Citizens against Europe? Civil Society and Eurosceptic Protest in Ireland, the United Kingdom and Denmark*

This article seeks to broaden the study of Euroscepticism by developing a basic system of analysis for investigating civil‐society‐based opposition to European integration. Existing studies of Euroscepticism have almost exclusively focused on examining political parties and, as a result, theoretical approaches to understanding opposition to European integration have been strongly influenced by the party‐based literature. By drawing from the body of work on both party‐based Euroscepticism and European civil society, this article formulates a series of hypotheses and applies them to the case studies of Ireland, the United Kingdom and Denmark. Its main conclusion is that civil‐society‐based Euroscepticism generally conforms to the hard/soft model of opposition to the EU, but that this Euroscepticism is drawn from a more mainstream societal base than its party equivalent. Additionally, this study argues that civil‐society‐based Euroscepticism can be interpreted as a form of grass‐roots civic engagement with the EU that mobilizes mainly around the salience of EU‐related referendums.