France

The main purpose of this chapter is to link the general attitude of French political parties towards EU integration (since 1989) with their positions in political arenas and with historical junctures, and to show that in the French case the interdependency between these factors is particularly strong. Party positions on European integration (whether supportive or critical) is ‘related to voter alignments, ideology, interests and identity’ and then translated into party competition in the context of the party system (Sitter 2001, 37, emphasis added). ¹ The attitudes towards the EU that have emerged in France have always been somehow critical (Bossuat 2007; Schmidt 2006; Crespy 2010). Certainly, this is due to a large number of factors including the country status of leading power within the EU, a greater international influence in the international scene than other member states and a strong national sentiment that is historically rooted (Schmidt 2007; Gaxie et al. 2011). In France, attitudes towards the EU have always been more critical and complex than in most of the other countries considered for this book. Following many other EU member states, French civil society has now largely overstepped the ‘permissive consensus’ once pointed out by Lindberg and Scheingold which relied on a global factitious adhesion to European prospects, moving to a ‘constraining dissensus’ (Down and Wilson 2008). As Percheron (1991) showed and confirmed 20 years later by Gaxie et al. (2011), there are different logics behind attitudes towards the EU. The present situation is now closer to what we could describe as a process of politicization through involvement, as Weber (1976) explained for the changing French society of the nineteenth century. Indeed, dynamics of European integration are really politicizing the debate and even modifying the French partisan field and the way French diplomacy defends its strategic interests in the European co-decision process (Crespy 2010; Milner 2006). This phenomenon is not new but has structured the French field since the beginning of European integration and the rejection of the European Defence Community in 1954 (Bitsch et al. 2007). This has a ‘disinhibiting effect’ on French debate: voices against one specific European project or the whole European integration have no ineffable and delegitimizing effect on those who express them.