ABSTRACT
Differentiated integration is a relatively new phenomenon in the field of European studies. As discussed in the introduction to this collection (Leruth and Lord 2015), the use of differentiated integration as an alternative to the traditional dichotomy between membership and non-membership has profoundly changed the nature of the relationship between state actors and the European Union (EU). Since the early 1990s, national preferences on European integration have increasingly played a role in shaping the relationship between a state and the EU – with some states opting in or out of key European policies. With an increase in differentiation over time and recent developments that even
raise possibilities of disintegration (Cameron [2013]; see also Fossum [2015]), it has become increasingly important to go beyond the study of how political parties view European integration in general. Differentiated integration demonstrates why this is so. The general positions that political parties take on European integration may
be an imperfect guide to their positions on differentiated integration. They may favour or oppose differentiation in ways that cannot be altogether predicted from their general attitudes towards integration. Moreover, it is only by drilling all the way down to the positions that individual political parties take on particular policies open to differentiated integration that we can really understand the positions that governments and states take on integration. Yet most existing studies do not take differentiation into account: most of them analyse party preferences on European integration as a whole (e.g., Hix 1999; Hix and Lord 1997; Hooghe et al. 2002; Marks and Steenbergen 2004; Marks and Wilson 2000; Ray 1999), or they focus on broad government positions taken at the European level (Aspinwall 2002, 2007). Similarly, the literature on partybased Euroscepticism offer a series of competing typologies that present a series of terminological issues and focus on the issue of ‘Europe’ as a whole (Kopecky´ and Mudde [2002]; Taggart and Szczerbiak [2001]; Usherwood and Startin [2013]; see below). In addition, internal divisions, which often have an impact on a government’s European policy, tend to be ignored. To help fill this gap in the literature, this contribution operationalizes party and government preferences on participation in EU policies characterized by differentiated integration. As such, it is argued that one cannot fully understand the variety of positions that parties and governments take on ‘Europe’ without considering the potential for differentiated integration, especially in policy areas where differentiation takes place. In other words, by unravelling components of support for (and opposition to) integration, this contribution focuses on the demand side of differentiation,1 which plays an important (yet ‘under-analysed’) role in shaping a country’s relationship with the EU. Rather than being an explanatory piece exploring why e´lites support or
oppose Europe, the main purpose of this contribution is to solve problems of existing conceptualizations of party-based Euroscepticism by offering a more accurate way to measure party and government preferences on European integration. One can expect a complex series of causal factors, both domestic and external, to play a role in determining a party’s support for differentiated integration, such as public opinion (e.g., Aylott 2005), electoral strategy (e.g., Raunio 2008) or ideological opposition to the European project (e.g., Batory and Sitter 2004). Owing to the lack of space, this contribution does not explore these in details. Instead, it is designed as a qualitative survey of party and government preferences on Europe, in order to demonstrate the benefits of the operationalization suggested. Such operationalization could then constitute a starting point to study the causes and drivers of support/opposition to specific aspects of European public policy. In addition, a systematic operationalization of how parties inside a member state have different preferences on
differentiated integration is essential to a proper understanding of how governments respond to the options for differentiation available to them. The contribution is structured as follows. The first section gives a brief review
of existing studies on party and government preferences on European integration, based on the literature on Euroscepticism. The second section then discusses the operationalization of preferences on Europe within the context of differentiated integration. The third section then applies this operationalization to three country case studies: Finland, which belongs to the ‘inner core’ of the European Union as it participates in all EU policy areas; Sweden, which is located in its ‘outer core’ as a ‘Euro-outsider’; and Norway, which belongs to the ‘inner periphery’ as a European Economic Area (EEA) member (see Figure 1; see also Schimmelfennig [2013]). The final section then reflects on the three aforementioned assumptions, and discusses how the operationalization of support for European integration offered in this contribution can help EU scholars to better understand the phenomenon.
