Sins of Omission: Mainstream Parties and the Decline of “Ever Closer Union”

• In Event: European Crises and Crisis Management

Abstract

Despite the EU’s founding goal of “ever closer union among the peoples of Europe” and the momentous treaties of the 1980s and 1990s completing the Single Market and launching Economic and Monetary Union, subsequent EU policymaking in the 21st century has become more incremental and far less ambitious. Over the last decade, the Union has weathered successive major crises – from the Eurozone crisis to the refugee crisis to the challenge of democratic backsliding among member-states – but none of these have led to new EU treaties or substantially deeper integration. In fact, as illustrated by public opinion (Schneider 2019), the rising popularity of Eurosceptic challenges (de Vries and Hobolt 2020), and the domino effects of Brexit (Walter 2021), the trend is not merely one of stagnation, but rather disintegration (Jones 2018, Vollaard 2014). In this paper, we argue that mainstream parties are a central source of this stagnation and disintegration. We develop and test a theory of “sins of omission,” in which mainstream parties – by ceasing to talk about the EU and European integration – create rhetorical space for challenger parties to mobilize (Kitschelt and McGann 1997), either in opposition to further integration or to the EU altogether. We illustrate this pattern using data from the Comparative Manifesto Project, followed by case studies of mainstream parties’ “sins of omission” in response to two major crises of the last decade: the Eurozone crisis and the refugee crisis.

Authors

• Mark Copelovitch, University of Wisconsin, Madison

• Sara Wallace Goodman, University of California, Irvine