From Cohesion to Contagion? Populist Radical Right Contestation of EU Enlargement
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Date
2022-05
Publication Type
Journal Article
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yes
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Abstract
The rise of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) in a growing number of European Union (EU) member states and inside the European Parliament (EP) has triggered concern over their ability to drive further contestation of European integration. Using EU enlargement as a test case, we analyse an original dataset of over 2′700 hand-coded statements from the last three EP mandates (2004–19) to trace the emergence of an increasingly coherent, oppositional discourse by PRRPs towards a further widening of the EU. We show that PRRPs contribute to a generalized hardening of opposition towards enlargement, but fail to impose their identity-focused framing upon other parliamentary actors. Instead, we suggest that mainstream party groups accommodate PRRPs' essentialist discourse by shifting from technical, conditionality-based reasoning towards more political arguments articulated around human rights and democracy. Our findings feed into debates about the transnational cooperation of PRRPs and the political impact of Euroscepticism.
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Publication status
published
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Book title
Journal / series
Volume
60 (3)
Pages / Article No.
653 - 672
Publisher
Wiley
Event
Edition / version
Methods
Software
Geographic location
Date collected
Date created
Subject
discourse; enlargement; European Parliament; Euroscepticism; political claims analysis; populist radical right
Organisational unit
03714 - Schimmelfennig, Frank / Schimmelfennig, Frank
Notes
Funding
172558 - Constructing Europe's Borders: Membership Discourses and European Integration (SNF)