ABSTRACT
Conflicts over European integration are ever more likely to be interpreted as a part and parcel of the formation of a new cleavage. They raise fundamental issues of rule and belonging, and tap into various sources of conflict about national identity, sovereignty, and solidarity, which all have become particularly prevalent during the latest period of crisis (see Kuhn and Nicoli, 2020; Zeitlin et al., 2019). Apart from competing supranational sources of authority, the critical issues linked to the new cleavage concern the immigration and integration of migrants as well as international economic competition. Scholars have used different labels to refer to the cleavage – from ‘integration–demarcation’ (Kriesi et al., 2008, 2012), ‘universalism–communitarianism’ (Bornschier, 2010), ‘cosmopolitanism–communitarianism’ (de Wilde et al., 2019), ‘cosmopolitanism–parochialism’ (de Vries, 2018) to the ‘trans-national cleavage’ (Hooghe and Marks, 2018). What they all emphasize is that the new divide constitutes a break with the period of ‘permissive consensus’ and that conflicts over Europe have been transferred from the backrooms of political decision-making to the public sphere.
