ABSTRACT
The EU played a key crisis management role during the European sovereign debt (ESD) crisis. Contestation over the appropriateness of EU measures, democratic quality of decision processes and legitimacy of the EU as a crisis actor occurred in many spheres of public life, including national and European parliamentary elections and at the level of civil society. Protest actions largely targeted domestic authorities, but many protests had European dimensions, including targeting EU institutions and the ‘Troika’ – the European Commission (EC), European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) – and protests involving citizens from multiple EU states. The relevance of Euroscepticism in that mobilization has hitherto received little scholarly attention. This may be due to the Euroscepticism literature's broader focus on parties and public opinion (Carey 2002; Hooghe and Marks 2005; Szczerbiak and Taggart 2008; Leconte 2010), despite the emergence of many non-party Eurosceptic groups (FitzGibbon 2013; Usherwood and Startin 2013; Vasilopoulou 2013). It may also reflect the view that during the global wave of contention following the Arab Spring, Indignados and Occupy mobilizations, movements mostly sought ‘to reclaim the nation state as a locus and focus of action’ (Flesher Fominaya 2014: 183; see also Kaldor and Selchow 2013; della Porta and Mattoni 2014). Nevertheless, closer examination would help address various timely or unanswered questions raised in the Euroscepticism literature, including questions about the impact of the ESD crisis on Euroscepticism, and the nature of Euroscepticism in social movements.
