Backlash politics against European integration
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148120947356 |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Author | Hanspeter Kriesi |
| Subject Matter | Symposium on Backlash Politics in Comparison |
research-article2020
Special Issue Article
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
Backlash politics against
2020, Vol. 22(4) 692 –701
© The Author(s) 2020
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European integration
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120947356
DOI: 10.1177/1369148120947356
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Hanspeter Kriesi
Abstract
The answer to the question whether opposition to the European integration process is an example
of backlash politics is an ambiguous one. While the Euroscepticism from the radical right qualifies
for backlash politics, the Euroscepticism from the radical left does not at first sight, although it
also shows some traces of this kind of politics. Both the radical left and the radical right mobilise
political discontent and are part of a ‘populist backlash’, but it is only the ‘nationalistic backlash’
against European integration of the radical right which qualifies as a politics with a retrograde
objective. The argument is illustrated by the case of Brexit, the British version of the ‘nationalistic
backlash’.
Keywords
Brexit, Europscepticism, nationalist backlash, politicisation of European integration, populism,
populist backlash
What kind of backlash politics?
Alter and Zürn (this volume) conceive of ‘backlash politics’ as a politics with a retrograde
objective, opposed to ‘progressive politics’, aiming to revert to a prior condition and
involving extraordinary goals and tactics. The question is whether the opposition to the
European integration process is a case in point. Opposition to European integration has
been driven by new challenger parties from the radical left and the radical right, while
established parties have resorted to a vast array of strategies to depoliticise European
integration in national politics (De Wilde and Zürn, 2012; Green-Pedersen, 2012; Hooghe
and Marks, 2018; Schimmelfennig, 2018). To be sure, mainstream parties have not always
succeeded in their attempts to depoliticise the issue (Dolezal and Hellström, 2016;
Hellström and Blomgren, 2015), as is vividly illustrated by the British Conservatives, but
they have generally attempted to keep it off the agenda. Given that opposition to European
integration has come both from the radical left and the radical right suggests that the
answer to the question is not an unambiguous one: while the Euroscepticism from the
radical right qualifies for ‘backlash politics’, the Euroscepticism from the radical left does
not at first sight, although it also shows some traces of this kind of politics.
Department of Social and Political Sciences, European University Institute, Firenze, Italy
Corresponding author:
Hanspeter Kriesi, European University Institute, via dei Roccettini 9, San Domenico di Fiesole, 50014
Firenze, Italy.
Email: Hanspeter.Kriesi@eui.eu
Kriesi
693
Hobolt and De Vries (2016), in their analysis of the 2014 European Parliament elec-
tions, find that the surge in support for Eurosceptic parties is related to the voters’ nega-
tive perceptions of the European Union’s (EU) management of the Eurozone crisis and to
the degree to which they were themselves adversely affected. These effects apply for
parties from both the radical left and the radical right, even if the effect of negative per-
ceptions of the EU’s crisis management is twice as strong for parties from the radical
right. The key difference between the Eurosceptic vote for the radical left and the radical
right is, however, that the radical right was benefitting from the Eurozone crisis in north-
western Europe, while the radical left did so in southern Europe. In the northwestern
European ‘creditor’ countries, the voters backed radical right parties that wanted to repat-
riate powers and disapproved of economic solidarity. By contrast, in the hard hit ‘debtor’
countries (mainly, but not exclusively in the European South), the Eurosceptic parties
from the radical left like Syriza (Greece) and Podemos (Spain) or Sinn Fein (Ireland)
were vocal opponents of the austerity policies imposed by the troika (the EU Commission,
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Central Bank (ECB)) and demanded
more solidarity between richer and poorer member states as well as a renewal of democ-
racy. Importantly, in these countries, the radical left turned against both, the EU and the
domestic elites. Thus, Alexis Tsipras, Syriza’s leader, used the phrase of ‘external troika
– internal troika’ effectively equating the three-party coalition government (New
Democracy (ND), Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and Dimokratiki Aristera
(DIMAR)) with the country’s international emergency lenders.
Subsequently, the refugee crisis not only enhanced the Euroscepticism of the radical
right in northwestern Europe, but also of the more established conservative right in cen-
tral-eastern Europe. In the latter part of Europe, xenophobia runs high among the elector-
ate in spite of the almost complete absence of foreign residents (Zaun, 2018: 54), and the
parties on the conservative-nationalist right seized the opportunity to mobilise the ‘defen-
sive nationalism’ which has been asserting itself against internal enemies (such as ethnic
minorities: Russians, Roma and Jews) and external ones (such as the EU and foreign
corporations colonising the national economy) already before these crises. This defensive
nationalism is embraced by the transition losers (e.g. ‘Poland B’), and has been fueled by
the existence of contested national borders (e.g. national diasporas in neighbouring coun-
tries), by the unassimilated legacy of the Second World War and the Communist regimes,
by ‘more deep-seated vulnerabilities’ (Haughton, 2014: 80), and by the strategic mobili-
sation of parties from the right (Enyedi, 2005). The refugee crisis and the attempts of
European decision-makers to impose a resettlement scheme for refugees on all EU mem-
ber states fueled the nationalist opposition in the Visegrad countries in particular (Hungary,
Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic) and led to increasing conflicts between the
eastern European bystander states and the west European front-line and destination states
(Börzel and Risse, 2018).
In other words, the Eurosceptic backlash of the radical left on the one hand, and the
radical right (in northwestern Europe) and the nationalist-conservative right (in central-
eastern Europe) on the other hand, has a very different meaning. In southern Europe,
where opposition to European integration has been mainly driven by the radical left and
where it has been most intense (see Hutter and Kriesi, 2019), it arguably did not have a
retrograde objective. Thus, the Greeks (with the exception of their short-term finance
minister Varoufakis) never intended to leave the EU. What they claimed was more soli-
darity from the EU and the other member states with their predicament. In the final
analysis, the radical left asked for a different, more solidary Europe than the one that the
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The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 22(4)
southern European countries had to deal with in the Eurozone crisis. By contrast, the
Eurosceptic backlash of the radical and nationalist-conservative right in northwestern
and central-eastern Europe clearly has a retrograde quality. This kind of Euroscepticism
wants to return to a prior...
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