"The populist politics of Euroscepticism"

Taggart, Paul. (1997) "The populist politics of Euroscepticism". In: UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This paper is based around the suggestion that Euroscepticism is often tied to a wider populist politics, and that there is even more potential for populist Euroscepticism to grows the EU develops. The focus is on mass politics in general and on parties in particular. The paper is structured around three sections. The first section provides a survey of party-based Euroscepticism across EU member states. This demonstrates that Euroscepticism primarily comes from the periphery of party systems and from a wide range of parties. The second section is an attempt to point at how this disparate grouping is unified in its populist politics. The third section introduces the concept of attentisme and, using an illustration from the British relationship with the EU, suggests that populism is encouraged by attentiste politics and that the European integration is particularly susceptible to the conditions that give rise to attentisme and therefore that a strong populist Eurosceptic backlash is a very real future possibility for the EU.

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