How Can National Political Parties (de)Politicise European Integration ?

Numerous recent political developments in Europe have raised the European integration as a political issue and have given to the EU a central part in the public debate. We can give the examples of the presidential electoral campaign in France, the management of the crisis in Greece, and of course the case of Brexit. That overall context presents the opportunity to study the concept of politicization. The literature in this field underlines that there is a differentiated politicization between the different spheres (institutional, citizens,…) and the different countries. (De Wilde, Leupold, Schmidtke 2016). This literature concludes in particular to the need to study intermediate factors of politicization (Zürn, 2016).

This paper will present the results of a research building on a comparative and mixed-methods design. It aims for a better understanding of the differentiated politicization of European integration. Most previous studies in this area study the explanations of politicisation, intending to answer the question: “Why may (de)politicisation of European integration happen?”. We propose to go a step further in the process and ask the following question: “How may (de)politicisation of European integration happen?” Building on previous work (Versailles and Van Ingelgom, CES Glasgow 2017), our analysis will focus on national political parties as intermediate factors of (de)politicisation. We will conduct discourse analysis thanks to qualitative and quantitative approaches of parties’ discourses in five European countries: Belgium, France, Ireland, UK and the Netherlands. Our main result is the elaboration of a typology of politicising and depoliticising political discourses.