Euroscepticism as Asymmetrical Nationalist Neoliberal Legitimation: A Case Study of British Citizens’ Beliefs in EU Legitimacy
(2019)
Files
No attached file found for this publication.
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- There is a gap in the literature concerning public—rather than attitudinal—forms of Euroscepticism. We approach the question of public Euroscepticism from the perspective of legitimacy and investigate the collective standards of governance in terms of which citizens publicly legitimate their Euroscepticism (Beetham 1991; Beetham and Lord 1998). As a case study, we investigate collective standards of governance used by British citizens to justify their Euroscepticism by reanalysing CITAE UK focus group data from the mid-2000s. Our in-depth qualitative reanalysis finds that a key shared standard of governance used in such legitimations combines UK nationalism and neoliberal beliefs about fair market competition. Our findings establish this collective nationalist neoliberal standard of governance as a source of legitimacy for public British Euroscepticism that spanned broad occupational divisions between respondents. Our results open the door for the study of this shared standard of governance in legitimations of Euroscepticism used by Brexiteers.
- Affiliations
Citations
Vila-Henninger, L. A., Caprioli, M. U., & Van Ingelgom, V. (2019). Euroscepticism as Asymmetrical Nationalist Neoliberal Legitimation: A Case Study of British Citizens’ Beliefs in EU Legitimacy. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/22694