Debating Europe

Debating Europe offers a selection of fourteen country studies on the European Parliament election campaigns and the recent developments of national debates surrounding European integration, allowing for a comparative reflection on the more general evolution and limits of discourses concerning the European integration project. Comparisons are drawn across four principal axes of discourses: the political project of European integration, the social and economic project of European integration, the preservation of national identity, and the differences in prevailing national 'pro-integrationist' discourses. This thematic cataloging facilitates a 'mapping' exercise: looking for distinctive patterns of the framing of European issues which are shared by definable sub-sets of Member States. The book identifies overall trends across countries, such as the tuning down of federalist discourses in the founding Member States. The contributions confirm the scholarly interest of studying 'national European debates' with their 'sticky' representations of both a nation's place in the European integration project and the corresponding place of that project in constructions of national identity and polity.