Introduction: Historical Perspectives on Criticisms of European Integration

The troubled waters which the European Union (EU) has had to navigate in recent decades call into question the previous focus of historical studies on the perceived progress of European integration. ¹ Whereas in the past the EU has often been portrayed as leading its member states to peace and prosperity, recent developments have turned the opposition to unification efforts into a central area of study. The success of political parties across Europe that mobilise against ‘politics from Brussels’, particularly since the referenda on the Treaty of Maastricht and the EU constitution, has made Euroscepticism a guiding phenomenon through which European integration history is being re-examined. ² This leads us to ask: has European integration reached a stage that is characterised by a new kind of resistance? Or has the Union already had to confront similar headwinds before? Until now, historical scholarship has not played a central role in the perception of Euroscepticism. But it has recently started to develop accounts that can inform our understanding of current affairs and integrate opposition to the EU into a broader historical and political framework. ³ This special issue contributes to this field of research. It shows that explanations of both the character and the significance of Euroscepticism lack a central dimension if the historical perspective is not taken into account.

In many respects, the historical aspect of Euroscepticism remains understudied. Even a cursory glance at the European past shows that there have always been conflicts over European unity, ever since the first steps towards integration. The establishment of the European Economic Community (EEC) did not meet with universal acceptance and was countered by the creation of the European Free Trade Association in 1960. ⁴ The empty chair crisis from July 1965 to January 1966 is particularly well known, when the French government boycotted the meetings of the Council of Ministers of the EEC, thus rendering it incapable of taking decisions. ⁵ Referenda on whether to join or remain in the European Community (EC) were held as early as the 1970s. In Norway, a majority of voters rejected joining in September 1972, provoking a severe political crisis in the European project. In Britain, although almost two-thirds of the electorate voted to remain in 1975, opponents mobilised in such a sustained way that the question of membership remained on the agenda for decades. And Greenland left the EC in 1982 to take up a looser relationship after a majority vote. ⁶

Yet do the conflicts of the present follow the patterns of the past? Many observers would answer this question in the negative, because they perceive recent forms and manifestations of Euroscepticism to be a genuinely new kind of phenomenon. ⁷ However, arguments on the issue necessarily involve a comparison between past and present. Has opposition to European integration become more fundamental over time and, if this is the case, how shall we define the boundaries between (recent) fundamental and (former) less fundamental forms of opposition? Political scientists have dealt with this question extensively, but often rely on distinctions between opposition from the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’, or opposition to ‘core issues’ or rather ‘side issues’ of the integration process. ⁸ From a historical perspective, the demarcation lines between these conceptual dichotomies appear blurred and fuzzy. In fact, the centre and the periphery have shifted over time, and so has the perception of what was key and what was not. To understand the long and conflictual path to European integration, and the relevance of opposition to that development, the changing nature of the EC/EU institutions and the different alternatives in play at given moments need to be part of the picture. ⁹ As a consequence, a response to the question of the historical significance of Euroscepticism seems tied to an interpretation of the integration process and changes in its course. Is it conceivable that crucial lines of conflict have only emerged from the growing influence of supranational institutions and the repercussions of this influence on the political conflict over European integration? In the context of such an interpretation, the circumstances need to be identified that increased the perception of a supranational threat in comparison to former periods. At the same time, such an argument would have to explain why resistance to the empowerment of supranational institutions mobilises the political actors that lend so much weight to Euroscepticism today. What makes the effects these actors are able to produce different from the efforts of previous opponents of European integration, such as those with communist and socialist convictions in the 1960s and 1970s? ¹⁰

Varieties of Euroscepticism and Europeanisation

A much-discussed proposition by the political scientists, Liesbeth Hooghe and Gary Marks, brings many of these questions together. Hooghe and Marks stress the far-reaching politicisation of national identities that started to impact on the integration process in the aftermath of the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992. This development, they hold, was triggered by new social cleavages between groups that benefited from cosmopolitan liberalism on the one hand, and groups disadvantaged by it on the other. According to their view, the Treaty of Maastricht extended EU authority in many policy areas and unleashed increased economic competition and immigration from other countries. The reforms mobilised opponents who perceived European cooperation as a threat to their national culture. ¹¹ As a consequence, Hooghe and Marks argue, from 1992 Maastricht shifted the arena of negotiating European integration away from arranging the economic interests of elites to inciting mass politics. Debates on European integration, data analysis has shown, are now among the most salient issues in national inter-party competition and media coverage across the EU. This new arena of conflict created new barriers to brokering the political process of further integration, transforming the political scenery in the EU from ‘permissive consensus to constraining dissensus’. ¹²

Historians have expressed reservations regarding this interpretation. Mark Gilbert and Daniele Pasquinucci draw attention to the fact that portraying Maastricht as a turning point runs the risk of constructing a past ‘golden age’ of European integration, unrestrained by opponents from the political margins. ¹³ Kiran Patel points out that the assumption of broad support for European integration before the Maastricht Treaty rests on ‘thin ice’. The Eurobarometer polls that helped spread this impression were to a considerable extent a tool of self-legitimisation controlled by the European Commission, and the questions were presented in such an abstract and leading way that the answers can hardly be considered a reliable source. ¹⁴

Against this backdrop, many historians are finding that the notion that contemporary Euroscepticism has increased in significance runs the risk of conveying the idea of a continuous, linear integration process that encountered strong opposition only when it crossed the Maastricht threshold. Recent historical studies stress the fact that the direction of development of the EC/EU was repeatedly uncertain, making it difficult to ascertain whether resistance was directed against the fundamental principles of integration or against one of the roads not taken. ¹⁵ Rather than accepting its recent rise to dominance, they prefer to understand resistance to European integration as a phenomenon that is both older than Maastricht and rich in variation. ¹⁶ Since the term “Euroscepticism” fosters an overly homogeneous picture that obscures the actual heterogeneity of the opponents of European integration, two recent edited volumes on the subject use the plural ‘Euroscepticisms’ in order to highlight the multiplicity of past and present positions critical of integration. ¹⁷

But can the conceptual problem be solved just by adding on a plural? Even if we use the label ‘Euroscepticisms’, we still refer to the similarity of the group of phenomena under investigation. To the extent that individual cases are categorised as ‘Eurosceptic’, it is necessary to define the common ground between them. The idea of family resemblance (Ludwig Wittgenstein), often invoked in similar situations involving blurred categories, is of limited help, because even a family resemblance needs some sort of definition. Mark Gilbert and Daniele Pasquinucci present a concise, but at the same time contestable proposition. According to them, the plural ‘Euroscepticisms’ indicate the variations between different nationally configured cases. ‘[P]olitical oppositions to Europe remain deeply rooted in their national contexts. […] The many differences and divides among the various Eurosceptical actors more often than not originate from historically shaped national values, interests and self-perceptions.’ ¹⁸ In this perspective, the common denominator uniting different variants of Euroscepticism is the national context, which has produced different reactions to the development of a supranational Europe.

Stressing the impact of national frameworks has become unusual in historical scholarship, not least because the nation state has been described as an increasingly obsolete construct of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ¹⁹ But this moribund arrangement might live longer than expected, and it is undeniable that supranational forms of governance have by no means replaced earlier forms of the body politic so far. ²⁰ In light of more recent regulatory experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic, it is difficult to deny the enduring significance of national borders and national logic informing the decision-making of European member states. At the same time, however, the question needs to be addressed whether the recourse to the idea of national containers provides the right resources to understand past and present forms of resistance to European integration. The national is certainly a category often mobilised by Eurosceptics, and several contributions to this special issue show how Eurosceptics invoked the idea of the nation to further their aims. However, Gilbert and Pasquinucci do not argue that Euroscepticism reinforces appeals to the nation-state, but that the national framework produces Euroscepticism.

This argument is difficult to sustain, because the process of European integration was part and parcel of an ongoing redefinition of the nation states involved. To isolate the national factor from this process as a basis for explaining Euroscepticism(s) is to underestimate the interaction between, and interdependence of, the national and the European. For example, the majority of the founding members were colonial states at the time of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Decolonisation endowed the question of the national identity of the former colonial metropolises with new significance and made the relationship between nation and Europe a key aspect of the debate. For the political leaders of France in the early 1960s, for instance, nationalisation and Europeanisation were directly linked when they supported a reconceptualisation of the French nation as genuinely European in view of refugees from Algeria. ²¹ In other cases, too, national development cannot be isolated from European integration. Spain's transition to democracy during the mid- to late-1970s changed the meaning of the Spanish nation in many respects, altering the relationship between Madrid and the regions that were demanding decentralisation, the standing of Castilian as the national language, and the role and significance of the Catholic church. But these developments cannot be separated from the reconceptualisation of Spain through its simultaneous efforts to Europeanise in support of its application for EEC membership. ²² This interdependence makes it hardly possible to single out a ‘national’ reaction to ‘Europe’ that could be held responsible for Eurosceptic movements. ²³

Against the backdrop of these discussions, a general difficulty in emphasising the connection between concepts of the national and Euroscepticism becomes apparent: both the singular and the plural of the concept of “Euroscepticism” are built on a bipolar explanatory scheme. In this dichotomy, the EC/EU embodies the path to supranational unity, while actors in the member states resist the loss of national sovereignty, albeit in different ways. Two associated assumptions make this explanatory scheme problematic: on the one hand, it presumes the national as a fixed orientation that precedes European integration; and on the other, it holds that Euroscepticism should therefore be understood as a reaction to supranational change. Together, these assumptions contribute to a view that tends to ignore the genuine origins and drivers of resistance to European integration. In the dichotomous allocation of roles Europe is the prime mover, while the national actors react. The contributions to this issue take an alternative view – firstly, by emphasising the constructed and changing character of the national in the mobilisation of Eurosceptic positions, and secondly, by understanding resistance to European integration as an alternative form of Europeanisation.

In this reading, the fact that Eurosceptic actors emphasise the impending loss of national sovereignty to supranational institutions should be understood as an expression of political objectives that are not only a response to Brussels. National sovereignty is not a fixed state whose existence can be defended. Rather, it is an elusive, multifaceted concept that needs to be interpreted and claimed in order to gain traction. State governments have rarely, if ever, acted independently of domestic and external constraints. If political leaders were to make decisions without taking into account the interests of domestic groups – such as important consumer organisations, employers’ associations or trade unions – they would be deprived of vital support. Foreign policy sovereignty that ignored the reactions of allies and adversaries would be incomprehensible to outside observers. Given that the idea of sovereignty as autonomous freedom of action is an illusory one, the more recent theoretical discussion conceives of it as a regulative idea in the minds of historical actors. ²⁴ As an aspiration, sovereignty gives orientation to plans and strategies, but never actually materialises. Due to this ideational function, sovereignty becomes especially significant for the framing of political agendas and finds expression in Eurosceptic demands and programmes.

This changes our perspective on the relationship between Euroscepticism and the national. To understand the emphasis on defending national values against their European deformation as the cause of opposition would be to take Eurosceptic claims to represent the nation at face value. By changing the perspective on Eurosceptic framings, research is not limited to the assumption that supranational interventions produce nationally shaped reactions in member states. Instead, the historical conditions that turn national sovereignty into a driving force come into focus. In this sense, the call for national sovereignty may on the one hand be provoked by the heterogeneity of EU institutions rather than their supranational character. Due to the complex distribution of competences between the Commission, the Council, the European Parliament, the European Court of Justice, etc., the idea of a single actor – that of ‘Brussels’ – has been used by opponents as an easy shorthand for the enemy, rather than engaging with the reality of the often obscure negotiations between member states, supranational and subnational actors on different institutional levels. ²⁵ On the other hand, the Eurosceptics’ choice of framing and its success may not primarily depend on a general national mindset. Several of the contributions in this special issue explore the circumstances under which national sovereignty became a publicly discussed subject before and after the Maastricht Treaty, often spearheaded by social and political elites. They used the topos of a nation threatened by European integration, in the dichotomous sense captured by the term Euroscepticism, to mobilise supporters for their cause.

Defending national sovereignty in this way may be part of a distinct vision of Europe and even, paradoxically, contribute to a form of Europeanisation that does not follow the EC/EU pathway. The term ‘Europeanisation’ has been discussed in this sense in order to widen the perspective beyond the dichotomy of supranational integration and national responses and to stress the genuine motives of conflicting visions of Europe. Ulrike von Hirschhausen and Kiran Patel define Europeanisation as a multi-layered process that should not be confused with a teleological development towards ever stronger unity. Instead, it encompasses many forms of intra-European connections, including those outside of the political framework of the EC/EU. ²⁶ These connections produced parallel, complementary and competing forms of Europeanisation which cannot be grasped as one linear trajectory. Member states (and their societies) and the EC/EU were not fixed poles in the course of the history of integration; nor the only poles in a setting that comprised a variety of groups and institutions who tried to advance their visions of Europe. Europeanisation reflects the interaction of actors inside and outside the EC/EU who influenced each other in various, often independent or even antagonistic, ways. It does not refer to spatial delimitation but to the reorganisation of political, economic and cultural spaces and the accompanying establishment of new links, as well as the dissolution of existing ones. ²⁷ The European arena is seen as the site of a dynamic decomposition and recomposition of boundaries, creating both cross-border cooperation and new competitive relationships in the process.

In this sense, Europeanisation was an inherently conflictual development, because shifting boundaries and the rearranged hierarchies that came with them inevitably produced resistance. EEC and EU integration policies could provoke a form of de-Europeanisation by mobilising opponents of integration. At the same time, this reaction could involve or produce visions of an alternative Europe, and thus represent a form of Europeanisation among Eurosceptics. ²⁸ Opposition to European integration has itself taken on transnational forms, with nationalist critics of the EEC/EU seeking alliances with like-minded forces from other member states. On the right wing, anti-EU actors coordinated their moves across borders, thus disproving the assumption that adherents of the far right would not be able to look beyond the nation-state because of their nationalist convictions. ²⁹ In this sense, the sociologist Valentin Behr has demonstrated that the current Eurosceptic convictions of the Polish right can only be understood in the context of the transnational networks of European conservatives that formed them, some of which date back to before the political transition of 1989. According to Behr, British conservatives in particular have used the EU's eastward enlargement to set up joint think tanks, such as the Centre for European Renewal, in order to spread European values in opposition to the EU. ³⁰

Contrasting forms of Europeanisation even preceded the EEC. In recent years, a number of studies have shown that European structures, in the form of international organisations such as the Council of Europe or networks of experts on traffic routes, already existed before the European Coal and Steel Community. The actors involved had their own ideas of an integrated Europe, which were not always in harmony with those of the EEC and provoked critical responses once the Treaties of Rome took effect. ³¹ These cases from the first decades of integration history highlight that Europeanisation was never a one-way street. The multifaceted interactions between the EC/EU and alternative conceptions of Europe, situated in different regions and spheres, constitute a broad field of research which this special issue engages with.

The articles presented here interrogate core assumptions in the existing explanations of Euroscepticism and extend the perspective beyond the last three decades. They emphasise the need to reassess the historical significance of resistance to European integration and, as a consequence, the process of European integration itself. The contributions broaden previous perspectives in several respects. Firstly, they draw attention to the geographical range in the history of resistance to integration and include regions from Italy, Spain, Germany, France and the UK. Secondly, they focus on actors who did not operate solely within nation-state or interstate frameworks, but also in other social and transnational contexts. Thirdly, they engage with the diachronic dimension of the phenomenon, covering European integration from the 1950s to the more recent past. While the contributions converge in these respects, they diverge in their choice of vocabulary, with some authors favouring the term ‘Euroscepticism’ over ‘Europeanisation’, and others vice versa. It becomes clear that the choice of explanatory concept also depends on the objects to be explained. While ‘Euroscepticism’ seems well suited to highlight the polarising effects of the integration debate from the perspective of contemporary actors, ‘Europeanisation’ suits research into the development of trans-European connections which could present themselves as alternatives to the existing EEC and EU frameworks. Our special issue thus participates in the current interdisciplinary debate over new concepts and perspectives on European integration history. ³²

Conflicting visions of Europe

For a very long time, one of the key research tenets bridging the different camps of integration theory has been the pivotal role of economic motives in the development of the EEC and EU ever since the Treaties of Rome in 1957. From the point of view of Hooghe and Marks, Maastricht ended the predominance of economic considerations in integration history, because popular attitudes of national community and sovereignty cannot be solely explained by an economic rationale. ³³

The contributions to this special issue embrace this observation and confirm that non-economic motives played a central role in European integration. However, this role was not limited to the period after the Maastricht Treaty. Concerns about diminished national sovereignty have accompanied European integration history from the beginning and already prompted a politicisation of the debate about the consequences of membership in the wake of the Treaties of Rome in 1957. As Andrea Martinez shows, Italian media coverage of the establishment of the EEC and EURATOM turned national sovereignty into an important issue. Many Italian media figures portrayed Italy as economically and politically weaker than the other founding states. They therefore warned their readers and listeners about the dangers of external domination in the future EEC and tried to counter the new national public broadcaster, which was under the influence of the pro-European government of the Christian Democrats. Thus, the debate about joining the EEC turned into a highly politicised controversy, with an array of voices self-identifying as sceptics of integration.

The politicisation of the Treaties of Rome in the Italian media shows that not only the experience but also the mere expectation of supranational influences could trigger lively controversies pitting proponents and critics of integration against each other. Uncertainty surrounding the effects of European integration has remained a constant companion since 1957 and repeatedly stimulated divergent responses. Consequently, the Maastricht agreement of 1992 was neither the first nor the only occasion to produce political polarisation on a large scale. But if the Maastricht Treaty was not unique, does the theory still hold true that its polarising impact led to fundamental changes in the structures of conflicts over integration?

Hooghe and Marks’ memorable thesis of a change from a ‘permissive consensus to constraining dissensus’ posits the years around 1992 as the beginning of a new phase of integration during which political elites saw their room for manoeuvre increasingly narrow: they were now required to choose between a limited range of options because they had to take the polarised attitudes of broad sections of society into account. ³⁴ But how and with what effect did this hypothesized structural transformation materialise? The Maastricht Treaty was undoubtedly a landmark event in the history of European unification, but it may not have weakened the influence of social elites to the extent described by Hooghe and Marks. In this issue, David Lawton provides a detailed reconstruction of the process by which groups of British lawyers, journalists and businessmen formed a coalition to challenge the Maastricht Treaty in court. The organisation of the case helped to close the ranks between anti-marketeers and new sceptics and thereby strengthened a wider alliance of opponents of European integration in Britain. In particular, members of the Society of Conservative Lawyers developed the strategy of portraying Maastricht as an attack on the legal tradition of common law. In the British case, the focus on endangered sovereignty was thus not a widespread public attitude that arose in the wake of the Maastricht Treaty. Rather, it was a concept developed in part by lawyers, who found powerful brothers-in-arms when they were able to convince elite figures such as Lord William Rees-Mogg, a well-connected and influential journalist and broadcaster, to join their campaign. British elites were drivers, not victims of this process.

Research has drawn attention to the fact that the European Coal and Steel Community and the EEC were established in competition with a multitude of other European integration projects that pursued separate aims and trajectories. In addition to the Council of Europe of 1949 and the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), other international organisations with a clear European focus, such as NATO, emerged or already existed before the Treaties of Rome were signed. ³⁵ At this stage, in 1957, the future of European unification was hard to predict, and contemporaries developed divergent visions for and of Europe.

Tracing the interaction of these organisations uncovers sources of resistance to the EC and EU which developed as a consequence of conflicting views as to the shape of an integrated Europe. Although economic motives are usually held to be the backbone of the EEC, Katharina Troll shows that European business federations were far from reaching a consensus when it came to deciding on the best avenue through which to pursue their interests. One of the most important European business federations, the Council of European Industrial Federations, was established as an official advisor to the OEEC and comprised members from all over Western Europe. But after the Schuman Plan was announced in 1950, the role of the Council was increasingly called into question by national business federations who belonged to member states of the European Coal and Steel Community. While the members of the Council all accepted the need to develop a European framework, they were divided on the question as to which path would impose the fewest constraints on business interests. When the British members proposed the foundation of a European Free Trade Area in 1956 as an alternative to the planned EEC, two economic visions of Europe clashed and paralysed the Council for several years. It was only in 1962, when the OEEC was transformed into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, that the Council regained significance.

Whereas the Council of European Industrial Federations represents an example of early Europeanisation that produced competing visions when confronted with the EEC's first steps, Alexander Hobe explores institutions that sought closer alignment. German veterans’ federations reacted to European integration plans by forming their own European ties with the veterans’ organisations of other member states. The European Federation of Combatants’ Associations (Fédération européenne des associations de combattants, FEDAC) originally set out to influence plans for the European Defence Community. Leading members of German and French veterans’ associations entered a coalition, hoping that joining forces would enable them to influence the structure of the future united armies of Western Europe. However, the West German association also used the argument of Europeanisation to lobby on behalf of German soldiers who had been sentenced for war crimes and were held captive in Allied prisons. Although originally started for specific purposes, the European veterans’ federation developed a dynamic of its own. Even after the plans for a European Defence Community fell through, German war criminals were eventually released, and their European vision ceased to resonate with the political concerns of the member states and thus were slowly abandoned within the EEC framework, the FEDAC continued to pursue a Europeanised alliance of former soldiers.

While in this case supporters eventually turned into opponents of integration, William King traces an antithetical development among British Labour delegates in the European Parliament. He argues that for them, resistance and integration were not contradictory, but represented mutually dependent poles that had a changing effect on each other. When the first European Parliament was directly elected in 1979, the majority of Labour Party MEPs were Eurosceptics who favoured Britain's withdrawal from the EC. In the years that followed, their involvement in parliamentary committees on workers’ rights did not simply draw them into the camp of ever closer integration. Rather, they found that their arguments could bring about changes in EC policy and thus also advance their domestic interests. Through their Euroscepticism, British Labour MEPs contributed to a change of views in the European Parliament, and in the course of this experience, many but not all of them turned from opponents into supporters of integration. In this way, the European Parliament emerges as a forum for alternative visions of Europe that were in tension with each other. Its policy debates do not represent a linear progression towards increasing European homogeneity, but rather a dynamic driven, not obstructed, by conflicting views.

Whereas the Europeanisation of British opponents of integration led to a softening of their criticism of the EC, Antonio Carbone shows the opposite could also happen. From the mid-1970s, discussions about reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the Southern EEC enlargement put the leadership of the Italian farmers’ federation, Coldiretti, under pressure. Since the early days of the EEC, the federation had supported European integration in close association with the conservative ruling party of the Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana). But when this alliance crumbled in the mid-1970s, Coldiretti was forced to deal with European matters directly and cooperate with other European farmers. Despite the so-called wine war between Italian wine growers and their colleagues in the South of France, Coldiretti farmers looked with interest at the protest practices of their French colleagues and partially followed their example. Furthermore, there were calls for Southern European farmers to join forces transnationally against national and EU interests and to oppose the relative disadvantage to Mediterranean production built into the CAP. The EEC's reform plans in this case thus triggered a process of Europeanisation that united actors across national borders, turning former supporters into critics of European integration.

In idealised conceptions, the EU appears as a form of governance that has replaced the centuries-old conflicts of the dark European continent with an ensemble of supranational and national institutions, finding common rules for the citizens of its member states. ‘Europe’ in this view seems to be a political structure whose main accomplishment is the efficient coordination of actors of different political, regional and cultural backgrounds. In such a functional description, conflicts and disputes seem nothing else than remnants of a dysfunctional past which European modernity has managed to overcome. However, as this special issue shows, conflicts are not only part of European history, but part of the European present; they drive and shape European futures. The political has never been reducible to arrangements of collective decision-making; it is permeated with opposing interests and contested hierarchies. The struggle for legitimacy is an integral part of political rule. Conflict in this context is more than just an interruption in an otherwise functioning system. It is a mechanism that can paradoxically lead to new forms of consensus, and a recurring phenomenon that in different guises and under different conditions has challenged claims to legitimacy by supporters of the EC/EU throughout its history. The contributions to this issue highlight the resistance to European integration from various angles, thereby drawing attention to the fact that the struggle over Europe is the very principle by which the development of European integration proceeds.