The fragility of the EU as a ‘Community of values’: lessons from the Haider affair

Abstract:

Unprecedented in the history of European integration, the sanctions against an Austrian government that included the far right Austrian Freedom Party in January 2000 clearly exposed the necessity to guarantee a minimum level of normative homogeneity in the European Union. However, as the hasty lifting of the sanctions a few months later showed, EU leaders proved both unable and unwilling to defend a durable, common and coherent position on this issue. Classic intergovernmental theories, which predict that the unification process cannot go beyond a certain threshold of politically acceptable integration without coming up against deep national divisions and sharpening tensions between the Union and domestic societies, only partly explain this rapid erosion of the European consensus against the FPÖ. The article argues that the breakdown of this 'cordon sanitaire' is also largely due to the reluctance of domestic political elites to institutionalise a principle which might backfire against their own countries and ultimately implies a far-reaching Europeanisation of domestic politics and party strategies.