Xenophobia and the European Union

As the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, representatives from the twelve nationstates of the European Community gathered in Maastricht in the Netherlands negotiate the Treaty on the European Union. This treaty promised deepen economic and political integration; its preamble resolved to continue the process of creating ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as closely as possible the citizen.l While all twelve nations ratified the treaty, some did so only with great difficulty. The French and Danish were deeply divided. The former barely approved their referendum (by 50.7 percent), and the latter required a second one after the first failed. The British House of Commons delayed its final vote until the Danes approved ratification, while founding member Germany was the last ratify the treaty due a constitutional challenge that the federal constitutional court did not dismiss until October 1993. The unexpected difficulty in garnering adequate support suggested that the resolve create an ever closer union among the peoples of lay more with the drafters of the treaty than with the peoples themselves.2 In the decade preceding the Maastricht Treaty crisis and in the years since, increasing support for nationalist parties across Europe has also been accompanied by the resurgence of antiimmigrant and antiforeigner themes in the political arena. The National Front (FN) in France was the strongest and most visible of these groups, but very few countries in western Europe escaped the rise of nationalist politics. Nor were these sentiments limited active supporters of the extreme right. Whereas support for the FN and the German Republikaner averaged approximately 10 percent of the electorate in the early 1990s, opinion polls revealed that between three and four of every ten respondents sympathized with their negative views of immigrants or foreigners. 3 These two phenomena, tenuous support for European integration and rising xenophobia, suggest a common wariness towards external changes that threaten the perceived integrity of the nation. For the most part, current literature on support for the European Union has emphasized cost-benefit arguments in explaining variance in public opinion. Other than a brief nod at national traditions, these arguments have largely disregarded the influence of such motivations as inclination preserve national integrity or a fear of foreign influences. Such motivations seem likely predispose individuals towards a particular evaluation of European integration in addition considerations of economic self-interest. Xenophobic attitudes are possi