framed, to whom it is directed, and in what ways it transforms the EU public sphere. More specifically, the paper will delve into how Eurosceptics mobilize transnational and multi-level networks of politicians (MPs and MEPs), experts and NGOs to create new communication spaces, reaching out beyond Europe to US actors to add the Atlanticist perspectives in a quest to “defend national sovereignty”. The paper contributes to the literature on Euroscepticism as a transnational phenomenon with a special focus on the multi-level (between national MPs and MEPs) and cross-border co-ordination and diffusion of ideological positions among political parties and civil society. On a more theoretical level, the paper will add to the discussion on the evolution of the European public sphere that couples the creation of (new) transnational spaces of political communication to the transformation of EU’s multilevel political system and its democratic credentials.