The political and academic debate on European Union politics is characterized, among other things, by a catch-all concept: Euroscepticism. For instance, after the 2014 European Parliament election international media and politicians began to talk about the huge rise of Eurosceptic parties. Moreover, the deepening of the economic crisis started in 2008 has led scholars to identify a new cleavage which makes a distinction between Eurosceptic and pro-European political parties.
Although their undeniable fruitfulness for the empirical analysis, these approaches seems to over-simplify the reality. We need to go beyond the mere distinction between parties opposing the process of European integration tout court and parties criticizing only some specific aspects of European Union. To be better understand and explain parties’ political behaviour, we have to look more in depth at the various dimension of anti-Europeanism: from the hostility toward the EURO currency to that toward specific European policies (i.e. the immigration policy). Moreover, we need to investigate on the relationship between the parties’ attitudes on European Union and their strategies related to the domestic politics.
This panel presents new researches that analyse these issues. Theoretical and empirical papers are very welcomed. In particular, we are looking for in-depth conceptualization of anti-Europeanism; comparative and single-case studies on left right anti-European parties by using both national and European election results; anti-European strategies of mainstream parties, looking particularly to their political actions at European and domestic level.