ABSTRACT
The increasing Europeanization of governance structures on the one hand, and the lack of a parallel development of an active European citizenship on the other – at the heart of the so called EU’ ‘democratic deficit’ – is a crucial issue for current European politics. However, even before the popular rejection of the European Constitution in the French and Dutch referenda, there were indications that citizens’ support for the European integration process was no longer self-evident. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the former ‘permissive consensus’ on the European integration has eroded (Sharpf 1999); trust in European institutions has strongly declined, as well as voter participation in European elections (Crepaz and Stenier 2007: 291). In addition, tendencies of a ‘renationalization’ of politics have been observable in many member states, such as the emergence of xenophobic and anti-European political parties and groups (Statham and Gray 2005).
