ABSTRACT
The development of political opposition to European integration or to the European Union (EU), Euroscepticism, is strongly shaped by national contexts (Harmsen and Spiering 2004: 127–128; Lacroix and Coman 2007; Taggart and Szczerbiak 2008; Conti 2014) and related to many variables. These factors include, among others, each nation state's particular socio-political history and integration experience, which combine to yield different national narratives of the European project (Harmsen 2008; Harmsen and Schild 2011), collective memories (Eder and Spohn 2005) and ‘idioms’ of nationhood (Brubaker 1992; Brubaker and Cooper 2000). The specific dynamics of domestic political competition are also important: the number of parties as well as the relationship between governing and ‘outsider’ parties (Taggart 1998; Sitter 2001), party ideology and strategy (Mudde 2012) and, more generally, states' path dependence and institutional framework, especially electoral rules, are all key to understanding the intensity and forms of party opposition to the EU.
