Introduction

In democratic political systems, elections are the most important institutionalised opportunities to articulate political preferences and opinions, to mobilise citizens and to organise political conflict. Political conflict is expected to be most intensive in the electoral arena, where political parties fight for votes, offices and policies. In Schattschneider's words, this is where the ‘crowd’ comes in because ‘[n]othing attracts a crowd as quickly as a fight’ (Schattschneider 1975 [1960]: 1). In our context, this statement needs to be qualified in two respects. First, it is true that elections have by far the strongest mobilising power compared to national referenda or protest events. However, they have an elitist bias because they are dominated by political parties and marginalise interest groups and organised civil society. Second, while political conflict in integration debates is clearly directed at European issues, elections are open for any political issue. For this reason, conflicts over European integration have to compete with other domestic issues (such as welfare, unemployment, security, etc.) for public attention and for consideration in parties’ electoral strategies. Taken together, elections may provide a favourable political opportunity structure for politicisation, but it is uncertain whether parties actually make use of this opportunity. It is the task of this chapter to examine this empirically.

We concentrate on the national electoral arena, because national elections in the period under consideration were ‘first order elections’. Compared to ‘second order elections’ to the European Parliament (Reif and Schmitt 1980) or to sub-national election contests, they had the highest turnover and parties directed their strongest efforts at them. Moreover, as we argued in the introductory chapter, in the EU's multi-layered polity, national elections are expected to be the most important institutionalised channel to mobilise political conflict beyond the narrow range of the governmental elite. In order to assess the relative importance of conflicts in national election contests, we introduce an empirical benchmark which allows European integration issues to be compared with the most relevant domestic issues. Against this background, the key questions to be answered in this chapter are the following. Has the European integration process become politicised in the last four decades in the electoral arena?

Introduction

The empirical analysis in this book represents the most comprehensive effort so far to understand political conflict over European integration in all its relevant manifestations. Our study covers more than four decades of European integration from the early 1970s to the most critical phases of the euro crisis in six west European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK). We examined public debates on every major step of integration in the past four decades; we have investigated the relevance of European issues in every national election in this period; and we have collected data on protest events on European issues since 1995. If there has been a politicisation of the European integration process in the last four decades, we will have observed it!

In the following, we summarise and discuss the main findings in five steps. First, we give a résumé of the level of politicisation and its development. In this context, we check the validity of our general politicisation hypothesis and of the hypotheses on the individual dimensions of politicisation. In a second step, we provide explanations of the pattern of politicisation which we have observed; third, we analyse the effects of politicisation on the structuring of political conflict in Europe; fourth, we investigate the consequences of politicisation for the European integration process; and, finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for integration theory.

In sum, we argue that the politicisation hypothesis as advanced in the scholarly literature needs substantial revision. There is neither a single uniform process of politicisation nor is there a clear trend over time. Rather, European integration must be interpreted as a strategic opportunity for political actors, political parties in particular, to mobilise citizens. Such opportunities to politicise European issues became increasingly common with the intensification of the integration process after the mid 1980s, but they already existed in the 1970s and they have been exploited not only by radical challengers but also by mainstream parties on several occasions. The result is a punctuated politicisation, characterised by significant variation over time, across countries and political arenas. This pattern may be interpreted as a result of the dynamic interplay of strategies of politicisation and de-politicisation. Although these findings do not fully support postfunctionalist integration theory, they are compatible with most of its assumptions.

Introduction

The previous chapters have traced the politicisation of Europe by looking at contestation both around key integration steps and national elections. Generally speaking, the results support the claim that the European integration process has become politicised since the 1990s. At the same time, they suggest that public conflicts over Europe are still very much an elite affair. While the study of election campaigns focused exclusively on political parties, the integration debates turned out to be dominated by public authority actors. Less powerful actors, such as civil society or social movement organisations (SMOs), were hardly present in these public debates (see also Koopmans 2007, 2010; Helbling et al. 2012: 216–220 and Statham and Trenz 2013a: 85–93). While this finding casts doubt on the idea that social movements and other civil society actors are key to the politicisation of Europe, as suggested by Beck and Grande (2007) and Habermas (2012), we still lack a systematic assessment of this claim.

This chapter provides such an assessment by testing our ‘mass politics hypothesis’ (see Chapter 1). In other words, the chapter answers the question of whether European integration has become part and parcel of mass politics, i.e., whether non-party challengers and ordinary citizens are becoming more involved in conflicts over Europe. To do this, the chapter shifts attention to the protest arena. More specifically, we ask whether and to what extent European integration has become politicised in the protest arenas of the six countries. The protest arena's centre and pivotal point is the direct participation of people in protest events. Mobilising this active participation is a core competence and resource of the collective actors involved in protest politics (Hutter 2014a: 26–29). Taking up Schattschneider's (1975 [1960]: 1) words again, the protest arena is the channel where the ‘crowd’ can enter the fight without institutional, thematic or territorial boundaries. Thus, we change our research strategy and focus on protest events that are thematically related to European integration – either directly in terms of the issues articulated by the protesters or indirectly by means of the justification frames used or the addressee of the event (for the data collection strategy, see Chapter 2).

The focus on protest events reflects our general definition of politicisation as involving three dimensions: salience, polarisation and actor expansion.

Politicising Europe is the third major volume from a long-term research collaboration between Edgar Grande and Hanspeter Kriesi that started in the early 2000s. It builds on previous work on the political consequences of globalisation and the re-structuring of political conflict in western Europe and takes a closer look at the development of political conflict over European integration. This book is once more based on a large-scale empirical research project that covers six west European countries, several political arenas and more than four decades from the early 1970s to a peak of the euro crisis in 2012. Our shift in emphasis to European integration issues is both for analytical and political reasons. On the one hand, our previous projects have shown that conflicts over European integration have been constitutive for the emergence of a new ‘demarcation-integration’ cleavage in western Europe. Therefore, examining these conflicts in more detail promised important new insights into the political mechanisms that drive the transformation of political conflict. On the other hand, political developments since the mid 2000s have given the impression that the European integration process has been entering a profound political crisis. This became most evident in the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty in two national referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005 and the following fruitless debates on the future of the ‘European project’. After two decades of intensified integration, which commenced in the mid 1980s with the project to complete the single market and came to an end in the mid 2000s with the accession of twelve new member states, there have been increasing signs that the political foundations of the integration process have been changing fundamentally. The current ‘euro crisis’ has intensified this political predicament even further. In 2015, it seems as if integration euphoria has given way to perennial frustrations, public support has turned into open political resistance and intensified political conflicts have been shaping decision-making on European issues both in supranational institutions and within the European Union's (EU) member states. Against this background, our study assumes that a focus on the politicisation of Europe, both as an analytical concept and as a political strategy, is key to an understanding of the acute problems that the European integration project faces today.

Introduction

As stated in the Introduction, this study is mostly based on new original data which has been collected by a collaborative team of researchers for the purposes of this book. It represents the most comprehensive and ambitious effort thus far to analyse the politicisation of Europe in all its relevant manifestations over a long period of time in a large number of European countries. More precisely, the volume focuses on six western European countries – Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland – in the period from the early 1970s to 2012, including very critical phases of the euro crisis.

Analysing the politicisation of European integration in such a comprehensive way entails confronting several conceptual and methodological challenges. The first challenge is the proper conceptualisation and demarcation of European integration, i.e., getting hold of Europe. The second challenge is designing an adequate research strategy which allows political conflict on European issues to be observed. The third is choosing the most appropriate methods to collect data on the politicisation of Europe. The final challenge of our study is determining meaningful levels of analysis and categorisations of issues when analysing the data on the politicisation of Europe.

In the following, we explain how we cope with each of these challenges. We describe in detail the critical choices we had to make in the design of our study, and in our strategy for collecting and analysing data. In the first section, we present our conceptualisation of European integration, its dimensions, its historical development and its country-specific manifestations. Against this background, we explain the periods covered by our study in more detail and the selection of countries. In the second section we introduce the three ‘windows’ that we use to observe the politicisation of Europe: (i) public debates on major integration steps, (ii) national election campaigns, and (iii) Europeanised protest events. In the third section, we introduce our data sources, sampling strategies, and coding procedures. We close by describing two central features of our data analysis, namely, the various levels of analysis we use and the categorisation of key variables. A more detailed account of how we measure politicisation can be found in the Methodological Appendix at the end of the volume.

Politicising Europe – why bother?

Politicisation has become a key concept in European integration studies. Since the mid 2000s, it has been the object of an intense and controversial scholarly debate. The rise of politicisation as a topic in research on Europe certainly reflects current problems and challenges of the European integration process. The failure of the Constitutional Treaty, increasing Euroscepticism among citizens, the successes of Eurosceptic political parties in national and European elections, the negative outcomes of national referenda on major treaty reforms, public controversies on political strategies to cope with the euro crisis – all these incidents suggest that the elitist approach which characterised European integration for decades has arrived at a critical stage. Politicisation, both as an analytical concept and as a political strategy, seems to be the key to an understanding of the acute problems of the European integration project.

Assessments of the ‘politicisation’ phenomenon in the scholarly literature differ widely, however. Although there seems to be agreement ‘that something like politicisation has happened since the mid-1980s’ (Schmitter 2009: 211–212), its level and intensity are still the object of controversies. Three questions are at the heart of the debate. First, there is disagreement over the empirical scope of politicisation. Can we really observe a significant increase in politicisation and what are its characteristic features? Second, it is unclear whether the changes observed are of a lasting nature. Is there a durable structuring of political conflict or do observers exaggerate singular events such as the debate on the Constitutional Treaty or public protest related to the euro crisis in some southern European countries? Third, there are conflicting opinions on the consequences of politicisation for the future of European integration. Will politicisation strengthen or weaken the European project? Is it part of the problem or the key to its solution?

To start with, Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks (2009), who put the politicisation concept at the centre of a new ‘postfunctionalist theory of European integration’, argue most forcefully that there has been a significant politicisation of the integration process in the post-Maastricht period, which has become visible not only in changing public opinion but also in electoral and protest politics. In their view, the European integration project has become the object of controversial ‘mass politics’.

This Methodological Appendix serves four purposes. First, we explain how we operationalise the three dimensions of politicisation. Second, we show how we combine the indicators of the three dimensions in our politicisation index. Third, we discuss the construction of the empirical benchmarks which allow us to compare the politicisation of European integration with other political issues. Finally, we present tables with the values of all the indicators and the index for each integration step and election campaign (see Tables A.2 and A.3). The tables allow the interested reader to have a look at detailed information – because we sometimes needed to restrict our discussion in the empirical chapters to the index value only. In addition, the tables may serve as a reference for researchers interested in extending our study in time and space.

Measuring salience, actor expansion and polarisation

How did we measure the three dimensions of politicisation, i.e., salience, actor expansion and polarisation? While protest events by definition integrate the three dimensions, we had to find indicators for each of them in public debates on integration steps and election campaigns. For clarity and simplification, we rely on one indicator for each dimension and we operationalise them in a similar way for the two ‘windows of observation’ in order to secure comparability. The remaining differences – especially as regards the salience measure – are due to the different sampling and coding strategies for the two arenas (see Chapter 2).

Salience

In the case of election campaigns, we rely on a relative indicator to measure the salience of European integration. The indicator refers to the share of core sentences related to European integration as a percentage of all core sentences related to any political issue. We take into account both types of core sentences, i.e., actor–actor and actor–issue sentences. Note that in the context of this project we only coded actor–actor and actor–issues sentences with a thematic reference to European integration. We rely on data previously collected by Kriesi et al. (2008, 2012) to estimate the overall number of core sentences on all issues in a campaign (for details on the data, see ‘Constructing benchmarks’). We opted for the relative measure because the total numbers of coded sentences related to European integration give a very similar picture when looking at trends over time, but they are not well suited for comparative research.

Introduction

So far, we have shown that European integration has been politicised on various occasions and in different political arenas during the past four decades. However, the intensity and patterns of politicisation vary significantly across arenas, countries and over time. To understand and explain this variation, this chapter – as the first of a group of three chapters – puts the spotlight on the substantive content of the conflicts and its implications for politicisation. Our central hypothesis is that constitutive issues, a specific type of European issue, are a driving force of politicisation. Thus, we set out to answer the following two questions. Is the politicisation of Europe triggered by constitutive issues? Are constitutive issues positively related to higher levels of politicisation?

Constitutive issues relate to the very nature of the EU polity. Such issues involve questions related to the typical problems of regional integration introduced in Chapter 1, i.e., authority transfer, membership and decision-making rules (see Bartolini 2005: 310). Policy-related issues, by contrast, relate to questions about how in their policy-making European institutions make use of the competencies they have been attributed. Since these issues correspond to similarly structured national issues, such as, economic, social and environmental policies, they have been labelled ‘isomorphic issues’ by Bartolini (2005: 310). In contrast to consolidated national political systems, the EU polity is still in the making, and this continually raises questions about its functional and territorial boundaries. When political actors fight over such constitutive issues – be it over competencies (‘deepening’) or membership (‘widening’) – they thus touch upon the crucial elements of the European political system. This can be expected to trigger more intense opposition than policy-related European issues, and these conflicts may cut across existing party alliances, while policy-related issues tend to be more firmly embedded along traditional left–right conflict lines (e.g. Hoeglinger 2012; Hooghe and Marks 2009; Kriesi 2007; Kriesi et al. 2008, 2012; Statham and Trenz 2013a).

In this chapter, we answer our central questions by systematically differentiating between constitutive and policy-related European issues and by studying their consequences for the level of politicisation in both electoral and protest politics. Since debates on integration steps offer no fair test of our guiding hypothesis because the selection strategy is biased towards constitutive aspects of European integration, we do not consider them in this analysis.

Introduction

Since it broke out with the financial troubles of Greece in early 2010, the euro crisis has been dominating the agendas of governments and European institutions, it has sparked an intensive public debate widely covered by the mass media, and it has unleashed a new wave of public protest, in particular in those countries most heavily affected by the crisis (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Spain). The question of whether the euro crisis has contributed to the politicisation of the European integration process seems to be trivial. It certainly has! Less obvious is how the politicisation of the euro crisis compares to previous integration debates. The scholarly literature on this topic has been dominated by three propositions (see Statham and Trenz 2013a, 2015; Rauh and Zürn 2014; Zürn and Rauh 2014; Risse 2014b). First, scholars assume that the euro crisis has produced a ‘cosmopolitan moment’ (Beck 2000) in which national debates have been integrated and Europeanised in a unique way (Beck 2012; Risse 2014b). Second, they argue that ‘the Eurozone crisis has led to an unprecedented degree of politicisation’ (Statham and Trenz 2013a: 167) characterised by extraordinarily high levels of salience and particularly broad actor participation in public debates and protest events (Rauh and Zürn 2014). Third, this high level of conflict is explained not the least by the fact that politicisation in the euro crisis is not principally driven by authority transfer and membership conflicts, as in previous integration debates, but ‘by conflicts over redistribution both within and across member states’ (Statham and Trenz 2013a: 164). As a result, the euro crisis is thought to have changed not only the level and intensity of politicisation, but also its content and nature.

The empirical evidence provided thus far is mixed at best, however. An analysis of media debates and public opinion in the six founding member states of the EU by Rauh and Zürn (2014) shows a significant increase in politicisation since the early 1990s with a clear peak in the euro crisis. A comparative review of national elections in Europe shows that governments have been punished in elections following the euro crisis regardless of their party-political affiliation (Kriesi 2014).

Introduction

Having shown the importance of constitutive issues and the role of political parties in the previous two chapters, we now turn to another key variable discussed in the scholarly literature as a driving force of politicisation, namely, the framing of European issues. Political actors not only emphasise different issues and adopt different issue positions; they also frame their issue positions differently. In this context, frames are conceived as ‘thought organisers’ (Ferree et al. 2002: 13) which give political issues a specific meaning. Within the constraints of their general ideological predispositions, political actors can strategically construct and promote such frames in order to improve their competitive position in terms of votes, offices and influence (Hänggli and Kriesi 2012). By strategically framing a given issue, actors can shift the central logic of a political conflict.

Statham and Trenz (2013a: 128) distinguish three types of frames: ‘campaigning frames’, which emphasise tactical and strategic considerations; ‘issue-specific frames’, which focus on specific attributes of a political issue; and ‘justification frames’, which ‘aim to resonate with the public by adding political meaning’ (Statham and Trenz 2013a: 128–129) to an issue at stake. For the articulation and mobilisation of political conflict over Europe, justification frames are the most important because they ‘move beyond the assumed party loyalty of campaigning and issue-specific frames and try to win votes by politicising a stance over integration’ (Statham and Trenz 2013a: 129; emphasis in the original).

In short, the question of how Europe has been framed in political conflicts is crucial for an understanding of its politicisation. In the scholarly literature, three arguments in particular have been advanced on the ‘framing of Europe’ (Diez Medrano 2003). First, scholars assume a positive relationship between the importance of cultural-identitarian frames and high levels of politicisation (Kriesi et al. 2008, 2012). This implies an increasing importance of cultural frames in debates on European integration, as formulated in our ‘cultural shift hypothesis’. Hooghe and Marks (2004, 2006, 2009) argue that with the completion of the common market and the introduction of a common currency citizen preferences and public opinion on European integration have to an increasing extent being determined by attachments to national identity rather than by economic rationality. In this context, they distinguish between ‘exclusive’ (nationalist) and ‘inclusive’ (multiculturalist) identities. While inclusive identities welcome cultural openness and supranational political integration, exclusive identities aim at protecting national identity and sovereignty.

Introduction

In Chapter 4, we presented an overall map of the levels of politicisation in the electoral arenas of the six countries covered by this book. We demonstrated that European integration has become a relevant factor in national elections and that a general trend towards higher levels of politicisation in the post-Maastricht era exists. However, Chapter 4 also pointed to remarkable across- and within-country differences that could not be sufficiently explained by the questions at stake and the political context. More generally, we concluded that integration problems do not automatically lead to manifest political conflict and thus to politicisation in election campaigns. They rather produce potentials for political mobilisation, and these potentials have to be exploited by political actors.

The present chapter builds on these results and focuses on political parties, the key players in the electoral arena and the main non-governmental actors in integration debates more generally (see Chapter 3). In other words, we analyse the factors which influence parties’ decisions to strategically use European issues, and we explore how parties position themselves towards them. It is these strategic decisions that may finally explain the level of politicisation in the electoral arena. Our data again cover the sixty-one national elections from 1970 to 2010. Besides variation in selective emphasis and position taking, which we examine in this chapter, party strategies also differ, as discussed in Chapter 1, with respect to justification framing. This aspect, however, will be dealt with in the subsequent Chapter 8.

In the introductory chapter, it was argued that radical right and Eurosceptic parties may form the most important driving forces of the politicisation of Europe (radical right hypothesis). In contemporary politics, populist radical right parties seem to stand out as the most Eurosceptic party family. They oppose the pro-European mainstream, their (relative) visibility in election campaigns is high when it comes to the articulation of European issues and they also focus on constitutive aspects, which – as Chapter 6 has demonstrated – are the most conflict-prone. Many authors (e.g. Kriesi 2007; Kriesi et al. 2008; Hooghe and Marks 2009; Kriesi et al. 2012) therefore see these parties as the driving force of politicisation of Europe in the electoral arena. When comparing different routes towards politicisation in this arena we will call a path shaped by this party family a Type 1: radical right path.