Intégrer l'indifférence : une approche comparative, qualitative et quantitative, de la légitimité de l'intégration européenne
(2010)
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- (en) Drawing on the current debates, both political and academic, this doctoral research deals with the political legitimacy of European integration. Although political legitimacy is not a new concept in political science, it has attracted increased attention over the last two decades in the context of reflections on democracy, governance and the “crisis” of legitimacy at the European level, the sphere on which this research is founded. This thesis takes a sociopolitical approach to legitimacy, beyond any normative considerations. More specifically, it focuses on legitimacy understood as the acceptance of a changing political order by ordinary citizens, this acceptance being more or less conscious and active. The specificity of this approach lies in addressing this problem in all its complexity, analyzing both its latent and its manifest aspects. As a result, it contributes to the study of the processes of acceptance and/or resistance to the current process of European integration and its possible or desirable politicization. More precisely it is focused on the indifference of ordinary citizens to this process. Indeed the politicization of the European political order is at the heart of many academic debates and as a result a better understanding of this indifference is essential. Ameliorating our understanding of the lack of salience of European issues for a growing part of the public is the fundamental task tackled in this thesis. Beginning with a critical review of the literature on European legitimacy that underlines some of its weak points, the first chapter of this thesis provides a synthesis of the different theoretical models of legitimation that have been used in the course of European construction. The presentation of these different models provides the backdrop against which we are able to understand how citizens’ attitudes towards European integration have been analyzed in the existing literature. This first chapter demonstrates how the citizen, from being a simple spectator, has been constructed as a key actor in the processes legitimizing European integration. Mobilizing a new longitudinal analysis of Eurobarometer data, the results of the second chapter lead us to conclude that the principal limitation of the way the notion of support is used in the literature is its over-reliance on a one-dimensional understanding of citizens’ attitudes towards European integration. Contrary to this, we defend the idea that these attitudes are much more complex. The evolution of the post-Maastricht period cannot simply be reduced to an increase in “euroscepticism”, particularly amongst lower socio-economic groups. This chapter concludes that it is necessary to take into account indifferent or undecided citizens to fully comprehend the question of the legitimacy of European integration, in all its components. The non-polarization of a significant number of citizens is indeed an overwhelming phenomenon. However, the study of this non-polarized category of citizens is not without posing substantial methodological problems. The third chapter thus deals with the issues surrounding the choice of methodology for the analysis of ordinary citizens’ lack of polarization. With the goal of contributing to the renewal of research on citizens’ attitudes towards European integration, we chose to put into place a methodology that is both qualitative and exploratory, whilst continuing with efforts to quantify the different processes observed, along the lines of existing European studies. This research therefore adopts a triangulation strategy that commonly comes under the term of mixed-methods. In this chapter we outline the reasons for our choice of focus groups as a research tool and set out our comparative research design in detail. 24 focus groups were conducted in the context of the research project Citizens Talking About Europe in (francophone) Belgium, in France, and in Great Britain. The additional perspective gained by the use of focus groups in three countries leads us in the fourth chapter to refute the underlying premise of the “constraining dissensus”, already visible in the model of the “permissive consensus”: the premise of the uniformity of national attitudes towards European integration. Building on the work of Juan Diez Medrano, in his book Framing Europe, the systematic coding analysis of our collective interviews leads us to confirm that different groups have different structures of perception and therefore of evaluation of European integration. Having radically questioned the uniformity of national attitudes towards the European Union, the fifth chapter demonstrates that the plurality of perceptions not only differs from one country to another but also within a given national context. In each of the three countries we studied, we observed the same increase in the number of citizens who expressed neither explicit support nor rejection of integration. In this chapter we focus our analysis on these undecided or indifferent citizens, distinguishing three forms of non-polarization: ambivalence, distance and exteriority, and fatalism. These three forms correspond to different framings in three different national categories however. In conclusion, our overall results lead us to interrogate the relevance of the affirmation according to which the permissiveness as understood in the thesis of the “permissive consensus” ended with the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty. We propose an alternative interpretation, which argues that the acceptance of a European political order stems from at least two rationales. On one hand, amongst the elites (understood in a broad sense as political or economic or even simply citizens interested in the political sphere) we observe a polarization of opinion characterized by a decline in support and a reinforcement of opposition to the processes of European integration. This tendency is emphasized and explained by the model of “constraining dissensus”. On the other hand, we observe the reinforcement of indifference and/or indecision amongst ordinary citizens not expert in political matters, faced with this same process. The first rational of appropriation is linked to an active form of contentment or rejection, whereas the second demonstrates a mode of tacit acceptance, illustrating that the “permissive consensus” has not disappeared in the post-Maastricht era, although it has been transformed over the course of the integration process. In this respect, European legitimacy must be understood as both direct and indirect: as a double process. It must be seen as the extension and/or transformation of the acceptance of the national political order. Our results therefore suggest that we reconsider two commonly accepted premises, firstly that the European Union has become a salient issue for citizens and secondly that European public opinion has become polarized on the question of Europe. More generally, the conclusion of this thesis invites us to question the acceptance of change in the political order by investigating not only the degree of support citizens have for the European political system and the type of support they express, but also at the intensity of this support. Although the contrast between the pre- and post- Maastricht periods in terms of the parallel growth of the competences of the European Union and the publicity around European issues is not called into question, an interpretation based on the binary permissive consensus/euroscepticism appears incomplete if not erroneous. In emphasizing the complexity of the dynamics of politicization, this thesis suggests that the alleged break in the “permissive consensus” amongst citizens needs to be put into perspective. Thus, it is not clear that the “popular mood” towards Europe is the mirror image of the level of dissensus amongst elites . The politicization of European issues does not necessarily lead to the polarization of citizens opinions; we argue here that it is necessary to incorporate the notion and the role of indifference into any reflection on the legitimacy of the European integration process.
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Van Ingelgom, V. (2010). Intégrer l’indifférence : une approche comparative, qualitative et quantitative, de la légitimité de l’intégration européenne. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/130657