Politicising Europe in the streets

Abstract

In the last two decades, critical attitudes towards European integration have been at the core of an established strand of studies that have focused on hard and soft Euroscepticism. Research on progressive social movements pointed out the dominance of a third and milder critical stance towards the EU, defined as critical Europeanism. More recent analyses have shown an increasingly radical opposition to the EU among these groups, although this criticism rarely takes the form of an outright call to leave the EU. While most of this research has addressed social movement organisations, the goal of this chapter is to test these findings beyond the realm of politicised activists and see if they hold true for individual participants in protest events. In the context of the crisis of critical Europeanism, what can be observed in the Italian streets is an increasing politicisation of Europe as an issue. Progressive protesters are still more pro-EU than the general population, notwithstanding the fact that there is a significant minority calling for the process of Europeanisation to be scaled down and an increasing radicalisation of Euro-criticisms, especially among young protesters.