Euroscepticism as a political label: The use of European Union issues in political competition in the new Member States

Abstract

Abstract. During the 1990s, political consensus on European Union (EU) membership in Central Europe gave way to widespread ambiguous positions – many parties approved the principle of European integration while criticizing EU policies. In the late 1990s, two analytical frameworks – cleavage theories and typologies of Euroscepticism – were developed to account for this change in political debate. Cleavage theories tend to downplay the evolution of party positions during the 1990s, whereas typologies of Euroscepticism create analytical categories that are difficult to operationalize. Both perspectives have a limited understanding of the relationship between ideology and strategy with regard to party positions on European integration. This article follows a broader research design focusing on the use of European issues in political competition in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic after the fall of communism. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, ideology and strategy are closely related because ideologies are created by politicians in order to differentiate themselves from their competitors and to gain political capital. Politics is essentially a competition to impose certain lines of division in the political field and to classify actors along those lines. In Central Europe after 1989, references to Europe allowed politicians to shape and reshape three lines of division, distinguishing mainstream from protest parties, mainstream political actors from their competitors and intra‐party currents from each other. Yet EU issues could be used only according to some general rules of political competition that evolved over time. As early as 1990, a pro‐European stance was a political norm acting as a normative theme– that is, a general rule that determined political actors' behaviours. As the pre‐accession process unfolded, a tension emerged between a necessary collusion between parties that moderated their criticisms in order to appear to be legitimate political actors, and instrumentalization of EU issues to gain political capital at the expense of competitors. In the late 1990s, saying ‘yes, but’ to accession to the EU became a pragmatic rule of the political game – that is, a set of rules of a lesser importance that actors could freely define without any risk of stigmatization. This shift resulted in ambiguous party positions on EU integration. Considering the word ‘Euroscepticism’ as a tool for political classification rather than as an analytical notion sheds a new light on the dynamics of party positions on European issues. These findings have wider relevance for the study of the Europeanization of national political systems in the enlarged EU because pre‐accession politics in Central Europe amplified logics that also exist in Western Europe. There is a difference in degree, but not in kind, between the uses of the European themes in political competitions in new and in old EU Member States.