New Labour and the European Union by Oliver Daddow

Author:Oliver Daddow [Daddow, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Ideologies, Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Political Process, Political Parties
ISBN: 9781847794925
Google: dXa5DwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2011-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

II. Modelling attitudes to ‘Europe’

Having unpicked the word ‘Euroscepticism’ in a general sense, we can now explore two of the leading efforts to make sense of its meaning from a theoretical perspective: the models proposed by Paul Taggart and Aleks Szczerbiak on the one hand and Petr Kopecký and Cas Mudde on the other. Having reviewed each approach we will see how they map onto the usages of the term in Blair and Brown’s speeches. It will be argued that, for New Labour, a Eurosceptic (or anti-European – the terms were used interchangeably) was someone, frequently but not always of the Conservative right, whose opinions are built on the twin pillars of national superiority and British-best assumptions that denigrate anything and sometimes everything European. That is, it denoted someone at the ‘harder’ end of the ‘sceptic’ spectrum the academics have devised to capture the meaning of this conceptually problematic phenomenon.

Arguably the best-known effort to pin down different strains of Euroscepticism has been that of Paul Taggart and Aleks Szczerbiak, whose opening gambit was a 2001 working paper on Euroscepticism in what were then the candidate states of Central and Eastern Europe (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2001). Founders of the Opposing Europe Research Network (OERN), since renamed the European Parties, Elections and Referendums Research Network (EPERN), their judgements were quickly tested by the other network members and this has resulted in a productive process of dialogue and theoretical refinement (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2002; Szczerbiak and Taggart 2003; Taggart and Szczerbiak 2004). Such alterations as have been made, however, are less important than the labels they gave to the different strains of scepticism they found in those countries – for two reasons. First, as we shall see below, their ‘hard/soft’ distinction has become an integral part of the academic lexicon of scepticism as the 2000s have progressed. Second, dissatisfaction with that early terminology prompted Kopecký and Mudde to develop their alternative model of attitudes to Europe. The starting point for Taggart and Szczerbiak in 2001 was the observation that expressions of opposition to Europe within EU member states cut across national boundaries and party borders. Across Europe there are many parties, or factions within parties, that express opinions that we could classify as sceptical or, at the extreme, hostile to European integration. Taken together, these collected Eurosceptics constitute a range of very different political parties and factions from extreme left to far right via the new left and the new populist right. In what were then EU candidate states, Taggart and Szczerbiak observed a gradual weakening of the consensus behind accession, to the point that ‘it is no longer safe to assume a compliant and supportive mood of public opinion’ (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2001: 6). The dearth of comparative work on Euroscepticism up to that point came as a surprise and, they felt, required a distinction to be drawn between different strengths of scepticism. This would aid an appreciation of the differences between national scepticisms and help show similarities across states which might

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