World economy

An EU of discontent

Critics of the British press believe it has fuelled a nationalistic antiEuropeanism that has few parallels elsewhere in Europe. In fact, the UK is representative of a growing division in Europe on the matter of European integration. Politicians and political scientists alike frame this as a more general struggle between the winners and losers of globalisation, of which the EU is a symptom rather than a cause.2 By virtue of its openness to trade and its flexible labour market, the UK has done better in some ways than other EU Member States in dealing with the effects of globalisation. In France, the combined vote for Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon – two explicitly Eurosceptic candidates – in the first round of the country’s presidential election was 14.5 million votes, around 40 per cent of French citizens who voted. Elsewhere in Europe, Eurosceptic parties and movements have become key political players at the national level. In Italy, the Five Star Movement (M5S) regularly tops opinion polls. The M5S has fudged its position on the euro but has made the issue of ‘monetary sovereignty’ a central part of its platform. The other leading opposition party in Italy is the Northern League, a long-standing Eurosceptic voice in Italy.

The precise meaning of Euroscepticism differs across national contexts and there is a marked difference between eurozone and noneurozone Member States. The EU’s critics find it hard to win support for exiting the eurozone, as Marine Le Pen has discovered. However, far from being popular it is common to hear people say that they regret having joined the euro but that now they are in the eurozone they are stuck with it. The expectation that membership of the euro would translate into a political and social community  – widely held by all those who lauded the project in the course of the 1990s and early 2000s  – has proven unfounded (McNamara 2015; Streeck 2016a, Chapter 7). The euro has brought forth greater heterogeneity than before and structural differences between national economies (so-called ‘supply-side factors’) are the basis of powerful intra-eurozone forms of competition. Accepting that the euro is a ‘trap’ (Offe 2015) from which it is very difficult to escape is quite different from a positive sense of belonging, though interpreters of polling data tend to confuse the former with the latter.

The mainstreaming of Euroscepticism does not mean other countries will follow the UK in leaving the EU. Many contingencies produced the Brexit outcome, including the poor pro-EU campaign and political rivalries within the British Conservative Party (Cummings 2017b). Other institutional factors  – such as being outside the eurozone  – made the UK’s exit relatively easier to contemplate than for most other countries.

Moreover, what it is really seeing in Europe is not so much a deepening antagonism between Member States and the EU. It is rather a widespread crisis in state–society relations, where national party systems find themselves convulsed by the forces of popular disaffection and disenchantment with mainstream politics. These forces overwhelmed the UK’s EU referendum and they are exerting powerful effects elsewhere in Europe. The EU may appear shielded from direct criticism, but if Member State governments are unable to rule authoritatively because of a hollowing out of their national political life, then this leaves the EU as a weak and ineffectual regional body.