Political Identity
Fifteen years ago, my interest in the topic of European integration was ignited upon reading a nice little book edited by Wolfgang Mommsen and prefaced by Walter Lacqueur (1994). The book’s title was The Long Way to Europe and it included beautifully written essays by well‐known scholars such as François Bédarida, Valerio Castronovo, William Wallace, and Ivan Berend, on how the elites in their respective countries had approached European integration. Thus the chapters had titles like ‘France and Europe – From Yesterday to Today’, ‘Hungary’s Place in Europe: Political Thought and Historiography in the Twentieth Century’, or ‘The British Approach to Europe’. The book was in many ways the scholarly counterpoint to Hans Magnus Enzersberger’s literary and generally witty collection of essays entitled Europe, Europe (1989) and shared with it a renewed fascination with Europe in the context of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the drafting of the Treaty of European Union. The contributions to this volume connect with this tradition of examining the various stories that public intellectuals in different parts of Europe have knitted together as they reflect on Europe. The stories are gripping, and like those told by Mommsen, his collaborators, and Enzersberger, they naturally resonate with the national cultures in which they are embedded.
The accent of my previous work on European integration has been on the explanation of citizens’ attitudes towards European integration. I therefore focus on citizen representations and, more generally, on views on Europe expressed by actors in the public sphere. While occasionally these actors are intellectuals, they are more often than not politicians or representatives from interest groups. Their views on Europe are sometimes inspired by those of public and scholarly intellectuals but only partially overlap with them. Either because European stories lose their national‐specific narrative structure as they travel from intellectuals to public actors and citizens or because public actors (p.316) and citizens autonomously develop their representations of Europe, the fact is that national public spheres portray the European Union and the European integration process and imagine the future of the European Union in very similar ways. Therefore, I will argue that viewed from the public sphere’s and the citizens’ perspective, the most relevant story to be told about the European Union is one of similarity.
I also argue that the content of debates on European integration in the public sphere and citizens’ views on European integration suggest that the European Union is unlikely to move beyond consolidation of the current architecture. It may become more efficient and even larger, but not much more integrated. This is because the political elites’ projects for a European political identity do not imply sharing a great deal more sovereignty than at present in the second and third pillars. The populations of the European Union largely share the elites’ political identity project and, lacking a deep sense of identification with Europe that would lead them to develop more than a pragmatic interest in the European Union, they are unlikely to become a driving force of integration.
Although there is a broad consensus on the type of Europe that both elites and populations want, European political elites still quarrel about details or about semantic issues with an eye to their domestic audiences. Drawing on themes that resonate with national cultures, and that through sheer repetition have become part of these same national cultures, elite discourses thus shape public frames of reference about European integration. These different frames in turn can, and in some cases do, have a concrete impact upon public attitudes to European integration.
The following sections develop the points made above. I draw mainly on my own research on how people frame European integration and on the European public sphere, but also on data provided by surveys and secondary sources. I begin with a focus on political elite discourses on the European Union and the European integration process, as portrayed in the media. Partial as it may be, this analysis gives us access to political elites’ representations of the European Union and to their political identity projects. I then move to examine ordinary citizens’ representations of the European Union, political identity projects, and degrees of identification with Europe.
Europe viewed from the public sphere
Frames about Europe among political elites
Between 2001 and 2003 some colleagues and I coded thousands of newspaper articles in seven European countries in order to examine public discourse on the European Union between 1990 and 2002. These countries were France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. (p.317) The Europub.com project, as this research endeavour was called, allowed me to expand on insights I had drawn from a previous study of media frames in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The Europub.com data demonstrate that political elites in this broad range of countries tend to represent the European Union broadly speaking in the same way: namely, as a market founded on democratic values (see Table 16.1). In the period we analysed, the Euro, European Central Bank policies, and EU enlargement were the issues that prompted the use of economic frames. They were presented in slightly different ways in different countries, however. In Germany, and to a lesser extent in the Netherlands and Switzerland, for instance, the Euro and European Central Bank policies were framed predominantly in terms of their contribution to stabilizing prices. In France, Italy, and to a lesser extent in Spain, the focus was on trade‐offs between budgetary discipline, a strong Euro, and price stability on the one hand, and economic growth and unemployment on the other. In Britain, together with a great deal more discussion of the economic trade‐offs involved in pursuing a monetary policy basically inspired by that of the Bundesbank, aversion to membership led public actors to debate the EMU with reference to a broader range of economic topics such as investment, export opportunities, and convergence (or lack of it?) between the British and the EU’s economic cycles. Other subtle contrasts also distinguished countries in their discussions of European Union enlargement. Although enlargement was predominantly framed as an opportunity for economic growth for both old and new members, concern over a decline in social standards (‘Lohn‐Dumping’) induced by outsourcing and labour immigration was greater in Germany and the Netherlands than in the rest of the countries. British public actors were those who framed enlargement in the most positive terms, as when British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that ‘enlargement is about the stability provided by national working together rather than fighting together and the prosperity that comes from the single biggest market in the world’ (The Times, 8 December 2000).
As mentioned above, only slightly less prevalent than the representation of the European Union as an economic space is the representation of the European Union as a project grounded in and upholding democratic values. In the period that we analysed, this framing of the European Union emerged in discussions over EU enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe and to Turkey, and very frequently too during the debate over sanctions to Austria prompted by the participation of Jörg Haider’s party in the coalition government. Democracy as a frame was also used in public discourse, however, to criticize the alleged democratic deficit of the European Union institutions and procedures. This was the case especially in the United Kingdom.
While conceptualizations of the European Union as a market embedded in democratic institutions prevail over any other conception, images of Europe are much more diverse, and national contrasts often stem from the relative prevalence of these less frequent frames. Among these other frames, the EU’s impact (p.318)
Table 16.1 Most‐mentioned political and media actors’ frames, by country (% of claims with a particular frame)