Reassessing British Conservative Euroscepticism as a Case of Party (Mis)Management

Abstract

Much has already been written about internal party divisions and European integration (Hix and Lord 1997; Conti 2007; Szczerbiak and Taggart 2008; Conti 2014), with the example of the British Conservative Party of the 1990s often used as a textbook case of a mainstream government party expressing some forms of opposition to European integration. In a wider comparative framework, the party can also be located within a Eurosceptic drift across the centre-right in the EU (Best 2012, p. 140). The case of the British Conservative Party is all the more relevant as the history of European integration shows how party families on the centre-right initially played an active part in the setting up of the project, either prominently supporting it or criticizing it from the outset (Alexandre-Collier and Jardin 2004, p. 205). More generally, one could argue that the decline of both the party families which had initially supported European integration, that is Christian democracy and social democracy, turned political parties away from support for Europe and paved the way for new forms of protest (Quermonne 2001, pp. 29–30) taken over by conservative parties in the EU. At the European scale, these conservative parties followed different national trajectories but most of them suffered from internal divisions. From a comparative point of view, the evolution of the French Gaullist movement — now UMP — is diametrically opposed to that of the British Conservative Party which used to be known as the ‘party of Europe’ before turning Eurosceptic. It is somehow more remarkable in the case of the previous Gaullist party — the RPR — where strongly nationalistic rhetoric, encapsulated in Jacques Chirac’s famous Cochin speech of 6 December 1978, was replaced, within a few years, by an enthusiastic commitment to European integration (Derville 1990, pp. 22–23).