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Have we reached a tipping point? The mainstreaming of Euroscepticism in the UK

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Abstract

Stephen George, the eminent scholar of the European Union, famously labelled the UK as the ‘awkward partner’ when analysing the country’s relationship with the EU. The ‘permissive consensus’ evident in most EU nation states, at least prior to Maastricht and more recently the Eurozone crisis, was never ‘clear-cut’ in the UK. However, recent developments have propelled the issue of UK membership to the centre stage of British politics. By analysing some of the key historic variables which have contributed to the UK’s ambivalence and hostility towards the EU as well as more recent factors such as Conservative Party splits over ‘Europe’ and the rise of UKIP, the article focuses on the role and influence of the tabloid press, and in particular the Daily Express, to demonstrate how the debate surrounding UK membership of the EU has completed its journey from the margins to the mainstream of British politics. It concludes that the lack of a ‘level playing-field’ in terms of EU coverage among the UK tabloid press has led to a situation where its citizens, in the context of an ‘in-out’ referendum, are unable to ‘weigh up’ the ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’ of EU membership in a rational and informed fashion.

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... This lack of interest in media influence is striking because readership of the British Eurosceptic press closely correlates with Eurosceptic attitudes (Swales 2016). Furthermore, voters' explanations for favouring leavesuch as immigration, the cost of welfare paid to EU citizens or threats to national sovereigntyalso mirror dominant themes in much press reporting (Startin 2015). ...
... In Britain, these have included the country's "island mentality", its legacy of Empire and exceptionalism, and a tendency to tell its national story through the lens of Britain "standing alone" in World War IIrather than its broader historical relationship with Europe (Grant 2007;Daddow 2012;Wellings and Baxendale 2014). Public attitudes have also been shaped by key events and processes such as the Maastricht debates in the 1990s, European enlargement in 2004 and 2007, and the post-2008 Eurozone crisis (Startin 2015). So the formation of public beliefs and attitudes is a complex, dynamic process involving collective memory, identity and significant eventsas well as the information that people are exposed to through the media and other key sites of socialisation. ...
... In depth research focused solely on British reporting has tended to be more qualitative and focused on how the EU has been constructed in press accounts (e.g., Morgan 1995;Anderson and Weymouth 1999;Anderson 2004;Daddow 2012;Startin 2015;Copeland and Copsey 2017). This research has found the Guardian, the Independent, the Daily Mirror and the specialist financial press (Financial Times and Economist), to be broadly supportive of EU membership. ...
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This paper analyses the historic role of Britain's major public service broadcaster, the BBC, in reporting the European Union. To do this it combines a content analysis of two datasets of BBC broadcast and online coverage from 2007 and 2012 with a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with former and current senior BBC editors and journalists. The research finds that BBC coverage in the pre-referendum period was closely tied to major events – such as summits – and elite party conflict. These patterns in coverage were primarily a consequence of the lack of traditional news values inherent in most EU stories and the impact of the wider political and media landscape. The consequence of these patterns in coverage was to present audiences with a restricted, negative and largely conflictual picture of Britain's relationship with the EU which is likely to have fuelled rather than inhibited the growth of Euroscepticism.
... The anti-European stance of parts of the British press is well documented (e.g., Daddow, 2012;Startin, 2015), but scholars have also studied media and Euroskepticism in other European countries. These studies have picked up on different forms of criticism on and opposition to the EU and its policies. ...
... Earlier studies on media reporting and Euroskepticism often revolved around the question whether news media coverage of EU affairs is predominantly negative or positive. Yet, recently new typologies have been put forward that acknowledge that opinions for and against European integration and EU policies are two sides of the same coin and come in many different guises (e.g., Bijsmans, 2017;de Wilde, Michailidou, & Trenz, 2013;Startin, 2015). While important, this does not make easier attempts toward conceptual clarification and methodological applicability. ...
... 12). Indeed, Startin (2015) notes the important role played by British media-tabloids in particular-in creating an environment in which hostility toward the EU became commonplace. ...
Chapter
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In an age of Brexit, Euroskepticism has become a central element in debates about Europe. It is generally believed that there has been an increase in criticism on and opposition toward the European Union (EU) and its policies since the 1991 Maastricht Treaty. Yet, criticism was already present at the start of the integration process, also among mainstream parties in the six founding members. With the EU’s recent crises, Euroskepticism has become embedded in contestation in most member states, affecting politics at the national and European level. Consequently, it is important to understand Euroskepticism in contemporary Europe and to gather a broad overview of its development, its meaning, and its wider consequences. Euroskepticism is a diverse, multifaceted phenomenon that varies across time, member states, and policies. Exploring the history of Euroskepticism helps to contextualize contemporary developments and to understand some of the main debates and issues in the field, including conceptual challenges, but also debates about the reasons for Euroskepticism and what kind of impact it might have. One of the key questions in this respect is whether Euroskepticism should be seen as a problematic phenomenon or as an essential element of a democratic Europe. While conventional negative connotations associated with Euroskepticism suggest the former, research finds a broader variety of criticism and opposition to the EU and its policies that may be conducive to a more democratic EU debate.
... Seperti yang telah dibahas pada bagian-bagian sebelumnya, sentimen yang demikian cukup dominan terutama pada isu migrasi. Namun, tidak sampai disitu Lalu, mudahnya narasi identitas digiring untuk secara buta membenci kelompok Preferensi untuk memilih leave ini-selain didorong oleh sentimen rasial-juga didorong (Startin, 2015). ...
... Dalam konteks Brexit, argumen utilitarian atau secara sederhana bisa dikatakan pragmatisme ekonomi tidak cukup untuk dapat meyakinkan publik mengenai keanggotaan Britania Raya di dalam UE. Argumentasi utilitarian yang cukup signifikan pada masa Thatcher pada akhirnya tersingkirkan oleh wacana-wacana identitas sebagaimana yang dijelaskan olehStartin (2015).Namun demikian, penulis melihat bahwa wacana identitas ini munculnya identitas sebagai sebuah komoditas politik yang sangat menguntungkan juga tidak dapat dilepaskan dari bagaimana identitas tersebut dipolitisasi dalam mekanisme politik elektoral. Penulis melihat bahwa media konvensional dan UKIP dalam hal ini menjadi aktor yang sangat diuntungkan melalui "komodifikasi" wacana-wacana identitas tersebut.Bagi media, bias-bias kepemilikan yang sudah lama terjadi banyak diantaranya juga dihinggapi pandangan eroskeptis dan bagi UKIP jelas membawa keuntungan berupa dukungan politik. ...
Thesis
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The exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union (Brexit) is one of the cases of a series of waves of global populism which has been widely studied by academics across disciplines, especially social, political and cultural sciences. When examined through the perspective of International Relations, Brexit is one of the case studies that successfully demonstrates the significance of various forms of identity political discourse in influencing a country's foreign policy. Referring to this big picture, this study aims to review academic literature that discusses the discourse of identity politics in Brexit. The type of literature used is in the form of journal articles, books and chapters in academic books. Then, this literature review was then successful in gathering discussions which were later divided into four themes, namely (1) Historical Review of the Relations between Great Britain and Europe, (2) Actors Playing a Role in the Reproduction of Identity Political Discourse, (3) Various Forms of Identity Political Discourse Appears, and (4) Intersection of Identity Political Discourse with Socio-Economic Factors. After describing the distribution of literature in each theme, this paper contains consensus and debate, reflection, and synthesis which are manifestations of the entire literature. In the end, this paper gives birth to a conclusion, namely that the discourse on identity politics which continues to develop will be strongly driven by domestic complexities as a result of interactions between actors at the elite level and at the public level. In addition to domestic complexities, the formation of identity politics discourse in Brexit is also influenced by pressures that arise at the international level – especially because of the UK's membership in the European Union.
... Euroscepticism in the British press has been thoroughly researched (Simpson and Startin 2023;Startin 2015), but this generally does not apply to other European countries. Often the central question is whether news media coverage of EU affairs is predominantly negative or positive (de Vreese et al. 2006;Schuck et al. 2011), thereby overlooking the rich variety of positions and views found by the research referred to earlier. ...
... Here, I employ a categorisation ( Table 1) that I developed elsewhere (Bijsmans 2017(Bijsmans , 2021. In contrast to other categorisations for analysing media reporting of EU affairswhich are either limited to polity issues (de Wilde et al. 2013) or focus on newspapers' positions rather than those of the actors covered in them (Startin 2015)this categorisation finetunes existing concepts, whilst at the same time avoiding problems of operationalisation (Szczerbiak and Taggart 2018). ...
Article
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Euroscepticism has become prominent across the European Union, also in countries that were originally seen as pro‐integrationist such as the Netherlands. Based on a qualitative analysis of claims in three major Dutch newspapers, I examine the mainstreaming of Euroscepticism in the Netherlands in the context of the 2009, 2014 and 2019 European Parliament elections. Mainstreaming refers to a process in which an idea becomes an integral part of debates in the public sphere. I examine the mainstreaming of Euroscepticism through a two‐part analysis that centres around a fourfold typology, which distinguishes between supportive, Euroalternative, soft Eurosceptic and hard Eurosceptic claims. I find that Euroscepticism has indeed become mainstream, in debates revolving around arguments for and against the European Union. Furthermore, Euroscepticism has not just become more prominent but has also moved from an outsider to an insider perspective. Yet, it often remains unclear what Euroscepticism actually entails.
... This echoes similar arguments about the Eurosceptic press' role in mainstreaming hard-line opposition to the EU and support for a membership referendum (Startin, 2015), highlighting the significant influence of the media over public perceptions of both the EU and ECtHR. Still, Mead and Gies do not identify differences in specific forms of conflation, which vary considerably depending on factors such as intent, context and the precise language used in particular acts of conflation. ...
... Moreover, even with corrections, once articles muddling one Europe with another are published, they are seen by readers who absorb and potentially perpetuate the error. Given that UK citizens have among the lowest levels of knowledge about the EU (Daddow, 2012;Startin, 2015), and limited knowledge of the United Kingdom's own human rights infrastructure (Hartmann and White, 2020: 16), conflation of the ECtHR with the EU in the media and among political actors can be seen as both reflecting and reinforcing poor understanding. This, in turn, affects how Europe is perceived: as a web of overlapping courts and councils either too complicated or too unimportant to distinguish between. ...
Article
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This article focuses on the phenomenon of conflating the European Court of Human Rights with the European Court of Justice and European Union in British political and media discourse. Scholars of the European Court of Human Rights and Euroscepticism often acknowledge conflation, but rarely specify the forms it takes or its specific effects on British perceptions of the legitimacy of European institutions. This article identifies three main forms of conflation: muddled conflation, ambiguous conflation, and deliberate conflation. It shows that conflation can be both a symptom of deeper Eurosceptic disregard for the roles and purposes of distinct European institutions, and a deliberate rhetorical tool, intended to weaken the legitimacy of separate institutions by tying criticisms of one to the other. The article demonstrates that conflating the different Europes contributes to the persistence of Strasbourgsceptic narratives in the British political sphere by exacerbating pre-existing concerns and providing additional opportunities to raise them in public.
... of these traditional identities, that of the UK as a European country, is available for pro-remain speakers to articulate and it operates very much at the margins of political discourse (Startin 2015;Daddow 2015). ...
... Articles reviewed are as follows:Wellings and Baxendale (2015),Bevir et al. (2015),Daddow (2015),Goes (2015),Ludlow (2015),Startin (2015),Hill (2016), Tombs (2016), Whitman (2016a, b), Menon and Salter (2016), Oliver (2016), Oliver and Williams (2016), Henderson and Jeffery (2017), Whitman (2017), Menon (2017), Oliver (2017), Oliver (2018), Bogdanor (2018) Daddow (2018), Nedergaard and Henriksen (2018), Wellings (2018), Martill and Staiger (2018), Whittaker (2018), Hill (2018), Goodman and Shankleman (2019) and Daddow (2019).Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved. ...
Article
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Brexit threatens to disrupt the fabric of British foreign policy thinking. For decades, policymakers identified membership of the European Community as one of two pillars of British influence (the other being the ‘Special Relationship’ with the United States). Together, they allowed Britain to exercise power on a global as well as regional scale. These assumptions were repeated so often that the UK was regularly criticised for lacking policy imagination and avoiding hard choices when the interests of Europe and the United States conflicted. Brexit presents an unavoidable dilemma for policymakers as they chart a new course for British foreign policy. Interpretivism, as set out by Bevir and Rhodes (2003), offers a route to understanding how actors interpret and respond to such dilemmas, via reference to traditions. This article uses their approach to examine the expression of beliefs about Brexit and British foreign policy. In particular, it focuses on two datasets, one a ‘control sample’ of commentary since 2016, the other, the parliamentary debates on the first EU Withdrawal Bill in December 2018 and January 2019. We find a contrasting willingness to evoke traditions in a substantive fashion to understand and justify political choices. In particular, parliamentarians utilise one particular tradition, pragmatism, to marginalise the expression of abstract belief. In the process, they reduce discussion to a technocratic exercise that is unable to manage the conflicts Brexit has brought about. Meanwhile, those MPs that are most creative in their expression of traditions tend to be from smaller regional parties or on the political periphery. The resulting deadlock is evidence of the importance of traditions to interpreting and managing dilemmas of social change.
... Poor knowledge of EU institutions coupled with the weak presence of everyday symbols such as flags and Euro notes have limited individuals' identification with the Union and contributed to low public support for integration in the UK (Cram 2012;Startin 2015). The two main parties have historically approached EU politics in an 'indirect and potentially less electorally risky 5 manner' by focussing on general views rather than specific policies (Sherrington 2006:70), thus helping party leaders from providing clear cues to their voters (Curtice 2017). ...
... The two main parties have historically approached EU politics in an 'indirect and potentially less electorally risky 5 manner' by focussing on general views rather than specific policies (Sherrington 2006:70), thus helping party leaders from providing clear cues to their voters (Curtice 2017). Pro-remain politicians were careful to overtly support the EU, while Eurosceptics of varied political leanings frequently spoke against it (Startin 2015) -a trend confirmed in Wenzl's (2019) analysis of MPs' speeches given in Westminster between 2015 and 2016. As shown by Clarke, Goodwin and Whiteley (2017), the association of EU membership and negative emotions might ...
Article
This article analyses the political construction and politicisation of UK–EU relations by British parliamentarians in Westminster and in the European Parliament (EP) between May 2015 and May 2017. Using computer-assisted content analysis techniques and qualitative analysis of sampled speeches, we investigate how parties used frames and emotions in order to mobilise voters. Results indicate that the ‘Leave’ campaign succeeded in triggering sentiments of distrust and anger against the establishment and mobilizing voters while, economic arguments used by ‘remainers’ failed to convince citizens from deprived areas of the benefits of EU membership. Intra-party divisions were stronger among Westminster members than in the EP, but the visibility of the ‘Leave’ discourse in the EP was disproportionately higher to the number of pro-Brexit parliamentarians. Polarisation and values-based arguments are observed in the EP early in the campaign, suggesting that the process initiated at the European level and then migrated to the national level.
... British news outlets, in particular, highlighted the threat posed by EU policy to the concept of the nation (Anderson & Weymouth, 1999;Díez Medrano, 2003;Rowinski, 2014). Tabloid outlets were instrumental in linking the issue of European integration with migration, employing an 'emotional' strategy based on identity and sovereignty (Startin, 2015). This approach fostered a framing of 'us and them' between individual state members and the EU organisation (Triandafyllidou, 1998). ...
... This became a legitimate, mainstream political concern in the view of some commentators (for example, Roe-Crines and Heppell, 2020) following UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's argument during her Bruges speech of 1988 in favor of a future EU based on national independence and sovereignty rather than integration and interdependence. This was then followed by a period of growing ambivalence and, in some cases, hostility towards the EU by fringe and mainstream political parties and citizens based not only in the UK (Startin, 2015) but also, to a varying extent (Leconte, 2010) in other member states. ...
Article
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This paper explores the economic and non-economic factors that could potentially lead to a Polish decision to remain within or leave the EU, following a future potential Polexit referendum. The study aims to determine the relative impact of Polish citizens’ values and attitudes on their support for their country’s continued EU membership and integration, at such a crucial time. The research is based on a survey conducted in December 2021, with a stratified sample of 1,517 respondents, and a statistical analysis of the findings. The results suggest that the relative importance of these factors could vary considerably, with economic factors potentially playing a less significant role than sociocultural and political elements. We argue that this projected outcome is likely to be influenced by citizens’ socio-demographic backgrounds, their perceived levels of economic security or insecurity, and differences in their economic and non-economic values, thereby creating potential opportunities for future populist Eurosceptic politicians in Poland to exploit, underlining the potential implications of these findings.
... After all, the British relationship with the EU has always been exceptional in some respects. Britain has been notably labelled the EU's 'awkward partner' , thought to be geographically, institutionally and psychologically distant from the continent, characterised by persistent and outsized Euroscepticism (George 1990; see also Startin 2015;Davis 2017;Carl et al. 2019). A major component of the 'awkward partner' title was the 'awkward party' , the Conservatives, which compared to mainstream centre-right parties in other European countries, projected more pervasive and intense Euroscepticism after Margaret Thatcher's own conversion on the issue Gamble 2012). ...
Article
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This introduction to the special issue recalls the alarm raised in EU capitals and Brussels after the UK’s in-out referendum delivered a Leave vote in June 2016. The fear was of a domino effect and the further fragmentation of an already divided EU. Seven years later, it is clear that there was rapid attrition of Eurosceptic triumphalism, and the EU-27 showed remarkable unity. This required a sustained collective effort to contain a membership crisis and maintain the EU polity. Yet, the issue contributors challenge the notion that the alarm was unfounded and explain why this counter-factual did not materialise, even though potential for future membership crises of different sorts was revealed. Theoretically, this supports an understanding of the EU as a polity that is fragile, yet able to assert porous borders, exercise authority over a diverse membership, and mobilise a modicum of loyalty when the entire integration regime is under threat.
... In line with this facts, Startin (2015) held that the European identity was not shared by UK citizens and this issue became a relevant psychological impediment to pro-European British attitudes. Additionally, McLaren (2015) stressed that, through its history, the British considered that the European integration has limited their sovereignty and the capacity of the government to take decisions. ...
Article
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This article focuses on French opinions and perceptions towards the European Union (EU). Its aim is to assess whether nationalism plays a relevant role in shaping people´s views on the EU. For doing so, different proxies of patriotism, nationalism and chauvinism are explored, and French perception of the EU is scrutinized through four dimensions measuring the respondents´ assessment of their EU knowledge, their country´s benefits from EU membership, national sovereignty and support for continuing French EU membership. The data source comes from the survey carried out in 2013 by the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) in which the sample size, in the case of France, is more than 2,000 people. Findings indicate that nationalism and chauvinism correlate negatively with attitudes towards the EU. The contribution to the literature is twofold. Firstly, it is shown that there is a strong negative correlation between chauvinism and the willingness of remaining as a Member State of the EU. Secondly, this research revealed that an improvement in the communication channels between the EU´s institutions and the citizenship could be crucial to counterbalance this effect. RESUMO Este artigo se concentra nas opiniões e percepções dos franceses em relação à União Europeia (UE). Seu objetivo é avaliar se o nacionalismo desempenha um papel relevante na formação de opiniões pessoais sobre a UE. Para isso, ele explora diferentes indicadores de patriotismo, nacionalismo e chauvinismo e examina as percepções francesas sobre a UE por meio de quatro dimensões que medem a avaliação dos entrevistados sobre seu conhecimento da UE, os benefícios de seu país como membro da UE, a soberania nacional e o apoio individual à permanência na UE. A fonte de dados vem da pesquisa de 2013 realizada pelo International Social Survey Program (ISSP), na qual o tamanho da amostra, no caso da França, é de mais de 2.000 pessoas. Os resultados indicam que o nacionalismo e o chauvinismo estão negativamente correlacionados com as atitudes em relação à UE. As contribuições desta pesquisa são duas. Primeiro, ela mostra que há uma forte correlação negativa entre o chauvinismo e a disposição de permanecer como estado-membro da UE. Em segundo lugar, ela mostra que a melhoria dos canais de comunicação entre as instituições da UE e os cidadãos pode ser crucial para neutralizar esse efeito. Palavras-chave: França, União Europeia, Frexit, nacionalismo, chauvinismo, nacionalismo, chauvinismo. RESUMEN Este artículo se centra en las opiniones y percepciones francesas hacia la Unión Europea (UE). Su objetivo es evaluar si el nacionalismo juega un papel relevante en la configuración de las opiniones personales sobre la UE. Para ello, se exploran diferentes indicadores de patriotismo, nacionalismo y chovinismo, y se examina la percepción francesa de la UE a través de cuatro dimensiones que miden la evaluación de los encuestados sobre su conocimiento de la UE, los beneficios de su país como miembro de la UE, la soberanía nacional y el apoyo individual a seguir siendo miembro de la UE. La fuente de datos procede de la encuesta realizada en 2013 por el International Social Survey Program (ISSP) en la que el tamaño de la muestra, en el caso de Francia, es de más de 2.000 personas. Los resultados indican que el nacionalismo y el chovinismo se correlacionan negativamente con las actitudes hacia la UE. Las contribuciones de esta investigación son dos. En primer lugar, se muestra que existe una fuerte correlación negativa entre el chovinismo y la voluntad de permanecer como Estado miembro de la UE. En segundo lugar, se observa que una mejora en los canales de comunicación entre las instituciones de la UE y la ciudadanía podría ser crucial para contrarrestar este efecto. Palabras clave: Francia, Unión Europea, Frexit, nacionalismo, chovinismo. ARTICLE HISTORY Sapienza: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies |
... The "New Settlement" Narrative of the UK Government Euroscepticism in the UK has a long history (see Clarke et al. 2017;Gastinger 2021;MacMillan 2018;Sobolewska and Ford 2020;Startin 2015;Wellings and Baxendale 2015). However, the likelihood of Brexit significantly increased in 2013. ...
Chapter
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The Withdrawal Agreement (WA) and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) constitute the legal scaffolding of the post-exit EU-UK relationship. The implementation of the WA began as the TCA was being negotiated, thereby creating an implementation-negotiation overlap. This chapter analyses the issues that have confronted the two treaties as living legal documents. More than two years after agreement on the TCA, EU-UK relations have not reached a stable modus vivendi because of continuing controversy about the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP).
... While the quality press tended to defend experts, the tabloids frequently portrayed them as part of the elitist Brussels plot. Individuals including Nigel Farage with his column in the Daily Express, but also Conservatives like Boris Johnson (especially in the Daily Telegraph) saw themselves as, and were set up to be, figureheads against such Brussels elites (Startin 2015). Given the greater 'pull' of politicians, it is not surprising therefore that the press granted substantially greater attention to them rather than experts and academics despite the complexities and technicalities of the issue (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism 2016). ...
Article
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The UK decision to leave the EU poses a challenge to European integration theory at the supranational end of the spectrum. This process of horizontal disintegration by popular vote constitutes a particularly hard case for neofunctionalism, which has assumed a forward-moving integration project based on a "permissive consensus" among European citizens. Unsurprisingly, neofunctionalism has been dubbed "outdated" in view of the British membership referendum. In this paper-which examines the degree to which neofunctionalism may explain the Brexit process and referendum outcome-we argue that the theory still significantly adds to our understanding because (1) neofunctionalism may be able to theorise disintegration, to some extent, by tackling the issue of politicisation; (b) neofunctional dynamics, although overridden by other factors, were, and continue to be, present here; (c) neofunctionalism is a dynamic/transformative theory: a specification of the conditions of spillover can usefully delimit its scope of application-an exercise to which this paper seeks to contribute.
... El término «euroescepticismo» («euroscepticism») fue acuñado a mediados de los 80 por los medios británicos y es fruto de la tradición discursiva, tanto entre políticos como periodistas, que consideraba este país y sus ciudadanos como diferentes del resto de europeos (Spiering, 2004). Esta diferencia se argumentaba tanto en base a criterios geográficos -carácter insular del Reino Unido-, como a criterios históricos y de relaciones internacionales -relación privilegiada con los Estados Unidos y con los países de la Commonwealth (Startin, 2015). Durante las negociaciones de acceso a mediados de los setenta y más tarde, en el momento de la firma del Acta Única por parte Margaret Thatcher, a mediados de los ochenta, ya se puede apreciar la magnitud del sentimiento contra las instituciones europeas en este país (Vasilopoulou, 2013: 158). ...
Chapter
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Estudio teórico y metodológico para enmarcar la obra desde el punto de vista teórico, de la literatura y de la metodología
... El término «euroescepticismo» («euroscepticism») fue acuñado a mediados de los ochenta por los medios británicos y es fruto de la tradición discursiva, tanto entre políticos como periodistas, que consideraba este país y sus ciudadanos como diferentes al resto de europeos (Spiering, 2004). Esta diferencia se argumentaba tanto en base a criterios geográficos -carácter insular del Reino Unido-, como a criterios históricos y de relaciones internacionales -relación privilegiada con los Estados Unidos y con los países de la Commonwealth (Startin, 2015). Durante las negociaciones de acceso a la Comunidad Económica Europea (CEE) a mediados de los setenta y más tarde, en el momento de la firma del Acta Única por parte Margaret Thatcher, a mediados de los ochenta, ya se puede apreciar la magnitud del sentimiento contra las instituciones europeas en este país (Vasilopoulou, 2013: 158). ...
Chapter
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Conclusiones de la obra, análisis de los principales hallazgos procedentes de los diferentes casos de estudio
... El término «euroescepticismo» («euroscepticism») fue acuñado a mediados de los 80 por los medios británicos y es fruto de la tradición discursiva, tanto entre políticos como periodistas, que consideraba este país y sus ciudadanos como diferentes del resto de europeos (Spiering, 2004). Esta diferencia se argumentaba tanto en base a criterios geográficos -carácter insular del Reino Unido-, como a criterios históricos y de relaciones internacionales -relación privilegiada con los Estados Unidos y con los países de la Commonwealth (Startin, 2015). Durante las negociaciones de acceso a mediados de los setenta y más tarde, en el momento de la firma del Acta Única por parte Margaret Thatcher, a mediados de los ochenta, ya se puede apreciar la magnitud del sentimiento contra las instituciones europeas en este país (Vasilopoulou, 2013: 158). ...
Chapter
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Análisis de las ideas de política exterior del Movimento Cinque Stelle en Italia desde sus comienzos, los años en la oposición (2013-2018) y la experiencia en el gobierno de Italia (2018-actualidad)
... Another possibility is a difference in the depiction of the EU in media. For example, Startin (2015) shows how in the British case lopsided coverage of the EU has led to a mainstreaming of Euroscepticism. This mainstreaming of Euroscepticism in UK media is also noted by Bijsmans (2017), who additionally shows that criticism of the EU is increasingly also a part of debates in Dutch media. ...
Article
Is Euroscepticism Contagious? How Mainstream Parties React to Eurosceptic Challengers in Belgian Parliaments Euroscepticism has long been absent among Belgian political parties. However, since the start of the century, some Eurosceptic challengers have risen. This article examines the effect of Eurosceptic competition on the salience other parties give to the EU and on the positions these parties take in parliament. Using a sample of plenary debates in the federal and regional parliaments, we track each party’s evolution from 2000 until 2019. Our findings both contradict and qualify existing theories and findings on Eurosceptic competition. When facing Eurosceptic challengers, all parties raise salience fairly equally, but government and peripheral parties adopted (soft) Euroscepticism more often than other parties.
... Nigel Farage also successfully implemented a "fusion strategy" (Ford & Goodwin, 2014, p. 282) between the issues of the UK's membership of the EU and immigration. He talked about the pros and cons of membership in emotional and psychological terms, focusing on the shortcomings of the principle of the freedom of movement and its impacts on Britain in terms of both economic competition and cultural threats (Startin, 2015). Moreover, helped by the parliamentary expenses scandal, which broke in May 2009, Nigel Farage conducted a campaign against the British 'corrupt elite', further intensifying the growing alienation between citizens and the mainstream parties. ...
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European politics is increasingly contested along two dimensions: the economic left-right dimension and a relatively new dimension focused on European integration and immigration. This chapter aims to compare the strategies adopted by mainstream and populist parties to compete on EU issues in national parliaments. The analysis reveals that support for the EU is no longer unconditional, even for mainstream left parties of both countries, which criticise certain aspects of the functioning of the EU, although they do not dispute the European horizon towards which their country needs to move. On the contrary, mainstream right parties, both in Italy and in the UK, express principled Eurosceptic positions towards the process of EU integration and towards EU institutions, mainly criticising the legitimacy of EU institutions. Populist radical right parties (LN and the UKIP) hold principled negative stances towards all the EU targets and link closely anti-immigration attitudes with anti-EU attitudes using both legitimacy and sovereigntist frames. Conversely, the M5S holds much more nuanced positions towards the EU. The chameleonic nature of the M5S is explained by its nature as a ‘pure’ populist party.
... Bu konuşmanın odağında bütünleşmenin derinleşmesine ve Avrupa kurumlarına daha fazla yetki devrine karşı itiraz ve tereddütler bulunmaktadır. "Avrupa şüpheciliği" bu konuşmanın ertesinde Avrupa bütünleşmesinin seyri ile ilgili endişe ve itirazları ifade eden bir terim olarak kullanılmaya başlamıştır (Hooghe ve Marks, 2007;Szczerbiak ve Taggart, 2000;Startin, 2015;Usherwood ve Startin, 2013). ...
... Understood as a 'politics of identity', EU politicization is not just limited to times of crisis but denotes an axial transformation of European integration. While we share some of these concerns, we also believe that the existing accounts of EU politicization have focused too narrowly on the 'mainstreaming' of Euroscepticism as a force that undermines EU legitimacy (Startin, 2015). We argue that EU politicization remains incomplete if the opposing side, that of pro-European mobilisation, is not considered. ...
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The UK’s referendum on EU membership that resulted in a narrow minority in favour of leave was followed by a leadership vacuum and intense debate about the implementation of the result. The politicization over Brexit resulted in the development of ‘Brexit identities’ of Remainers and Leavers that superseded party identities. We argue that in order to understand how this politicization took place despite a leadership vacuum we firstly need to look beyond the arena of formal party politics to more informal arenas of political contestation on social media, especially Facebook, and secondly understand the linkages between EU and national level politicization that polarised the country around new British-specific identities. Through this, we analyse the ‘politics of division’ not simply as a form of contentious politics driven by political parties, but as a social conflict driven by non-institutionalised groups, grassroots campaigns and ordinary citizens. We find evidence of significant mobilisation that extends beyond the realm of party politics but argue that this mobilisation cannot necessarily be considered entirely ‘grassroots’. Rather, it is driven not just by citizens but also shaped by mainstream and alternative media platforms. The debates cannot, however, be considered purely a form of EU politicization, rather, analysis of Facebook comments shows that politicization over Brexit through these campaigns is primarily contestation over the nature and legitimacy of British democracy. Because of this, we argue that social media is an essential site for the study of EU politicization and political campaigns in general.
... The social dimension of the Brexit process can be considered on two levels: ex post and ex ante. The former includes in-depth studies on the social and cultural characteristics of a group of British people who voted for the UK's exit from the EU (see Goodwin & Heath, 2016;Startin, 2015). The latter is much more important because it exceeds the assessment of the current state: it covers the social consequences yet to be reflected in tendencies that shape tensions among social groups in relation to age, gender, the standard of living or education (see Henderson et al., 2016;Kenny, 2016;Leconte, 2015), not to mention the nationalist and populist movements that will arise in Europe after Brexit. ...
... According to Startin (2015), UK citizens did not share a clear European identity with other EU members and this issue became a relevant psychological obstacle to pro-European British attitudes. Moreover, McLaren (2015) highlighted that, through its history, the public considered that the European integration has limited their sovereignty and the capacity of the government to take decisions such as an example, the capacity of the governments to control immigration. ...
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Este artículo tiene tres objetivos. En primer lugar, se muestra como los resultados del referéndum realizado en Gran Bretaña en 2016 no son sorprendentes dado que están en línea con los resultados obtenidos en la encuesta realizada en 2013 por el International Social Survey Program (ISSP). En Segundo lugar, se provee evidencia clara sobre la correlación existente entre los resultados del referéndum y las preferencias proteccionistas y las opiniones sobre los inmigrantes. Finalmente, se estima un modelo probit que brinda información sobre el impacto de los atributos sociodemográficos en estas preferencias los cuales están en línea con los resultados obtenidos en el referéndum de 2016.
... Later investigations point to controversial issues, such as the much discussed 'democratic deficit' or the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, to explain Eurosceptic coverage in British media (Gavin, 2001;Khabaz, 2018;Startin, 2015). Hawkins (2012) finds two Eurosceptic frames which conceive of 'the EU as a foreign power and the EU as a bargaining forum' (p. ...
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Ever since Britain voted to leave the European Union, emotions have dominated the public debate. How negative emotions, such as anger, have impacted the Brexit vote, has been widely researched. Less attention has been focused on the role positive emotions played in debating Britain’s relationship to the EU. Using critical discourse analysis and drawing on appraisal theory to investigate the representation of emotions in six sample texts from a corpus of so-called ‘Euromyths’ ( N = 334), this study argues that positive emotions were used to create a myth in Roland Barthes’ sense to naturalise a Eurosceptic ideology of British defiance and power.
... While the low number of observations (n = 17) makes it difficult to disentangle statistically the drivers at play in the four clusters, some cautious observations can be made. What is characteristic of both clusters one and two is that the political elites of the countries express Eurosceptical sentiments, which is likely to diminish the importance of the anti-elite model (Startin 2015). By contrast, the group of countries in cluster three is characterized by broad cross-partisan support for the EU and a low degree of politicization of the European integration process. ...
Article
Studies have suggested that people voting for Brexit were motivated by anti-globalization, anti-multiculturalism and anti-elite sentiments. However, little is known about how these factors are related and whether citizens in other member states share similar reasons for wanting to exit the EU. Methodologically, this question is addressed by utilizing path models on data from the European Social Survey, with respondents in 17 countries. Empirically, this article reveals considerable cross-country variation, which implies that motivations for voting Leave should be assessed on a country-by-country basis. Yet, two main pathways are identified. First, lower education is related to more negative attitudes towards multiculturalism, which increases the probability of voting Leave. Second, lower income decreases the level of trust in the political establishment, which again increases the probability of voting Leave. Theoretically, this implies that the anti-globalization model is subsumed by the anti-multiculturalism and anti-elite models, giving rise to two new mechanisms.
... The British print media has, however, also been associated with laying the ideational foundations of populist sentiment through the adoption across sections of the press of an anti-establishment and anti-migrant agenda (Stanyer et al., 2016). In the context of Brexit, it is also important to note many newspapers' sustained contributions to Euroscepticism (Daddow, 2012;Startin, 2015). But this ground-laying did little to open the gates for populist insurgents in media terms prior to the Referendum. ...
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This article examines how and when populist discourses were mobilised within the 2016 UK European Union (EU) Referendum campaign, by examining the specific temporal conjunctions between the changing strategy of the official ‘Vote Leave’ campaign, British national newspaper reporting of the Referendum and shifts in public opinion. Our analysis shows that Vote Leave only started to utilise anti-elitist and exclusionary populist rhetoric at the mid-point of the campaign, in response to constricting political opportunities, but by so doing transformed the dynamic of the Referendum. We term this an example of ‘strategic populist ventriloquism’, where elite politicians appropriate the language of insurgency for political advantage, and argue that current conceptual frameworks on media and populism need to be broadened to accommodate these occasions.
... Britain's relationship with Europe has been a contentious one ever since it joined the European Community in 1973. While domestic opposition to membership was initially confined to the fringes of Labour and the Conservative Party (Geddes 2004;Forster 2002), it was catapulted to the centre by David Cameron's promise to hold a referendum after the success of UKIP in the 2014 European elections (Gowland 2017;Startin 2015). However, the referendum did little to settle the debate. ...
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Brexit has been the most important issue in British politics in recent years. Whereas extra-parliamentary actors dominated the run-up to the 2016 referendum, the issue moved back to Parliament after the vote. This paper analyses newspaper reporting on Brexit in major British outlets during the post-referendum phase from July 2017 to March 2019. We study the visibility of Members of Parliament to assess whether the debate was balanced between parties and individual MPs relative to their vote and seat share. We conduct an automated text analysis of 58,247 online and offline newspaper articles covering the ideological spectrum from left to right, and from pro-Brexit to anti-Brexit. Our main findings are: (1) Conservative politicians dominated the debate, and (2) organized pro-Brexit MP pressure groups such as ‘Leave Means Leave’ were disproportionally more visible. This means that reporting was biased towards Conservative MPs and within the Conservative Party towards supporters of a hard Brexit. These findings are remarkably stable across different types of newspapers. The results challenge previous analyses that found a higher degree of balance in reporting but corroborate recent studies on the tonality of Brexit reporting that found a pro-Brexit bias.
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Las dificultades para la ratificación del Tratado de la Unión Europea (TUE), aprobado en Maastricht el siete de febrero de 1992, suelen ser interpretadas como el síntoma de un cambio en la identificación de la opinión pública europea con el proceso de integración comunitaria iniciado en la década de 1950. Con una participación del 83% del electorado, el referéndum de ratificación en Dinamarca, celebrado el 2 de junio de 1992 se saldó con un rechazo al Tratado por algo más del 50% de los votos, lo que obligó, meses más tarde, a un nuevo referéndum. Una ola de lo que comenzó a denominarse «euroescepticismo» se extendió a los demás países.
Article
When former British Prime Minister Theresa May resigned in May (Citation2019), in the first few days much mainstream and social media coverage focused on the tears she cried. Newspapers highlighted her tears as an extraordinary act for a politician. Her unexpected display of emotions was met with sympathy, sometimes even considered a feminist political moment, and often contextualised the framing of May’s political legacy. Analysing UK mainstream tabloid and broadsheet coverage following May’s resignation, this paper explores the media reactions in more detail. A dominant theme in the assessment of May’s legacy was her perceived inability to “get Brexit done.” Any deployment of feminist celebrations of public female tears was quickly overtaken by coverage that constructs May as politically and personally fragile, rooted in a known range of sexist tropes that associate femininity in politics with weakness. This “feminine weakness” is the opposite of what is needed to fulfil the Brexit project, which is often described in masculinist terms. Thus, Brexit is constructed as inherently masculine, and women are considered a threat to this project, highlighting the ways in which Brexit is mediated as a gendered political process. This article argues for greater attention to the role media play in the gendering of populist discourse.
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The outcome of the British membership referendum came as a shock to observers in the UK and the European Union. Such moments of profound uncertainty provide policymakers with “windows of opportunity” to collectively frame and nudge policy responses onto distinct pathways. This chapter argues that the economic interests of the member states is insufficient to explain the EU’s united response to Brexit. Crucially the united and effective EU response depended on how the Union framed Brexit as a challenge. Collective framing enabled the EU to agree internally on the nature of the problem and how to respond to the challenge of the UK’s exit.
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This article examines the rare phenomenon of mainstream Euroscepticism that has characterised the British Conservative Party and asks whether a similar pattern has appeared elsewhere in the EU. The study traces the long-term evolution of salience and positions on the EU issue in the manifestos of a heterogenous set of centre-right parties, paying particular attention to whether Brexit or successive EU crises have had some noticeable effect. The thesis of Tory exceptionalism is largely supported by the findings – no other mainstream conservative party in the EU has talked more, and more negatively, about the EU over a long time period. Most other centre-right parties were part of the permissive consensus on the EU and have supported, more or less openly, the integration project throughout the past 30 years. However, some parties of mainstream conservatism have shown a similar negative shift as British Conservatives did in the 2000s, such as the Austrian ÖVP, the Hungarian Fidesz, the Polish PiS and (marginally) the Dutch VVD. Being in opposition or pressured by radical right challengers does not necessarily make the mainstream right more critical of the EU. Internal organisational developments (i.e. the ascent of more Eurosceptic influences within the party) constitute the most convincing proximate explanation for mainstream Euroscepticism on the right.
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The Brexit vote — the British people’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016 — represents the outcome of a successful populist movement. More recently, the Conservative Party’s staggering 2019 electoral success demonstrated that the populist “Get Brexit Done” message remains popular among both traditional Conservatives and broad swaths of the working class in former Labour Partystrongholds. This study aims to explain the Conservative Party’s marked change rhetoric and policy, as well as factional shifts within the halls of Westminster, in response to the ongoing Brexit negotiations. While some scholars look at the supplyside causes of populism (elites and political parties) and others look at the demandside causes (the voters), this study applies a third school of thought that examines the relationship between supply and demand by analyzing a series of interviews with Conservative Party staff as well as public opinion polling. In doing so, the study concludes that there has been a deep, reciprocal, and simultaneous onset of populist Euroscepticism within both the Conservative Party and the working class that has structurally re-aligned the Conservative Party for decades to come, from more ‘libertarian’ to more ‘authoritarian’ in nature. A feedback loop between the new Conservative base and the Conservative Party has rendered and reciprocated a new mentality among voters. This research contributes to the existing literature as an example of the aftermath of populist movements when both elites and voters are able to forge cooperative relationships to achieve their goals.
Article
Political communication researchers studying the news media coverage often distinguish between broadsheets and tabloids when sampling relevant news outlets. But recent work has pointed towards a ‘tabloidization’ of news coverage, complicating the empirical distinction between the two. Computational methods for text analysis can help us better understand how distinct the news coverage between these two types of news outlets is. We take the Brexit referendum as a case study illustrating various aspects in which broadsheets and tabloids cover an issue permeated by othering and divisive rhetoric. We focus on Brexit-related news coverage before and after the referendum (N = 32,946) and use word embeddings to analyze the portrayal of different groups of citizens that can generate an in- and outgroup divide. First, we document the presence of media-based othering in the form of overly similar migrant and European Union citizen representations that are, in turn, very dissimilar to the UK citizen representation. Second, we show partial convergence between tabloid and broadsheet newspapers, as differences in the degree and characteristics of media coverage are rather small and specific.
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This article focuses on the role of the British tabloid press (BTP), and specifically the eurosceptic press, as a ‘supply‐side’ influence on the 2016 EU referendum. First, we focus on the BTP and its role as an ‘agenda‐setter’ in shaping eurosceptic discourse regarding the UK's relationship with the EU. Second, we use content analysis of five tabloid newspapers – The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror, The Daily Express and The Daily Star to demonstrate the disproportionate pro‐Brexit discourse prior to, and during, the EU referendum campaign. Third, drawing on opinion poll data, we show how this ‘bombardment’ approach influenced the electorate in the referendum campaign. Given the ‘knowledge deficit’ about the EU in the UK, we conclude that the BTP had a significant bearing on tipping the referendum vote towards Brexit.
Article
For over a decade, scholars of European studies have been studying a phenomenon referred to as the politicization of the European Union, usually defined as the intensification of a political debate, the polarization of opinions, and public resonance. This article extends existing explanatory models by offering a systematic theorization of the role emotions in EU politicization to establish that emotions are integral to every step of the process. First, they are prerequisites as actors and audiences need to be emotionally invested in an issue to engage in a debate about it. Second, they are drivers since they fuel debates and allow them to get heated and polarized. Third, they are outcomes since politicization will engender new emotional investments and sensitivities. The analytical added value of integrating emotions into explanatory models is illustrated through the case of the Brexit campaign.
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Sancılı bir başvuru sürecinden sonra 1973 yılında İrlanda ve Danimarka ile birlikte Avrupa Birliği (AB) üyeliğine kabul edilen İngiltere AB için, iç politika bağımsızlığı ve bazı egemenlik haklarının devri konularında her zaman sorun oluşturmuştur. İngiltere, AB’nin yürürlüğe koyduğu birçok ulus üstü ve hükûmetler arası anlaşmalardan kendini ayrıştırmayı başarmıştır. Brexit, bu ayrışmanın en kalıcısıdır. Brexit sürecinde göç konusunun yoğun bir şekilde propaganda aracı olarak kullanıldığı görülmektedir. İstatistiklere bakıldığında İngiltere için göç konusundaki sorunun bölge dışı olmaktan ziyade Birlik üyesi diğer ülkelerle olan göçmen hareketliliğinden kaynaklı olduğu anlaşılmaktadır. Bu çalışma göçün AB içerisinde ve İngiltere özelinde yarattığı ekonomik ve güvenlik kaynaklı etkilerini araştırırken, Brexit sürecinin göç konusu ile ilişkisini tartışmaktadır. Anlaşıldığı kadarıyla gerek AB ülkeleri ve gerekse İngiltere, göçle birlikte oluşan sosyal değişimi bir güvenlik tehdidi olarak ele almaktadırlar. Gelişmiş ve hedef ülkeler kendilerini bu tehdide karşı korumak ve göçü bir şekilde engellemek için her türlü politik tedbiri almak durumunda ve dahası bu hakka sahip hissetmektedirler.
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Italy and the United Kingdom (UK) are two emblematic cases to observe the effects of the politicisation of immigration and European affairs on party politics. First, the UK is traditionally a two-party system, while the Italian political system is highly fragmented and scarcely institutionalized. Second, Italy used to be a Europhile country, while the UK has never been entirely at ease with its membership of the European Union (EU), so much so to exit from the Union. Finally, Italy has only recently turned into an immigration country, while immigration is a long-standing phenomenon in the UK. These differences increase the variance in party politics, thus making it possible to understand if a generalisable relation exists between party family and party positioning. The European Parliament (EP) is considered as an additional case study as it allows to compare political competition across levels of government. This chapter presents a review of the history of immigration and European integration in Italy and the UK from the ‘90s until today, as well as an analysis of the evolution of political competition on immigration and European affairs in the EP.
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While the (upcoming) withdrawal of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU) has been heavily discussed in Europe, this debate revolves mainly around the future of the UK and UK-EU relations. By contrast, little attention has been paid to the reactions of third countries and the effect of their perceptions on the role of the changing EU in the changing world. However, only if the EU is seen as attractive and its actions as legitimate, valuable, credible and coherent, European (public) diplomacy and external action will be effective. This volume investigates how the planning of the ‘divorce’ between the EU and the UK, and specifically the ‘period of uncertainty’ that ensued after the June 2016 referendum in the UK, impacted on third countries’ perceptions of the EU-27, on their policy options (with regard to the bilateral relationship with the EU), and on EU external policymaking. This introductory chapter will set the scene for the subsequent contributions that analyse perceptions of the EU-27 after the Brexit referendum in the key world regions as defined by the EU Global Strategy 2016: the Wide Atlantic, the Middle East, Asia, Africa as well as the EU’s neighbours to the East and South. We elaborate on the common conceptual approach that guides all contributions, specify the methods employed to explore perceptions in individual countries/regions, introduce the structure of the volume and outline the main arguments and key results of the contributions to this volume.
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The 2016 EU Referendum has renewed the focus of historians and social scientists on Britain’s historical relationship with Europe as they aim to develop a better understanding of ‘the road to Brexit’. The development of Euroscepticism in Britain has often been approached from an elite perspective, with a focus on the conflicting ideas and arguments between politicians, political parties, and the media. This article builds on existing studies by focusing on popular attitudes to Europe during the early 1980s. We analyse responses to a ‘special directive’ issued by the Mass Observation Project in the autumn of 1982 to mark the ten-year anniversary of Britain joining the European Economic Community (EEC). Reading this previously overlooked material for categories, storylines, and other cultural resources, we identify four key grievances MO panellists shared as common-sense evaluations of Britain’s membership of the EEC. We argue these grievances constituted a wider folk theory of Euroscepticism circulating in British society six years prior to Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech and subsequent debates about further integration in the early 1990s. In developing this argument, we contribute a better understanding of the content and origins of popular Euroscepticism in the 1980s.
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This chapter places the Euromyths news stories in their historical-political context of growing British Euroscepticism at the time of the Maastricht Treaty negotiations. It also explores the editorial context of Euromyths, using the four previously analysed news stories as an example. The contextual analysis finds that Euromyths news stories constituted their own genre. The chapter then turns to the use of emotions in Euromyths and analyses six sample stories, drawing on discursive appraisal theory. It finds that positive emotions such as mirth and pride and negative emotions such as anger support the assertion of a Eurosceptic myth.
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This chapter introduces the “Euromyths,” false news reports that was collected over nearly three decades by the Representation of the European Commission in the UK. The chapter explains the impact the Euromyths had on the British coverage of European affairs and on British politics. A corpus of 334 Euromyths news stories constitute the main data set on which the investigation of this book is based. The chapter details how the corpus was built. While the British press was largely sympathetic to the European project in the first three decades after World War II, it turned sharply Eurosceptic from the 1980s onwards. The chapter summarises the research literature on the British Eurosceptic media.
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This article analyses how the issue of self-determination was framed and presented during the Brexit referendum campaign. It focuses on the two official campaign websites of the Leave and Remain sides during the referendum campaign between 15 April and 22 June 2016. The qualitative thematic analysis covers 186 posts from both sides, using an inductive approach. The results indicate that both camps adopted similar approaches towards the issues of self-determination (although from different perspectives), with limited emphasis on the general elements and extensive use of the specific themes. These themes were a combination of issues which were salient in society and on which the other camp had little to say.
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Euroscepticism in the Conservative Party Membership in European Union has become one of the most crucial and controversial issues in British politics in recent years. Eurosceptics from United Kingdom Independent Party were exhorting to leave the EU and more and more British people had supported them. David Cameron who was leading the government since 2010 had to express a conservative view on the matter. He had announced his plan to renegotiate the terms of EU membership and hold a referendum on the results, asking British people to vote for what he thought the only right choice – staying in European Union. But not all Tories shared that belief. This article examines the issue of Euroscepticism in Conservative Party analyzing its doctrinal as well as political origins and its influence on the government.
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Euroscepticism is widely used to describe the variegated forces opposing the EU. This chapter guides the reader through the evolution of this term highlighting the major theoretical contributions that enhanced our knowledge of this phenomenon. However, the scientific and political use of Euroscepticism also presents strong drawbacks that can be prevented relying on a traditional concept for political science: political opposition. This is the core scope of the chapter that proposes a reconceptualization of Euroscepticism in terms of political opposition drawing a set of guidelines that are used in the study to formulate an index of parties’ positioning to the EU disentangling both the targets and the character of the described action. To achieve a higher degree of completeness, the chapter reviews the literature focusing on the potential explanations for the presence of antagonism to the EU and proposes a model based upon the concept of Political opportunity Structure that is suited to study the phenomenon in the EP. The last part of the chapter reviews the selected cases and the methods applied to identify patterns of parties’ positioning in the EP and to understand their potential causes.
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Over recent years, the Western world has witnessed the (re-)rise of populism, which was marginal compared to the (once-)dominant ideologies of globalisation and European integration. This article examines the role played by the Twitter practices of politicians and the news media in mainstreaming populism through a case study of the 2016 Brexit referendum debates. The communicative freedom of politicians and the extensive attention given to them by users enabled the presenting of populist arguments as a legitimate part of debates about the referendum. The news media paid overwhelming attention to politicians and focused on the issues of immigration and the economy in their tweets, creating the sphere of legitimate controversy where populist arguments appeared in parallel with those supporting globalisation and European integration. In this case, the Twitter practices of British politicians and the news media led to the extensive – but largely uncritical – presence and articulation of populist claims on Twitter. Their strong presence alongside pro-EU and pro-globalisation arguments gave these populist perspectives a central place in the debates on the referendum. The mainstreaming of populism through the Twitter practices of politicians and the news media is inextricably linked with, and thus needs to be understood within, the broader context of rising populism where the (once-)dominant ideologies of globalisation and European integration are in decline.
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Chapter 6 points out that the factors that influence parties’ immigration policy stances are broadly similar in three countries, but the way that they are articulated by the parties is context dependent. This variation is explained by three contextual factors: the effects of the EU integration, party competition on the right and perceived identity concerns of the public towards immigration. Parties’ immigration policy stances are shaped by the parties’ attitudes towards the EU, the type of country’s citizenship regime and the strength of radical right competitor. The second part of the chapter delves into the comparison of causal mechanisms and explains the differences in policymaking logics that depend on the type of democracy a country belongs to.
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British participation in the historical process of European integration has been persistently framed as a policy dilemma of the highest order. This dilemma was itself coloured by the existence of policy traditions that oriented Britain away from Europe and towards political communities tied to a historical interpretation of British nationality. Euroscepticism is symptomatic of these traditions and dilemmas while at the same time sustaining them. But Eurosceptics face a dilemma of their own. What serious alternative do they propose? The notion of the ‘Anglosphere’ was adopted on the Eurosceptic right of British politics as an alternative to European integration. As a politics of disengagement by the Cameron government played out in Europe, a policy of re-engagement began with Britain's former Dominions. Here was a response to a political dilemma that not only used historical consciousness and political tradition as its point of departure, but as its place of destination too.
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Since the late 1990s, a true cottage industry of ‘Euroscepticism studies’ has emerged, which has given way to hundreds of publications in increasingly prominent journals. This article looks at two of the most important ‘schools’ of Euroscepticism studies: Sussex and North Carolina. The two differ in many ways – e.g. definition, data and methods, scope – but account for much of the academic output on the topic. Initially, I briefly describe the major publications of the two schools, before comparing and contrasting them on the basis of some key dimensions (definition, data, scope, explanations). The article then discusses the crucial ‘so what question’ by focusing on the Achilles heel of Euroscepticism studies: salience. Finally, I propose ways in which the two schools can be better integrated and suggest some avenues of research for the post-crisis period.
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Political resistance to European integration in the UK laid important ideological foundations for contemporary English nationalism. The politics surrounding accession to the European Economic Community (EEC) was such that it signalled that accession was a matter of supreme national importance and, via the device of a referendum, it led to the fusing of parliamentary and popular sovereignty. The unfolding of the Thatcherite project in Britain added an individualistic – and eventually an anti-European – dimension to this nascent English nationalism. Resistance to the deepening political and monetary integration of Europe, coupled with the effects of devolution in the UK, led to the emergence of a populist English nationalism, by now fundamentally shaped by opposition to European integration, albeit a nationalism that merged the defence of British and English sovereignty. Underpinning these three developments was a popular version of the past that saw ‘Europe’ as the ultimate institutional expression of British decline. Thus Euroscepeticism generated the ideology of contemporary English nationalism by legitimising the defence of parliamentary sovereignty through the invocation of popular sovereignty underpinned by reference to the past.
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This book provides both a comprehensive introduction and a perceptive examination of Britain's relations with the European Community and the European Union since 1945, combining an historical account with political analysis to illustrate the changing and multifaceted nature of British and European politics. Few issues in British politics since 1945 have generated such heated controversy as Britain's approach to the process of European integration associated with the European Union. The long-running debate on the subject has not only played a major part in the downfall of prime ministers and other leading political figures but has also exposed major fault-lines within governments and caused deep and rancorous divisions within and between the major political parties. This highly contested issue has given rise to bitter campaigning in the press and between pressure groups, and it has bemused, confused and divided the public at large. Key questions addressed include: • Why has Europe had such an explosive impact on British politics? • What impelled British policymakers to join the European Community and to undertake one of the radical, if not the most radical, changes in modern British history? • What have been the perceived advantages and disadvantages of British membership of the European Union? • Why has British membership of the European Union rarely attracted a national consensus? Engaging with both academic and public debates about Britain and the European Union, this volume is essential reading for all students of British history, British politics, and European politics. © 2010 David Gowland, Arthur Turner and Alex Wright. All rights reserved.
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The UK Independence Party (UKIP) is the most significant new party in British politics for a generation. In recent years UKIP and their charismatic leader Nigel Farage have captivated British politics, media and voters. Yet both the party and the roots of its support remain poorly understood. Where has this political revolt come from? Who is supporting them, and why? How are UKIP attempting to win over voters? And how far can their insurgency against the main parties go? Drawing on a wealth of new data – from surveys of UKIP voters to extensive interviews with party insiders – in this book prominent political scientists Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin put UKIP's revolt under the microscope and show how many conventional wisdoms about the party and the radical right are wrong. Along the way they provide unprecedented insight into this new revolt, and deliver some crucial messages for those with an interest in the state of British politics, the radical right in Europe and political behaviour more generally.
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This article advances the interpretivist perspective on British foreign policy by studying Tony Blair's difficult encounter with the Eurosceptic tradition in Britain, popularized by Margaret Thatcher from the late 1980s. Using discourse data taken from key foreign policy speeches by the two leaders across their periods in office, the article investigates the problems Blair and his New Labour team faced when trying to justify and legitimize Britain's more constructive approach to the European Union from 1997. The article argues that Blair failed to modernize public attitudes and build support behind a Europeanist consensus in Britain because, contrary to the reputations they have built up over the years, the two leaders’ webs of belief about the British in Europe were remarkably similar. Blair reworked rather than undermined core themes within the British Eurosceptic tradition.
Article
Since the early 1980s the Front National (FN) has been a significant feature on the French political landscape, performing consistently in national, local and European electoral settings. The party has consolidated its position in terms of votes cast as the third largest in France with Marine Le Pen polling over 18% of the vote in the first round of the 2012 presidential elections. More recently the party were victorious in the 2014 European elections, polling just short of 25% and underlining Marine Le Pen's status as the ‘leader’ of the contemporary Far Right in Europe. This progression is in contrast to the electoral evolution of the British National Party (BNP), which, under the leadership of Nick Griffin, has struggled to make an impact in the national electoral context and, after reaching a peak at the 2009 European elections where it won two seats in the Strasbourg chamber, fell away in the 2014 contest polling just over 1% of the vote. By concentrating primarily on ‘supply-side’ theories of the rise of the Far Right, the purpose of this paper is to account for the dramatically contrasting electoral fortunes of the two parties and to explain the electoral longevity and durability of the FN in contrast to the BNP. It examines the importance of ‘supply-side’ variables such as national tradition, political opportunity structures, charismatic leadership and the role of the media in order to account for their contrasting fortunes. In short, the article aims to contribute to the burgeoning debate about the rise (and durability) of Far Right parties in Europe.
Article
This article examines the nature and impact of changing media coverage of European integration in Britain from accession to the European Economic Community in 1973 to the present day. It does so through a consideration of the causes behind the collapse of the ‘permissive consensus’ on European affairs, which since the time of the 1975 referendum has given way to a form of ‘destructive dissent’ across vast swaths of the written and broadcast media, particularly noticeable in the UK tabloids. The collapse in media support for the EU project has been expressed in a number of ways, some of them bordering on the nationalist and/or xenophobic, and opportunities for the expression of such views have merely been increased by the EU's own efforts to deepen integration in the face of widespread popular distrust of both national politicians and supranational constitution‐building. The article alights on the ‘Rupert Murdoch effect’ as a core explanation for this general shift in attitudes, as market leader on Euroscepticism expressed in agenda‐setting outlets such as the Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times. The newspaper mogul's commercial interests in promoting deregulated media markets have kept him closely watchful of European affairs in Britain, and he has proved particularly willing to back leaders and parties he believes will be most conducive to the furtherance of these interests. The article suggests that Murdoch led the way in creating a climate of fear around European matters that severely tested the leadership qualities of even notionally pro‐European prime ministers on this vexed question in British politics. Newspapers might not be able to tell people what to think, but they can affect what they think about, and News International, with willing support from ideological Eurosceptics across the top‐selling UK tabloid and broadsheets, has proved effective at keeping the British public in a permanent state of ‘war’ with the EU since the 1980s.
Article
This article approaches Euroscepticism as central to a contemporary dynamic of government and opposition. Populist Eurosceptic mobilizations exemplify opposition to depoliticized forms of political rule and demonstrate the tight political coupling of the national and the European. In the case of the United Kingdom, a depoliticized post-imperial governing approach to European integration has proved highly contested. From this perspective, the article examines the recent politics of Europe under the coalition government (from 2010 to 2013) as a period of Eurosceptic mobilization that successfully challenges European policy. What on the surface appears to be a problem of party management for the Conservative leadership is more accurately understood as a broader conflict between government and a populist Eurosceptic opposition. The outcome of this conflict is to further embed hard Euroscepticism within British politics to the point where maintaining governing autonomy on Europe is severely constrained, if not unfeasible.
Article
In the two decades since the emergence of the European Union at Maastricht there has been a concerted attempt to build a European political space, typified by the debates on constitutionalization and democratization. Much less noticed, but no less important, has been the mobilization of publics, interest groups and political parties against the integration process. In the light of the failure to realize the Laeken objectives, the stabilization of an anti-integration bloc in the European Parliament, recurrent ‘no’ votes in national referendums and the emergence of an increasingly co-ordinated movement of critical interest groups, it is argued in this article that this opposition has become embedded and persistent, at both European and national levels. This will have considerable consequences for the Union itself and the way it has chosen to largely ignore sceptical voices to date.
Article
One of the most conspicuous European policy legacies of the Blair premiership pertains to its public salience: whereas European integration featured as a high-salience issue at the beginning of New Labour's tenure, it was transformed into a low-salience issue at the end of Tony Blair's period in office. Given the British public's euroscepticism and New Labour's relatively pro-European outlook, the decline in the salience of European policy accorded to the Blair government's electoral interests. As European policy could be expected to figure as an electoral liability for New Labour insofar as it was salient enough to become a significant dimension of issue voting, the Blair government faced strong electoral incentives to contain the public salience of European integration. New Labour responded to this incentive by pursuing a mix of different governing strategies that were suited to contribute to the pronounced downward trend in the salience of European integration. Specifically, the Blair government sought (1) to defuse the European policy cleavage between the two main British parties, (2) to depoliticise European policy decisions, (3) to delegate veto power to the general public, and (4) to defer the making of conclusive decisions on contentious European issues.British Politics (2008) 3, 156-182. doi:10.1057/bp.2008.1
Article
After an initial investigation of the motives underlying the Euroscepticism of three tabloid newspapers (the Sun, the Mail and the recently schizophrenic Express), this article focuses in detail on the sceptic broadsheets, the Times and the Daily Telegraph. It examines the discourses of nationalism present in these papers' reporting on the European Union, prior to suggesting that in most cases this nationalism appears, to varying degrees, to be a facade masking the commercial interests of the papers' proprietors. The article concludes by looking at the implications for British democracy of the manner in which the UK Eurosceptic press reports on the EU.
Article
Presentación del significado, la historia, las instituciones y el trabajo de la Unión Europea desde sus tímidos inicios, en los años cincuenta, hasta la integración económica y política de Europa Occidental en los años noventa.
Article
Conservative Party policy on the EU has hardened in recent years, both in order to outflank Labour and as a reflection of an increasingly Eurosceptical membership, inside parliament and without. Yet at the same time the Tories have increasingly downplayed ‘Europe’. In the light of the apparent defeat of the EU’s Constitutional Treaty and the Labour government’s more assertive stance, this could – and perhaps should – be the precursor to the party’s return to a more pragmatic, ‘softer’ Euroscepticism which acknowledges the reality of multilevel governance but seeks to tilt it in a more liberal direction. Abandoning the attempt to turn back the clock would also dovetail with David Cameron’s broader modernisation strategy. Whether the party is ready for a ‘Eurorealism’ that sees Britain’s relationship with the EU as a ‘valence issue’ – one revolving around competence – rather than a ‘position issue’ – one which demands people take sides – is another matter. Nor will things be made any easier by Cameron’s arguably rash promise to take Tory MEPs out of the EPP-ED group in Brussels.
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