Introduction

Abstract

As the world witnessed the start of the third millennium, Europe embarked on a path that was brimming with optimism and, despite some more cautious voices, assumptions that the process of European Integration is set to continue on its stable path. The EU had successfully expanded to include Austria and two Nordic countries (Sweden and Finland) in the mid-1990s, the fall of the Iron Curtain ushered in the hope and belief that various countries in Central and Eastern Europe would be in a position to join sooner or later. After the adoption of the Maastricht treaty, work began on the next stage of European Integration with discussion about the Constitutional Treaty (which was eventually rejected and replaced with the Lisbon Treaty) and preparations were in place for the adoption of the Common Currency across Western Europe. The first decade of the 2000s squashed the dreams of those who hoped that EU integration would be a smooth process. If things seem to go according to plan until the enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe (in 2004 and 2007), a succession of crises and road bumps have fuelled scepticism towards ‘ever closer union’. After the rejection of the EU’s Constitutional Treaty, integration and enlargement fatigue became increasingly evident as the so-called ‘losers of globalization’ (Betz, 1993; Kriesi et al., 2008; Swank & Betz, 2003; Van Elsas, 2017) expressed their disillusionment with the pressures of immigration and economic globalization (or in this case, Europeanization). An old saying that goes along the lines of ‘When the USA sneezes, Europe catches a cold’ proved its truthfulness—following financial crisis of 2007–2008, the European Union (and Eurozone in particular) found itself mired in its own sovereign debt crisis which eventually came to be known as the Euro Crisis more colloquially. The combination of economic austerity and prospects of further significant redistributive measures (national bailouts, fiscal transfers, and mutualized debt) dug up simmering tensions among the electorates of most European polities. Against this background, populist and Eurosceptic parties have been performing ever better in Western Europe and beyond, to the point of either outright winning elections in some countries (e.g. Italy) or becoming parliamentary kingmakers in several others.