Neoliberal Morality & National Populism in British and French Legitimacy Beliefs

• In Event: Historical Memory, Identity Construction, and Populism in Europe

Abstract

The logic behind contemporary Eurosceptic populism presents an empirical puzzle: how can politicians, parties, and voters from different economic positions support market liberalization but differ in terms of either supporting or opposing EU membership? The importance of understanding this empirical puzzle is demonstrated by the seemingly opposing outcomes of two key cases. On the one hand, the British referendum on European Union (EU) membership demonstrates the popular illegitimacy of EU membership for a majority of UK citizens. On the other, the 2017 French presidential victory of the distinctively pro-European E. Macron over radical right-wing populist M. Le Pen, suggest the popular legitimacy of EU membership for French voters. Although there is ample work on the individual-level alignment of policy preference and ideology (for a review see Lauderdale et al. 2018; Sojka et al. 2018), scholars have yet to investigate how citizens collectively use popular beliefs to justify accepting or rejecting EU membership. Comparing the evolution of popular processes of the (de)legitimation of EU membership across these two cases can then help shed light on the development of the divergent collective criteria that citizens use to accept or reject EU membership.
To begin to address this puzzle, we examine the intersection of national populism (see Taguieff, 1995; Goodwin and Eatwell, 2018) and neoliberalism in British and French citizens’ social reasoning about political legitimacy. Our investigation focuses on if and how neoliberal frames of market fairness establish a “moral economy”—or popular consensus of market fairness—that leads groups with supposedly opposing economic interests to make analogous collective evaluations of the legitimacy of EU membership by drawing upon a national populist applications of neoliberal fairness criteria. Centrally, we examine if this moral economy enables “asymmetrical” evaluations of political legitimacy, in which British and French citizens use either different or similar neoliberal fairness criteria to evaluate their nation’s and the EU’s political institutions as (il)legitimate. Hence, by emphasizing the question of political legitimacy both theoretically and empirically in our analysis of the beliefs and reasoning that citizens use socially to justify or reject power, we address some of the main gaps in the Euroscepticism literature (Weber, 1968; Beetham, 1991; Beetham & Lord, 1998; Van Ingelgom, 2014).
We proceed by providing a qualitative comparative longitudinal analysis of how British and French citizens’ legitimacy beliefs use different neoliberal and national populist moral discourses based on a re-analysis of data (Savage, 2010)from CITAE focus groups from the mid-2000s as well as Céline Belot’s semi-structured interview data in the mid-1990s in France and the UK. In particular, we find differences in how British and French citizens apply neoliberal fairness criteria in their articulation of their perceived national identity and interest in a populist narrative that (de)legitimates EU-membership and the effects of the EU’s framework of market regulation. We further develop the theoretical argument that neoliberal frames of market fairness establish a ‘moral economy’ (Vila-Henninger, forthcoming) that is central to understanding the (lack of) legitimacy of the EU to British and French citizens. We conclude by discussing how these divergent legitimation processes help us to understand the different trajectories of neoliberal reforms in each country.

Authors

• Luis Antonio Vila-Henninger, Université catholique de Louvain

• Mauro Ugo Caprioli, UC Louvain

• Virginie JN Van Ingelgom, Université catholique de Louvain