ABSTRACT
Parties of the extreme right are usually classified as the prime exponents of Euroscepticism, yet the issue of their position towards European integration and the EU remains under-examined, both in terms of its content and underlying motivations. Historically, ‘Europe’ has been of concern to nationalist movements of both the inter-war and post-war periods, although not necessarily leading to a rejection of Europe: on the contrary, nationalism did not preclude inter-war fascist parties from developing ideas of pan-Europeanism in which a certain conception of European culture and identity primed (Bar-On’s chapter in this volume). Additionally, case studies of extreme-right parties show that party platforms present changes, one of the most visible being that of the Italian Lega Nord, which, in 1998, switched from being a strong supporter of European integration to opposition as expressed by its recent proposition of a referendum against the Lisbon Treaty in May 2008 (Chari et al. 2004). Furthermore, the case of the Romanian Partidul România Mare, which officially supported Romanian membership of the EU, highlights the need to go beyond a monolithic understanding of the extreme right as ideologically preconditioned to oppose the EU (Grecu 2006; Johns and Adamson 2008). A closer investigation of the positions of parties of the extreme-right family is required, in order both to determine the nature and content of parties’ positions, and to explain why positions are taken and, where change occurs, why it does. In this chapter, I investigate the nature of extreme-right parties’ position towards European integration over a twenty-year period (1985–2007), by focusing on two representatives of this party family, which experienced growing electoral success from the 1980s: the French National Front (Front National, FN) and the Austrian Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ).
