Justification and political polarization in national parliamentary debates on EU treaty reform

Abstract:

National parliaments are arenas both for the discursive justification of European integration and its party political contestation. This article harnesses a discourse theoretical framework to investigate the links between both dimensions in debates about the revision of the EU treaties in the parliaments of four member states (Austria, France, Germany and the United Kingdom). Two arguments are proposed: first, a distinction between discursive perspectives and related mobilizing arguments helps to disentangle different thematic layers of debate, characterised as ‘problem-solving debates’ on the effectiveness of political action in the EU, ‘directional debates’ about the substantive goals of EU governance, and ‘legitimacy debates’ about the compatibility of supranational institutions with domestic democracy. Second, the empirical data show that each of these debates is linked to characteristic patterns of polarization along institutional and party political divides, adding fresh insights for the literature on party politics and public debate about European integration.