Editorial: Crisis, contention, and Euroscepticism

Editorial: Crisis, Contention, and EuroscepticismMichael J. Carpenter Helga K. HallgrímsdóttirThis Research Topic interrogates the prospects of deepening European integration in the context of crisis-driven contentious politics. The collection brings together contributors from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and combines insights from the fields of social movements and political economy. Our objectives are to promote better understandings of the interplay between crisis narratives and Euroscepticism and to contribute to scholarly and policy discussions around better governance strategies for mitigating public anxieties and restoring trust in authority. Euroscepticism has surged alongside a series of compounding crises within the last two decades. The first major shock emerged from the 2008 global financial meltdown and subsequent economic downturn dubbed the ‘Great Recession’: the Eurozone crisis. European and other international institutions bailed out poorer member states who were facing default on their national debts, but the aid packages were conditioned on deeply unpopular austerity measures. Pan-European wealth inequalities suddenly became fodder for contentious and populist politics, straining the bonds of the union. Popular movements for social justice proliferated in the streets while far-right political parties, as well as some on the populist left, surged from the margins and into national parliaments. Adding to the discord, around 2014 and peaking between 2015 and 2016, asylum seekers from North Africa and Western and Central Asia began arriving at Europe’s borders and shores in unprecedented numbers, fleeing conflict and destitution, risking perilous journeys in the hopes of reaching safety and better lives. While the receptiveness of European countries varied dramatically, the result was a net arrival of several million asylum seekers precisely at a time when most receiving states were least equipped to accommodate, and when most electorates were already on edge, eager to scapegoat or see menace in the ‘other’. Discourse and politics during this period turned xenophobic, antiimmigrant, and Islamophobic, going beyond economic concerns and extending into cultural and civilizational narratives. For many in the European public, the source of both sets of concerns – economic and immigration – was one and the same: EU policy. The EU was seen as pushing undemocratic neoliberal programs of transnational financial and migration governance on sovereign nations. Across the continent, populist movements, especially nationalist and far-right, expanded their constituencies, buoyed by the two distinct yet inextricably linked crises (Conrad 2020; Hallgrimsdottir at al. 2020; Schmidtke 2020). To punctuate these developments, the British electorate shocked the world (including the British) by voting to leave the EU in a national referendum held in June of 2016. The notion of ‘polycrisis’ – capturing the perception of multiple overlapping crises – had already entered the political discourse of European (dis)integration, going back at least to a post-Brexit 2016 speech by Jean-Claude Juncker (2016), when a new crisis hit: the COVID-19 pandemic. In a process of international mimicry, borders around the world closed in cascading effect, as if curtains on the final act of a play about globalization without borders. While still open to finance, trade, and cross-border workers, state borders sealed shut for tourists, international students, migrants, asylum seekers, and sometimes even their own citizens trying to return to their countries. National sovereignty nonchalantly reasserted itself with strict border controls. Moreover, COVID-19 exacerbated wealth inequalities and economic precarity, prompting, in many countries, neoliberalism to turn a blind eye to modest state-funded stop-gap measures putting borrowed tax-payer money directly into the bank accounts of a nervous electorate. As with the financial and migratory crises, the crisis of global pandemic not only rattled public confidence in the economy. For segments of the population, it also rattled public confidence in authority per se.The five articles of this collection seek to advance research and policy discussion with new case studies and analysis. In “Performing crisis to create your enemy: Europe vs. the EU in Hungarian populist discourse”, Robert Sata shows that nationalist identity can be simultaneously anti-EU and pro-Europe, even explicitly pitting one against the other. An important point: Euroscepticism need not condemn the prospsects of European integration generally but may refer more narrowly to the EU as it has come to be. The sometimes ambiguous and dual nature of crisis as a dis/integrative factor in Europeanization is explored in “Cultural narrative, crisis, and contention in Iceland's bid to join the European Union, 2009–2015” by Helga Kristín Hallgrímsdóttir, Michael J. Carpenter, Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly, and Maximilian Conrad. The authors argue that national identity constructions proved decisive over economic rationale for the aborted accession process, highlighting the importance of framing. In Vittorio Orlando’s and Maximilian Conrad’s comparative “Reinforcing or moderating? The impact of Brexit on Italian and German Euroscepticism”, the authors show how Britain’s watershed 2016 vote to exit the union was taken up in both Italy and Germany “as a sign of the decline of the EU, as an example of democracy in action, and as proof that there is an alternative” (8). Yet, distinctly, as the article shows, Brexit did not prove a contagion and even played a partially moderating role in the case of Italian Euroscepticism. On the streets, French protest movements challenged national authorities for imposing unpopular supranational neoliberalism, as Benjamin Perrier and Michael Carpenter show in “Yellow Vests: Anti-austerity, pro-democracy, and popular (not populist)”. The authors document the coherence of the movement’s grievances and demands as well as its appeal across social divides, indicating again the potential for alternative approaches to European governance. Along these lines, in “Trade contestation and regional politics: The case of Belgium and Germany”, Michelle Egan and Maria Helena Guimarães argue that trade agreements could be more conducive to European integration through “framing of trade narratives, addressing asymmetries of influence, enhancing subnational engagement, and mitigating the distributive costs of liberalization” (1). In short, they argue for more responsive and inclusive approaches to structuring the transnational economy. Since the onset of polycrisis over a decade ago, there has been a dramatic rise in contentious and Eurosceptic politics, from new social movements to more virulent populisms. As fuel for discontent and disjointed politics, crisis has become “one of the defining narrative constructs of our current era” (Hallgrimsdottir et al 2020). Pathways to negotiated integration have been narrowed or closed by weary and resistant national narratives. Distrustful publics have demanded greater accountability and involvement in decision making. This collection explores these challenges and contributes to practical policy discussions. In broad terms, authorities appear to have two pathways to respond to the crisis of Euroscepticism. One response is ‘more of the same’, that is, pushing ahead with top-down neoliberalism and assuming that opposition can be worn down or won over along the way. This course would necessitate more diligent and effective public messaging as well as a good deal more coercion. Alternatively, authorities could strive for more adaptable and inclusive governance, even at the cost of slowing, narrowing, or fundamentally redefining the integration process. This could mean opening up the very constitutions and basic laws of the EU to transformation by the demos. Deepening European integration through democratic reform may not be as far-fetched as it might, recalling that opposition often attaches to the particulars of the EU rather than the principle of integration itself, and that more transparent and participatory alternatives have broad appeal. In other words, surgent Euroscepticism need not spell the end or the failure of European integration but could indicate a more sustainable approach to continental governance in the long term. From this perspective, more democracy, not less, may be key to ensuring the longevity of a united Europe.