Abstract
European integration is at the crossroads. A growing divide in terms of politics, society, economy and culture is emerging in the European Union. The peripheralization of central, eastern and southern Europe after 2008 due to the finance crisis has changed the perception of merits of being member of European Union. A growing instrumental Eurosecpticism has become more prominent in most central, eastern and southern European countries. Although the divide between core and periphery Europe became more prominent after 2008, this chapter argues that a divergence between rich and poor countries started already at the beginning of the millennium. The cleavage between rich net payer member-states and poor net receivers has certainly contributed to the consolidation of a centre-periphery divide.
After delineating the objective transformation of the discourse or discourses among the member-states at the European level, a discussion of what is Euroscepticism and which kinds of the phenomenon exists in the present national debates. Here the literature related to the conceptualization by Paul Taggart and Alex Sczerbiak will be reviewed and discussed. The chapter argues that a large part of Euroscepticism is instrumental and related to the negative impact of the austerity policies of the European Union. The austerity policies of the EU have exposed the myth that the EU could be instrumentalised to transform ailing socioeconomic structures. The EU as vincolo esterno has changed from a soft touch approach of transformation to a hard one. This clearly alienated many populations from the EU. The chapter will address this change of mood and how it is being instrumentalised by more radical groups such as Golden Dawn in Greece and Jobbik in Hungary to return to nationalist policies. In spite of differences, Euroscepticism has become a phenomenon in central, eastern and southern European countries. However, the chapter will also try to delineate different groups of countries and the level of Euroscepticism in each one of them.
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Magone, J.M. (2015). Divided Europe? Euroscepticism in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. In: Demetriou, K. (eds) The European Union in Crisis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08774-0_3
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