The opinion data in this research derive from two sources: mass surveys and profiles of elite attitudes. Each is described below.

Public opinion data

The public opinion data come from Eurobarometer studies provided by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), located at the University of Michigan. In 1974, the Commission of the European Communities initiated the series, designed to provide regular monitoring of social and political attitudes of the publics within the EU. These have generated longitudinal and comparative data on controversial issues, including immigration, xenophobia, and race, as well as European integration. They are used here to provide some comparative context for national, ideological, and other polarizations that have evolved over the post-World War II period. Conducted biannually, these surveys consist of batteries of items repeated each year as well as special topics. Since the special issue on immigration and xenophobia in 1988/89, the spring Eurobarometer has consistently included a few questions related to immigration and immigrant groups. Not all questions are asked each year.

Eurobarometers 30, 35, 36, 37, 38, 38.1, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43.1, 44.2, 46, 47.1, 47.2, 48, 49, and 50 were most useful for this study.

In formulating the relationship between what people think and how they may be expected to behave, attitudinal research on immigration needs to be sensitive to issues such as social desirability, accessibility, and intensity of responses. Building on theories of perceived behavioral control, recent public opinion studies have reaffirmed the view that attitudes predict behaviors when they are highly accessible in the perception process (i.e., they come to mind quickly), independent even of direction and intensity. While it is true that attitudes that are highly accessible are more likely to guide perception and therefore behavior, it is imperative to recognize that there is a myriad of other factors that may inhibit or promote behaviors.

Social norms are especially important in attitudinal studies engaged in sensitive issues. The classic study of the Chinese couple travelling across the United States, conducted by Richard La Piere in the 1930s, revealed how social norms can inhibit behaviors that are thought to derive from attitudes. A thorny problem of all attitudinal research is that of the socially desirable responses. Asking people about issues as politically sensitive as minorities and migrant groups is telling (Hewstone 1986: 50). One way of overcoming the methodological bias of socially desirable responses is to ask people to project about the attitudes of their reference groups. My study on immigration, for example, has considered that publics and elites may more readily report the views of their colleagues and compatriots than their own.

Max Weber, the preeminent social scientist, once said that all scientific inquiry begins with a modicum of subjectivity – merely in the researcher's choice of topic. It is upon this recognition that one can proceed to the true objectivity necessary for scientific investigation. For me, the journey into immigration scholarship took root in my first one-way plane trip from Israel to the United States as a child. It resurfaced over years of shuttling back and forth, and finding a personal safe haven in the middle – Europe – where I could recreate the foreigner context anew. The immigrant story is remarkably familiar to a significant number of immigration researchers I have encountered over the years, and so it is natural that the spin and interpretations we bring to the fore vary so greatly.

This inquiry on immigration attitudes in Europe has its earliest intellectual origins in my initial graduate training at the London School of Economics. Set among the dynamic intellectual commons at Holborn, the LSE provided me with the opportunity to have observer and subject status at one and the same time. From the vantage point of a foreign student in London, and later Paris, where I conducted my thesis work, I had been privy to the fact that Europe had become a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural society, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps unacceptingly. But one thing was clear: it lacked a corresponding set of attitudes that resembled the American-pioneered “melting-pot” spirit. What was the common European myth?

That citizens of European Union countries differ in their attitudes regarding Europe is a commonplace of political commentary. Some favor their country's membership in the EU, others oppose it. Some, while thinking that membership is generally a good thing, feel that steps toward unification have gone far enough – or even too far. Others believe that further steps should be taken.

Citizens of EU countries also differ in terms of more traditional political orientations – attitudes to the proper role of government in society, welfare provision, and other matters which have increasingly over the past half-century come to be subsumed within a single orientation towards government action, generally referred to as the left/right orientation (Lipset 1960; Lijphart 1980; Franklin, Mackie, Valen, et al., 1992).

These two orientations are often assumed to be orthogonal, with the newer pro-/anti-EU orientation cutting across the more traditional left/right orientation (see, e.g., Hicks and Lord 1998; Hooghe and Marks 1999). Our own research (van der Eijk and Franklin 1996; van der Eijk, Franklin, and van der Brug 1999; van der Brug, Franklin, and van der Eijk 2000) demonstrates that EU orientation does not currently have much impact on party choice at EU elections. Elections to the European Parliament have been described as “second-order national” elections at which the arena supposedly at issue (the European arena) takes second place to the national arena as a focus for issue and representational concerns (Reif and Schmitt 1980; Reif 1984, 1985; Marsh and Franklin 1996); and the national arena is quintessentially one in which left/ right orientations dominate.

Ever since Schumpeter (1942) defined democracy in terms of a competition of political leaders for the votes of the people, public contestation or political competition has been generally recognized as one of the most essential characteristics of modern democracy (Dahl 1971). As modern democracy is hardly conceivable without political parties, political competition implies a major function for mass political parties. As Bingham Powell (1982: 3) puts it: “The competitive electoral context, with several political parties organizing the alternatives that face the voters, is the identifying property of the contemporary democratic process.” It is in this respect that the European Union is often said to be failing. There is no competitive electoral context at the European level. European elections are basically fought by national political parties on national rather than European issues. Because national party systems are based on national cleavages, they fail to organize the alternatives that are relevant to the voters in European elections, i.e., alternatives with respect to the development of the European Union as such. Even worse, any debate on these issues is suppressed by the leadership of the major political parties because they are internally divided on these issues and would risk being split apart when these issues were politicized. In order to remedy this aspect of the democratic deficit, it has been argued that in order to face the European electorate with a relevant choice, the party system should be reshuffled in such a way that parties organize themselves along the continuum pro-vs. Anti-European Integration.

According to Dahl (1971: 6), two central dimensions characterize democracy: the right to public contestation and the right to participate. Conceptually, these dimensions are independent. Empirically, they are connected. Political competition combined with broad participation, i.e., competition and inclusiveness together, determine the degree to which public contestation is possible (Dahl 1971: 20). With the project of European integration, a political order emerged at the supranational level for which this was – and still is – a critical issue. Discussion about the democratic deficit indicates that the Euro-political system continues to lack some central elements essential for democratic processes.

This topic has received much scholarly attention. There is a vast literature on European elections (van der Eijk and Franklin 1996), the European party system (Hix and Lord 1998; Hix 1996), the working of European institutions (Rometsch and Wessels 1996), political representation (Schmitt and Thomassen 1999), and decision rules (König 1997).

In contrast to research on parties, voluntary associations and interest groups have been researched less, in particular with regard to the democratic question and empirical analyses. Early exceptions are the studies of Kirchner and Schwaiger (Kirchner 1978; Kirchner and Schwaiger 1981); more recent ones are Greenwood, Grote, and Ronit (1992) and the works of Kohler-Koch, but the question of the role of interest groups for contestation is not their topic.

Here I wish to draw attention to this question and in particular to the dimension of inclusiveness of the EU system beyond electoral and formalized participation, i.e., interest intermediation in its broad sense.

The proper extension of the power of the EU – the exact domains in which decisions should be taken at the European level rather than by national or subnational authorities – remains a contentious issue. While the existence of the EU is uncontested, the scope of EU authority is an element of political dispute. Some scholars have examined this new political question and tried to make sense of it as a novel political issue, weakly or not related to traditional ideas and ideologies. Public opinion research on the European electorate has found support for European integration to be organized along two separate dimensions, one left/right, the other pro-/anti-Europe (Hix 1999b; Gabel and Anderson, this volume). Other research on political parties has demonstrated that the issue of European integration fits into existing political cleavages and Weltanschauung. Marks, Wilson, and Ray find that support for the EU is related to traditional party families (2002). Hooghe, Marks, and Wilson (chapter 6, this volume) find a relationship with the “new politics” dimension. Data on the European Parliament also suggest the importance of the left/right dimension in structuring contestation within this eminently European body (Thomassen, Noury, and Voeten, chapter 7).

I argue that a new European dimension in the political landscape is neither unrelated (orthogonal) to the traditional ideologies which have structured European politics, nor coterminous with them. Instead, the relationship between ideology and support for EU decision-making varies systematically according to the expected impact of EU decision-making on policies voters hold dear.

As Steenbergen and Marks (Introduction) describe, scholars of EU policy-making have adopted conflicting assumptions about the dimensionality and character of the EU policy space. Since the shape of the political space – the number of dimensions, the policy content of these dimensions, and the location of actors in this space – is a central determinant of political competition and outcomes, these conflicting assumptions often lead to different conclusions about and interpretations of EU policy-making. This is a serious impediment to advancing our theoretical understanding of EU politics. A resolution of this theoretical conflict depends on assessing the relative value of the conflicting assumptions about the character of the policy space.

To help address this problem, we attempt to examine empirically whether the structure of the EU political space is consistent with these existing models. Specifically, we investigate whether the existing models described by Marks and Steenbergen (in this book) account for the EU policy space as defined by the European party federations – or “Euro-parties.” These Euro-parties bring together the domestic and European-level political elites in the four main European party families – socialists, Christian democrats/conservatives, liberals, and greens. In the European elections of 1979, 1984, 1989, 1994, and 1999, the Euro-parties drafted manifestos describing their positions across a broad range of policies involving the EU. We use an established content analysis technique to turn these text documents into numerical data representing Euro-parties' positions on specific political issues.

The ongoing process of integration in Europe has fundamentally altered the political environment in which the political parties of the EU member states find themselves. European integration has produced new political issues, which cannot always be easily accommodated into existing cleavage structures, as the preceding chapters reveal. It has also changed the political opportunity structure – parties may play these new issues up or they may play them down. In this chapter, we analyze why some national political parties have stressed European integration, while others have refrained from doing so.

An analysis of the salience of European integration at the party level is important for several reasons. First, it speaks directly to the topic of contestation. A prerequisite for contestation is that political actors are willing to debate an issue – there is a willingness to give the issue a modicum of salience. To what extent do political parties show such willingness?

Second, salience is also critical for understanding representation in the EU. Van der Eijk and Franklin (1996; this volume; see also Reif and Schmitt 1980) have observed that European elections are rarely about the scope and nature of integration, even though at the level of the electorate a contestation potential exists. This may be a contributing factor to the so-called democratic deficit of the EU. The lack of European content in European elections may be due to an unwillingness or inability of parties to raise integration above a critical salience threshold.

How is contestation on European integration structured among political parties competing in the member states? How is it related, if at all, to the political conflicts that have shaped political life in Western Europe?

The framework within which we pose these questions is the standard model of European party system dynamics consisting of the following elements:

• Contestation among political parties is limited to one or two dimensions. This renders competition among parties institutionally and intellectually tractable.

• These dimensions are, first, a left/right dimension tapping greater vs. lesser government regulation of market outcomes and, in many party systems, a related new politics dimension tapping communal, environmental, and cultural issues.

The general question we ask in this chapter is whether issues arising from European integration are assimilated into these existing dimensions of domestic contestation. Can the positions that political parties take on European issues be read from their positions on the left/right and new politics dimensions? Or are these European issues unrelated – orthogonal – to these dimensions? Does European integration put a new and potentially disruptive set of issues on the agenda that cannot be swallowed within existing patterns of political contestation? If these issues are assimilated, how are they assimilated? What, in other words, are the substantive connections between party positioning on European integration and party positioning on the dimensions that structure domestic politics?

One must, we believe, disaggregate European integration into its particular policies (e.g., environmental, cohesion, and fiscal policy) in order to answer these questions accurately.

In the era following the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty, the European Union has been transformed into a multilevel polity in which European issues have become important not only for national governments, but also for citizens, political parties, interest groups, and social movements. How is conflict over European integration structured? This is the question that this book addresses.

The question of contestation over European integration has two related components. First, how do domestic and European political actors conceive the basic alternatives? Can debates over European integration, despite their complexity, be reduced to a relatively small number of dimensions? Does contestation over European integration resolve itself into a single underlying dimension, or does it involve two or more separate dimensions? Second, how is contestation over European integration related, if at all, to the issues that have characterized political life in Western Europe over the past century or more? In particular, how is contestation over European integration related to the left/right divide concerning the role of the state and equality vs. economic freedom?

These topics were first raised by neofunctionalists writing in the early days of European integration. Ernst Haas paid close attention to the domestic sources of opposition and support for European integration in his classic study, The Uniting of Europe, published in 1958. However, most scholars continued to view European integration as the result of foreign policies conducted by government elites acting on a “permissive consensus” (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970).