‘Love Europe, hate the EU’: A genealogical inquiry into populists’ spatio-cultural critique of the European Union and its consequences
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066119850242 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Author | Andrew Glencross |
research-article2019
EJ R
I
Article
European Journal of
International Relations
‘Love Europe, hate the EU’:
2020, Vol. 26(1) 116 –136
© The Author(s) 2019
A genealogical inquiry into
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119850242
DOI: 10.1177/1354066119850242
populists’ spatio-cultural
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejt
critique of the European
Union and its consequences
Andrew Glencross
Aston University, UK
Abstract
This article analyses the genealogy of the expression ‘Love Europe, hate the EU’,
which is taken as a spatio-cultural critique of the European Union that has important
consequences for how European integration is contested. Closely associated with the
Brexit movement, but also popular among other populist movements opposing the
European Union, this catchphrase is analysed as the latest stage in the contestation
over the political meaning of Europe. However, the article demonstrates that the desire
to do away with a rules-based institutional order rests on a deliberately ahistorical
reading of European inter-state relations following the rise of the sovereign state.
What is overlooked is the way in which Europe was conceptualized by the end of the
18th century as a distinct political unit with its own peculiar dysfunctionality, namely,
a naturally anti-hegemonic order that often resulted in violent conflict. The spatio-
cultural critique of European Union institutionalization nonetheless expects that shared
European interests and values can seamlessly recreate cooperation across sovereign
states, an argument that culminated in the UK’s Brexit decision. Yet, as shown by the
debate over the future of UK–European Union relations, this cultural and idealized
understanding of Europe’s commonalities ignores the economic and political significance
of borders and forgets the part played by the European Union in managing contested
spaces. This emerging cleavage between institutional and cultural understandings of
Europe suggests that European integration after Brexit needs to focus on demonstrating
the value of institutionalized cooperation per se as much as on the cultural symbolism
of supranationalism.
Corresponding author:
Andrew Glencross, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham, B4 7ET, UK.
Email: a.glencross@aston.ac.uk
Glencross
117
Keywords
Brexit, European Union, Euroscepticism, institutionalization, international order,
sovereignty
Introduction
Europe is not the creation of the Treaty of Rome. Nor is the European idea the property of any
group or institution…. The European Community is one manifestation of European identity,
but it is not the only one. (Margaret Thatcher, Bruges Speech, 1988)
Margaret Thatcher’s Euroscepticism, best captured for posterity in her 1988 speech at
the College of Europe in Bruges, is generally remembered today as a red-blooded
defence of sovereignty against the encroachments of a putative European Union (EU)
‘super-state’. Yet, as the epigraph for this article demonstrates, her hostility to European
integration was also couched in terms of defining what Europe actually consists of and
who gets to control the said definition. A similar logic was in evidence throughout the
2016 UK referendum on EU membership — as well as in populist Eurosceptic rhetoric
in other countries — when ‘Love Europe, hate the EU’ began circulating as a catch-
phrase among supporters of Brexit (Smith, 2017). This slogan — reproduced on a
campaign sweatshirt sold by the United Kingdom Independence Party1 — rests on a
deliberate juxtaposition contrasting supposedly oppressive institutionalized coopera-
tion under the EU’s legal-administrative architecture and the equally internationalist
defence of Europe as a looser community of sovereign nation-states. In this vein, the
aim of this article is to analyse the genealogy of this spatio-cultural critique of the EU,
not forgetting the succour given it by the Brussels institutions’ attempts to monopolize
who, as implied by Thatcher, ‘speaks for Europe’. This genealogical approach serves
as the platform for exploring the consequences that this critique of EU integration has
for political contestation within Europe, using the UK–EU Brexit negotiations as a
case study.
Disparate cries, from supporters of Brexit to Far-Right populists such as Victor Orbán
or Marine Le Pen, for less restrictive forms of political association are accompanied by
the promotion of a certain idea of Europe devoid of the EU. This alternative to integra-
tion via the EU is permeated by assumptions that shared values and interests among
European peoples can seamlessly replace the political-legal ties of EU membership.
Painting a picture of common values or decency corrupted by bureaucracy and self-
interested elites is a classic trope of populists (Mudde, 2004). Significantly, this genre
now extends transnationally to the extent that the EU itself is considered a common
enemy of peoples that have developed the same preferences and values. Thus, the Dutch
populist Pim Fortuyn could write that:
I love Europe, I love its multitude of peoples, cultures, landscapes, weather conditions,
languages, and human beings. I sometimes hate the euro-elite in its negligent arrogance. In
short, I want a Europe of the people, of the human scale. A Europe of you and me! (Quoted in
Liang, 2007: 12)
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European Journal of International Relations 26(1)
This kind of paean to European distinctiveness couched within a common political iden-
tity — different to the left-wing Eurosceptic critique of EU economic policies that is
nonetheless at ease with the principle of supranationalism (Van Elsas et al., 2016) — is
increasingly present in the rhetoric of right-wing populists across the continent. At a
2017 meeting of radical right-wing party leaders, Marine Le Pen declared that ‘because
we love Europe, we accuse the EU of killing Europe’ (quoted in Janicek, 2017).
Declaring an attachment to a common Europeanness that can make up for unwinding
the EU system is a convenient way to promote a rival mode of internationalism and fend
off accusations of insularity or xenophobia. However, rather than dismissing this rhetoric
as merely spurious, this article seeks to explore the genealogy behind a speech act used
as a potent weapon for attacking the EU’s rules-based institutional order. Here, the aim
is to analyse the historical imagination of Eurosceptic populism — thereby engaging in
the kind of thematic cross-fertilization advocated by Rooduijn (2019) — notably, the
way in which historical claims about a common Europeanness serve the populist narra-
tive regarding a virtuous people battling corrupt elites and institutions (Mudde, 2004).
In order to examine the attractiveness of this language and its potential ramifications,
the analysis situates the antagonism pitting institutions — an extension of elite interests
in the moralized language of populists (Mudde, 2004) — versus place and culture as the
latest stage in a much older contestation over the political meaning of Europe (Den Boer,
1993). Building on Bartelson (1995: 8), the objective is ‘not to tell what actually hap-
pened in the past, but to describe how the present became logically possible’. Tracing the
genealogy of the politics behind the notion of Europe is necessary to understand the
nature and impact of contemporary populist opposition to European integration as
defined by the emerging cleavage between a spatio-cultural definition of Europe and an
institutional one represented by the EU. Included in this genealogical analysis is a reflec-
tion on the EU’s own contribution to this cleavage through its imperial-like claim (cf.
Zielonka, 2006) to speak on behalf of Europe, as if the cultural and political identity of
the continent are coterminous and no rival definition of Europe is possible.
This article ultimately demonstrates how the narrative of Europeanness constructed in
terms of a special geographical place and culture is dependent on a very particular read-
ing of European inter-state relations. An appreciation of the genealogy of Europe as a
political entity shows that a secular definition of Europe as a political space originally
rested on an understanding that the European continent was united by a certain dysfunc-
tionality. That is, the emergence of a common secularized political space (as opposed to
the earlier concept of the respublica Christiana) required an equilibrium of power,
which, in practice, was often a violent enterprise, or at least one underpinned by the
threat of conflict. The ahistoricism of the populist Eurosceptic imagination stems from
ignoring the problems associated with competition between sovereign states and over-
looking the heated history of frictions arising from political and economic borders.
In this context, the creation of a contemporary Eurosceptic narrative that neglects the
proper place of borders and violence in the development of the continent represents a
conscious misreading of history, one intended to project a positive future in the absence
of the EU. Brexit has greatly raised the stakes in what could otherwise be more readily
dismissed as a recondite academic critique. This is because, as the article demonstrates,
the UK government’s negotiations over how to leave the EU are fundamentally beholden
Glencross
119
to a historical vision which imagines...
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