Tales of electoral disparity characterize the niche party experience. Across Western Europe between 1970 and 2000, niche parties promoting the same issues achieved wildly different levels of support. In Germany, the Grünen captured a peak vote of 8.3 percent and rivaled the centrist Free Democratic Party (FDP) for the title of the third largest party, whereas in equally environmentally friendly Denmark, the Green Party cobbled together a mere 1.4 percent of the vote in its most auspicious electoral performance. Similar tales can be told about the divergent fortunes of different niche parties within a given country. The strength of Spanish ethnoterritorial parties stands in sharp contrast to the electoral marginalization of their environmental compatriots, Los Verdes. Variation in niche party fortunes has also been witnessed across party life-spans. Voter support for the Greek green party peaked early and faded away, while the attractiveness of the Austrian Freedom Party continued to increase over the decades.

The goal of this chapter is to account for the variations in niche party fortunes across Western Europe. In Chapter 2, I argued that the solution to this puzzle of varying neophyte support can be found in the behavior of the mainstream parties. Rather than being solely or even primarily determined by the permissiveness of the electoral system or the rate of unemployment or economic growth in a country, the competitiveness of a niche party is largely a function of mainstream party strategic interaction.

Rallying to the cry of “France for the French” and “One million unemployed, one million immigrants too many,” the Front National burst into the French political limelight in the 1980s. Despite the fact that there had been a moratorium on immigration to France for almost a decade, this single-issue, anti-immigration party captured almost 10 percent of the vote and thirty-five seats in the 1986 legislative elections. Its support did not flag over the next decade, with the radical right party gaining increasingly larger shares of the vote with every election. By 1997, the Front National had surpassed all expectations of its success; in that election, it earned 14.9 percent of the vote and the title of the third most popular party in the French political system.

The electoral success of the Front National was made all the more threatening – especially to the dominant Socialist (PS) and Gaullist (RPR) parties – by its cross-party appeal. A 1981 SOFRES poll reveals that 70 percent of all respondents were opposed to the arrival of further immigrants to France and that between 15 and 22 percent of survey respondents favored the expulsion of all immigrants, policy positions espoused by the Front National. Seven years later, and several years after the start of the Socialists' pro-immigrant campaign, the percentage of survey respondents still preferring the repatriation of immigrants was more than 20 percent.

Why did the Green Party in Britain lose support across the 1990s as the electorate became more environmentally minded? How did the Front National overcome the institutional barriers to minor parties to become the number three party in France? Why did the support of the “institutionally advantaged” SNP wax and wane between 1970 and 1997?

The goal of Chapters 5, 6, and 7 has been to examine the electoral fortunes of these niche parties and find answers to these puzzles. In each case, the in-depth evidence has highlighted the insufficiency of the standard institutional and sociological explanations. Rather, examination of party documents, survey data, and interviews with party officials has demonstrated the central role of mainstream parties in determining the electoral highs and lows of each niche party. British and French mainstream parties have adopted strategies to deliberately manipulate the vote share of these green, radical right, and ethnoterritorial parties in order to improve their own electoral position vis-à-vis their mainstream party opponent. And as the survey data have confirmed, these mainstream parties have benefited from a more potent set of tactics than previously recognized; they have altered niche party support not just by shifting their positions on the niche party's issue but also by influencing the perceived salience and ownership of the issue.

Whenever it comes to defining ‘hard’ criteria of cultural heterogeneity in Europe's multinational constellation, the terrain of language is almost unavoidably brought into focus. At this point, suffice it to say that at present, after the first two rounds of eastern enlargement and the admission of 10 new members in 2004 and 2 new members in 2007, 27 member states within the European Union (EU) make for 23 languages which all enjoy formal equality. In addition, there is a long list of languages which have an official or semi-official character at the subnational level. Language may well be regarded as the principal factor of cultural differentiation in the EU. Accordingly, the imperative to respect cultural diversity, which plays a pivotal normative role in EU treaties and declarations, becomes in the first instance an imperative to respect linguistic diversity.

As a salient differentiating feature within Europe, language is at the same time a differentiating factor of a quite special kind, since the ability to speak, which is a constitutive attribute of the human species, finds concrete expression in manifold forms. Humanity speaks, yet it speaks in different tongues. Since the universality of language (in the singular) and the difference of languages (in the plural) are parallel phenomena, the linguistic medium is a symbol of cultural diversity with peculiar properties. Ultimately, the particularism of the mother tongue, which in the case of individuals with a multilingual socialization may become the particularism of a limited repertoire of ‘own’ languages, is a particularism common to all people in different ways.

After Maastricht, there was increasing evidence that the permissive consensus which formerly sustained the European project had become fragile. Those who advocated a deepening of the Union faced considerable resistance. This was due in the first place to the successful mobilization of Euro-sceptical or anti-European political forces. The European Union (EU) became a preferred target of right-wing populist groups in several member states. It had to confront a growing antipathy on the part of important sectors of the established right as well, who considered that existential national interests would be endangered in the European polity. At the same time, parts of the socialist and social-democratic European left felt more and more uncomfortable in view of the dominant position that untamed market liberalism had attained in the formation of the Economic and Monetary Union. The manifestations of discontent towards the EU appeared to be particularly strong within the political spectrum of recent adherents such as Austria and Sweden. In the first case, they were concentrated on the right; in the second, on the left.

Moreover, the situation after Maastricht was marked by a silent crumbling of the diffuse support which the bulk of the public in almost all member states had shown for the EU over a long period of time. According to the Eurobarometer surveys regularly conducted for the European Commission, it seemed that, with the increasing politicization of European affairs, the proportion of Euro-sceptical citizens was increasing too.

The line of argument developed in the previous chapters sought to demonstrate the central importance of the language question for the construction of a legitimate political order in Europe. In the course of the development of modern European democracies, language emerged as a crucial link between the cultural and political identities of citizens. Nowhere in Europe does membership in linguistic groups reflect a ‘primordial’ natural condition; it is rather the result of politics and of complex processes of social institutionalization. As an expression of cultural diversity, the phenomenon of European multilingualism must be accorded huge political importance in addition to its linguistic and anthropological significance. Hence, linguistic differentiation is a striking feature of political culture in the European Union (EU) and consequently also deserves close attention in debates over the future of integration. No European constitutional project can be successfully politically anchored without integrating into its normative architecture the socio-cultural resources on which a transnational order must be founded.

A key aspect of the argument presented here is the warning against allowing the ‘inevitable’ instrumentalism of market integration to spill over into the domain of political culture. The identity of a European civil society must take account of the diversity of cultural patterns of identification that centrally shape the self-understanding of the various political communities discernable within the EU. This normative task can be deduced from the essential European treaty texts.

Language politics and language policies played a crucial role in the historical processes of nation-state formation. Cultural and political integration in modern societies is largely based upon language. Thus, the making of nation-states went hand in hand with political attempts to introduce and maintain standardized communication codes. At later stages of political development, language policy was frequently associated with the goal of establishing a comprehensive and democratic public sphere. In multilingual settings, however, the political definition of a common language regime often became a matter of conflict. These general observations hold particularly true in the context of European history. It is in Europe where the idea of the national language originated and where it became inextricably connected with the dynamics of nation- and state-building. All over Europe, the forging of modern political identities entailed introducing communicative practices based on shared linguistic standards.

Against this background, it is quite obvious that the language issue bears extraordinary relevance if we want to assess to what extent the former logic of political integration has undergone substantial changes. We are experiencing the emergence of ‘postnational’ patterns of identification, which will ultimately reduce the salience of our ‘national’ attachments. The European Union has often been characterized as a regional harbinger of a coming global age of postnationalism. Accordingly, analyzing the role of language in the process of building Europe should improve our knowledge on the actual scope of the transition from ‘national’ to ‘postnational’ forms of political association in this part of the world.

The ‘European question’, namely, the question concerning the foundations of the political unification of Europe and its prospects of success, has by now become primarily a question of democracy. It touches, on the one hand, upon the impacts of processes of Europeanization on democratic will-formation in the member states of the European Union (EU) and, on the other, upon the possibilities of a democratization of the Union itself. Both aspects of the question have become objects of heated controversies that have long since spread beyond the boundaries of academic circles and have secured a fixed and prominent place on the political agenda. As the debates on the unfortunate European constitution have revealed, the fronts in these controversies are quite intricate, depending on ideological preference and national background. Nevertheless, one can discern a rough polarization between those who sceptically regard integration as a progressive hollowing out of the sovereignty of the democratic nation-state and those who embrace it instead as an opportunity to disclose new democratic options beyond the nation-state.

However, there appears to be widespread agreement, notwithstanding numerous other conflicts, that the technocratic approach of the initial decades of integration is no longer viable. Since the adoption and ratification of the Treaty on European Union at the beginning of the 1990s, the situation has been marked by continuing – and some would say, increasingly acute – problems of legitimation of policy-making at the European level and by a more and more contentious treatment of European issues in the domestic affairs of the nation-states.

The contentiousness of language policy within European institutions is closely bound up with the political character of the European Union (EU). Processes of communication within the Union have such a high practical and symbolic profile because they contribute essentially to the progressive constitution of a political community. The EU possesses extensive decision-making authority; European law has direct effects on all citizens of member states; and European politics is conducted within a highly differentiated complex of institutions with an independent executive, legislative and judiciary. Hence, the EU explodes the framework of a traditional international organization. Not only since the introduction of the Euro has its influence on the everyday lives of Europeans become virtually ubiquitous. It extends to a whole range of regulatory domains. In fact, there is scarcely a single policy field in the member states today in which the Community dimension is completely insignificant (Schmitter 1996b: 125). In areas such as agriculture and trade, it has long since become the dominant factor.

The considerable (and growing) importance of political processes in the institutions of the EU for the lives of its citizens cannot be doubted. But how do things stand with the communicative mediation of EU politics? Here there are evidently massive deficits. A constant chorus of complaints connects the political indifference of the subjects of European governance towards the outcomes of this very governance with the lack of information on EU affairs and the lack of transparency of decision-making processes in Brussels.

European identity has become an all-pervasive concept. In the debate on integration it is used so frequently that to call its currency inflationary would be an understatement. Thus there is an evident risk of the concept turning into a catchall formula whose possible meanings vary arbitrarily from one context to another. Typically, those who tend to evoke it with emphatic intentions are also inclined to amalgamate what they take to be the ‘objective’ attributes of a European identity, as they may be derived from the realms of geography, history, culture and politics, with normative proposals for what should placed at the core of this identity, be it the canon of ‘occidental values’ or the idea of a ‘social’ Europe. All in all, adding the adjective ‘European’ to the identity concept does not seem to help very much in clarifying terms in a discursive field which is in any case permeated by all kinds of semantic ambiguities.

In this chapter, I do not intend to give a systematic inventory of the manifold ‘identity issues’ discussed so intensely in different social science disciplines over the last two to three decades. As is to be expected, the steady multiplication of scholarly uses of the category has already triggered the first massive counter-reactions. Brubaker and Cooper (2000: 2–3), for example, speak of an ‘“identity” crisis’ in the social sciences, a crisis they relate to the devaluation of meaning caused by overproduction.

Since its inception in the 1950s, European integration has been a multilingual undertaking. This is true, in the first instance, in a quite trivial sense: relations between states are communicative relations. Interactions among political and administrative elites who belong to different language communities generally necessitate translation. The domain of international politics is, after all, also a domain of interpreters, and Europe is no exception to this rule. But beyond this, the European Union (EU) differs markedly from other more or less well-established arenas of interstate cooperation in that it officially accords multilingualism a very prominent place in its institutional architecture. In this chapter I will focus on the political background of the institutionalization of the EU's language regime and the practical implications of multilingualism for the European institutions.

For many years, the language issue occupied a rather inconspicuous place on the European political agenda. If newspapers had highlighted the ‘Brussels language problem’ in their headlines 20 or 30 years ago, politically informed readers would have assumed that they would find a report on the conflict between the Francophone and Dutch-speaking communities in the Belgian capital. Today, by contrast, many readers would be more likely to associate such headlines with the language situation in the EU. In fact, since the signing of the Treaty establishing the European Union, public interest in the European language regime seems to be increasing steadily, at least if one goes by press reports. German newspapers, at any rate, have recently devoted much attention to the subject.