Party Attitudes Towards the EU in the Member States: France

French Politics, 2013

Contestation over European integration, pauses and crises, as well as growing evidence of its political and social implications, has drawn scholars' attention to the question of the politicization of the European Union (EU) at the domestic level. This article argues in favour of complementing the existing literature on the spatial competition over EU-related issues with a study of the salience and diversity of these issues. We illustrate the potentialities of such an approach, drawing on the examples of French, British and German parliamentary parties between 1986 and 2009. Our study of electoral manifestos generates two main conclusions. First, as patterns of attention to Europe fluctuate considerably over time and tend to follow systemic dynamics, the resonance and political consequences of party discourses over integration will depend on the presence of political parties able and willing to push the EU onto the electoral agenda. Second, the EU gives rise to distinct issue emphases in each country and in each party, resulting from the 'domestication' of European debates by parties. This observation suggests that we should be cautious with regard to the location of domestic parties along a single, transnational dimension that opposes Europhiles and Eurosceptics, as the EU does not enter domestic agendas in the same form everywhere.

The Europeanization of France has accelerated reforms of French government and politics, and stiffened resistance to such reforms among public opinion and political elites. This article first evaluates the concept of Europeanization as a factor of change in comparison with other endogenous and exogenous pressures on French governance and public policy-making. It then systematically analyses the changes and reforms undergone in French decision-making and policy-making processes in connection with France's membership of the European Union. Finally, it evaluates the capacity of the current (1999) French political leadership to manage Europeanization in a context of instability in the French polity and in French society. The article contributes to the growing literature concerned with political strategies for the domestic management of European integration.

JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 2001

This article affirms the usefulness of thinking of Europeanization and European policy change in terms of national, party and European contexts and their interrelationships. Through a case study of the French Socialists in office, the article seeks to establish that national, party and European policy contexts matter in different ways and in varying degrees. National context provides a set of institutions, interests and referential paradigms which help to make sense of a complex external environment. Party provides a distinctive partisan lens and an enduring political community. Europeanization poses a series of direct and indirect policy challenges and opportunities for nation-states and party governments.

KKI Policy Brief, 2021

Abstract: As one of the founding member states of the European communities (EC), France has played a major role in the process of European integration since the 1950s. However, French presidents have always treated European integration cautiously, generally supporting forms of supranational integration in areas of socio-economic policy and preferring the intergovernmental mode of governance in areas of defence and foreign policy. In a context marked by the recent weakening of the French influence on European integration (see Assemblée Nationale, 2016), the gradual rise in Euroscepticism since the 2010s (see European Parliament, 2017), as well as the destabilising effect of Brexit (see Zagdoun, 2016), Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 election on an openly pro-European program has foreshadowed the possibility for France to reassert its role as a leading actor in Europe. The aim of this article is to make sense of these events in terms of France’s relationship with the European integration process from its origins to the present day and to understand France’s future role in the evolution of the European Union (EU), while paying particular attention to President Macron’s pro-integrationist influence on the EU.

chapter 2 in Nielsen, J. H.; Franklin, Mark N. (Eds.), The Eurosceptic 2014 European Parliament Election. Second Order or Second Rate?, Palgrave, p. 17-36, 2017

This chapter describes the diversity and evolution of oppositions to the European Union (EU) in France since the first EP election of 1979 1 , while questioning the specificity of the 2014 European Parliament (EP) election. It explains how the European issue gained saliency, showing the normalization of EU criticism in the French political space and its radicalization in 2014. The analysis reveals the weight of electoral rules in the shaping of the " eurosceptic " landscape, placing the 2014 success of the extreme-right National Front (FN) into that perspective. Assessing the effects of European integration on domestic political spaces, the chapter underlines how EP elections and the development of oppositions have contributed to reshaping the French domestic political arena while maintaining political conflicts there. Finally, in this perspective, the chapter questions the second-order model.

Could opponents to the European Union (EU) contribute -against their own will-to help it become an institution? This paper defends the hypothesis that this is partly true for French political parties with an 'anti-EU' stance. The growth of the regional and political integration process embodied by the EU these last decades leads to the following question: is the EU becoming an institution? We will consider here this question from a sociological perspective, interesting ourselves with the European institution in its informal qualities rather than in its formal ones. We must thus rephrase our guiding question accordingly: has the EU begun to alter mental representations, collective beliefs or peoples' practices, discourses and ways of thinking? 1 Following Durkheim we could add that, as a set of collective beliefs and conducts, institutions carry a constraining dimension, 2 it is in this sense that European integration could weigh on behaviors inside the French political party system. We will seek to identify signs of theses phenomena in practices and discourses produced by anti-EU parties. This paper intends to study the EU as a source of transformation of the beliefs and ways of behaving in the French political space and, specifically, among the leadership of political parties 3 , with a particular focus on anti-EU parties. Moreover, this paper will explore how the evolution of anti-EU parties especially can play a part in the deepening of the EU as a sociological (or informal) institution, embedding itself in discourses and conceptions of the political space and shaping them.

Perspectives on European Politics and Society, 2010

This article analyses the nature of French political parties’ attitudes towards the EU. Three main dimensions of the EU process and of its impact on the member states are focused upon: identity, representation and scope of governance. We propose for the analysis a complementary insight in to the ideological explanations of party attitudes towards the EU by focusing on two main factors of variation: the institutional position of parties and time effects. We show that French parties divide over EU issues, along the lines opposing (1) major parties to radical and outsider parties, and (2) governmental parties to non-governmental and extraparliamentary parties. Left and right do not impact the pattern of contestation of the EU issue in the French case. Parties divide upon EU issues producing in the end a peculiar pattern that differs from the more traditional patterns of party competition of France. Finally, there is diversity between the attitudes of the party central office and the party in public office.

Contestation over European integration, pauses and crises, as well as growing evidence of its political and social implications, has drawn scholars’ attention to the question of the politicization of the European Union (EU) at the domestic level. This article argues in favour of complementing the existing literature on the spatial competition over EU-related issues with a study of the salience and diversity of these issues. We illustrate the potentialities of such an approach, drawing on the examples of French, British and German parliamentary parties between 1986 and 2009. Our study of electoral manifestos generates two main conclusions. First, as patterns of attention to Europe fluctuate considerably over time and tend to follow systemic dynamics, the resonance and political consequences of party discourses over integration will depend on the presence of political parties able and willing to push the EU onto the electoral agenda. Second, the EU gives rise to distinct issue emphases in each country and in each party, resulting from the ‘domestication’ of European debates by parties. This observation suggests that we should be cautious with regard to the location of domestic parties along a single, transnational dimension that opposes Europhiles and Eurosceptics, as the EU does not enter domestic agendas in the same form everywhere.

2003

The decade since the Maastricht treaty has seen numerous instances of opposition to the European Union across its member states. Despite this, focused and systematic research on opposition has been scarce, resulting in an incomplete understanding of this phenomenon. This thesis describes, analyses and explains organised opposition, using France and the UK between 1985 and 1999 as case studies. An institutionalist approach is used, relegating traditional socio-historical explanations to a secondary position. The hypotheses state that political events at the European level will drive the formation and development of opposition within a country, but interactions with the country's political and social structures will produce specific patterns. In particular, the country's institutional structure will have profound effects on this process, especially the relative ease of access and carrying capacities of formal political institutions. These factors are hypothesized to control the development of opposition both within and outside formal institutions. Over time anti-3 Key dates in the development of the EC/EU