Euroscepticism and the Syrian Refugee Crisis

The Enemy Within or the Enemy Without: Euroscepticism and the Syrian Refugee Crisis Daniel T. Dye American University, School of International Service Paper prepared for the 2016 Political Studies Association Annual International Conference Brighton, England – 21-23 March Abstract How has the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe affected the rhetoric of Eurosceptic parties in the European Union? The crisis and the Union’s response touch upon many of the key objects of the debate about European integration—sovereignty, identity, the need for regional coordination. But they do so in a way that does not sit easily with the assumptions of nationalist Euroscepticism. Moreover, the crisis has heightened public salience of humanitarian concerns to a degree that makes the nativist discourse of some Eurosceptic parties more difficult to sustain politically. In essence, the crisis and the inter-state divisions it has engendered pose opportunities and risks for Eurosceptics. How they manage that tension will shape the direction of European policy on the issue. This paper analyzes this dynamic by using European Parliament addresses and other public rhetoric from UKIP and the Front National to compare arguments about migration, border control, and asylum before and after the recent crisis. It considers these changes within both the policy and political context of the parties involved. Finally, it advances the theoretical literature on Euroscepticism by reevaluating the hard/soft and nationalist/populist typologies. The European political space, and the transnational debates that take place within it, have been radically upset twice in the past decade. First, the regional response to the global financial crisis introduced “austerity” as a new touchstone for political rhetoric. The austerity narrative came to define mainstream European Union leadership, a discursively-linked array including the French and German governments, Angela Merkel personally, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission. Meanwhile, the reaction against austerity (at least as “imposed” from Brussels/Berlin/Frankfurt) came to define a European opposition made up of strange bedfellows (from right-wing Eursceptics to left-wing movement). Had the austerity issue continued to dominate EU political discourse, we might today see completely reworked political alignments 2 in Europe. However, over the past year and a half, the Syrian Refugee Crisis (and quasi-related events like the November 2015 Paris terror attacks) has brought migration an identity issues back to the fore. To some extent this has revived the left-right cleavage as the major axis of debates about European integration. And it also potentially challenges a simplistic linkage of Euroscepticism with xenophobia because of the possibility that an effective response to refugee flows may actually require greater regional coordination. In this paper, I study this development through the political rhetoric of Eurosceptic parties represented in the European Parliament (EP). I am particularly interested in those on the political right and which have been associated with populist and nativist sentiment. Such parties have defined both the EU institutions and non-European (especially Muslim) migrants as antagonists. Given a crisis in which expanded EU efforts (like the deployment of European border guards) have been offered as a way to manage and staunch the refugee flow, how will these parties respond? If they are rhetorically coerced to cede some of the benefits of regional coordination (on a sovereignty issue like border control), we might expect a weakening of the Eurosceptic position. But if they are able to discursively link their twin agendas, the high salience of the refugee crisis could provide crucial leverage to the right-wing Eurosceptic movement. At this stage this is a very preliminary, exploratory study. It focuses on the British Eurosceptic party UKIP, paired with some analysis of the far-right French Front National (FN). In terms of data, the empirical analysis below is based on a fairly comprehensive collection of UKIP texts and speeches, including essentially all statements by UKIP MEPs in EP plenary debates related to migration and border control.1 The FN discussion is based on a more cursory 1 Many thanks to American University MA candidate Joseph Quinn for his able research assistance in putting together this text archive. 3 analysis of that party’s rhetoric in the EP. Methodologically, these are intended as interpretive reading based on qualitative textual analysis of the speeches and publications. As I have done elsewhere, I draw upon some of the particular close textual analysis tools of critical discourse analysis (CDA; especially Fairclough 2003) but without importing all of the normative and ontological commitments of that approach (see the discussion in Dye 2015: 537-539). Looking only at speeches related to migration obviously limits my ability to make broad claims about how UKIP/FN discourse as a whole has changed over the past year, but in this case I am interested in how they are making certain types of claims than in mapping their claims overall. Particularly when speaking in the EP, Eurosceptic parties tend to always incorporate their fundamental critiques of the EU into the policy discussion at hand. Thus, what I aim to interpret here is how they are weaving Eurosceptic claims into debates about migration and border control, in what ways that has changed over the course of the refugee crisis, and what effect it might have on the broader contours of EU political discourse. Analyzing Eurosceptic Parties: Literature and Theory In order to systematically analyze the various parties opposed to European integration, scholars of European party competition have developed a new approach to categorizing political parties that moves beyond the existing silos of “left or right parties,” “regional parties,” etc. Studies of anti-EU parties often focus on distinguishing “hard” and “soft” Euroskeptics (Szczerbiak and Taggart 2003, 2008); the latter, also called “Eurorejectionism” (Kopecky and Mudde 2002), reject both the principle of ever closer union as well as the current state of the EU 4 institutions.2 It is this rejectionist position that is notable in many of the emergent parties in the recent European Parliament elections, such as UKIP. In any case, most of these distinctions are built on mapping policy positions, or (for more traditional left-right divides) identifying the social status of their supporters. An alternative approach is to proceed by analyzing the “claims-making” of parties: That is, not just who they are and what they stand for but how they make their arguments in the context of political talk and text. On a theoretical and methodological level, this can be seen as an incorporation of party politics into the tradition of rhetorical political studies (Finlayson and Martin 2008), which has tended to focus on the rhetorical performances of individual leaders (though see Atkins 2011). While leaders’ personality, styles, and beliefs are undeniably important in shaping the language that is used, that rhetorical language also contributes to binding and defining parties—as well as giving shape to the region-wide political debates. Thus, understanding the details of speeches and texts is equally important to understanding parties as organized actors. Note that I refer to claims-making rather than argumentation, as is more common in rhetorical or “political discourse” studies (Finlayson and Martin 2008; Fairclough and Fairclough 2012). This is for three reasons: First, I wish to deemphasize the process of collective deliberation and decision-making, in order to focus on the claims of individual parties. Second, I want to emphasize the fundamentally contentious nature of the politics around European integration—in the contentious politics tradition, these anti-EU claims would be categorized as either “programme” or “standing” claims (Tilly and Tarrow 2007: 83-85). Though made by 2 Note that while “Euroskepticism” has become broadly accepted in academic and political discourse, more specific terms are still contested. For example, party sympathizers prefer the more positive “Eurorealist” (Gardner, 2006), but Kopecky and Mudde’s (2002) similar-sounding “Europragmatist” refers to a different current entirely. 5 parties in this case rather than social movements (though the line is admittedly fuzzy in the case of, say, UKIP in the 1990s), the claims are much the same. Finally, I want to suggest that, in practice, the political claims often blur together with truth claims. It has often been empirical claims about the nature of contemporary Europe that underpin the normative (or deontic) imperative of opposing the European Union. The former are often contestable claims, but they are presented as taken for granted in the context of the political arguments. This echoes a social constructionist understanding of what would come to be called contentious politics as “the activities of individuals or groups making assertions of grievances and claims with respect to some putative conditions” (Spector and Kitsuse 1977: 75). Of the forms available, populist claims-making will be the most familiar to scholars of European parties (particularly right-wing parties) and party systems. Over the past two decades, there has been substantial academic attention to the origins and characteristics of an emergent (or re-emergent) European family of right-wing populist parties. This type of party has been given

Load more