ABSTRACT
The spreading phenomenon of Euroscepticism has been an invitation for debate among scholars about how to theorise European integration. In relation to this, the key question discussed has been whether European integration has entered into a new phase of politicisation giving salience to mass politics and mobilising around core areas of state sovereignty and national identity (Hooghe and Marks 2009; Statham and Trenz 2012). Euroscepticism relates to the forms and dynamics of EU legitimacy contestations, which neither prima facie affect the regularity and routine of governance nor the struggle over the composition of government, but, in the sense of David Easton, the question of the recognition of political authority (Easton 1975). It is about debating the choices related to European integration and not taking them as granted or embracing them with a ‘permissive consensus’. Moreover, it is about contesting the intrinsic value of these choices publically, not in the form of policy debates among political actors and experts, but in the form of public debates that involve a wider mass audience and the media (de Wilde 2011). In systemic terms, Euroscepticism refers to the lack of ‘diffuse support’ in terms of ‘evaluations of what an object is or represents […] not of what it does’ (Easton 1975: 444). As such, manifestations of Euroscepticism are typically detached from short-run ‘output’ or ‘performance’. ‘Eurosceptics’ are, for instance, not easily to be impressed by the acclaimed benefits of a particular regulation, since they would oppose European Union (EU) institutions having regulatory competences in the first place. Euroscepticism as a ‘crisis of regime’ is a reminder that the legitimacy of the EU is not simply coupled to the ‘functioning’ of its institutions but to a third case that provides such legitimacy. This third case is what emerges from popular contestation involving a diffuse category of the ‘people’ who engage in communication over the legitimacy of the underlying unit (Eder 2015: 99).
