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 PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
EUROPEAN UNION POLITICS
Series Editors: Michelle Egan, Neill Nugent
and William E. Paterson

DEBATING EUROPE IN
NATIONAL PARLIAMENTS
Public Justification and
Political Polarization

Frank Wendler
Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics

Series Editors

Neill Nugent
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

William E. Paterson
Aston University
Birmingham, UK

Michelle Egan
School of International Service
American University
Washington DC, USA
Aim of the Series
Following on the sustained success of the acclaimed European Union
Series, which essentially publishes research-based textbooks, Palgrave
Studies in European Union Politics publishes cutting edge research-driven
monographs. The remit of the series is broadly defined, both in terms of
subject and academic discipline. All topics of significance concerning the
nature and operation of the European Union potentially fall within the
scope of the series. The series is multidisciplinary to reflect the growing
importance of the EU as a political, economic and social phenomenon.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14629
 Frank Wendler

Debating Europe in
National Parliaments
Public Justification and Political Polarization
Frank Wendler
DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor
University of Washington
Seattle, USA

Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics

ISBN 978-1-137-51726-5 ISBN 978-1-137-51727-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51727-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944801

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover image © Karin De Winter/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction 1

2 Theoretical Framework 25

3 Data and Method 61

4 Formats of Parliamentary Debate

About the European Union 71

5 The Discursive Justification of European Integration 83

6 The Polarization of Parliamentary Parties 141

7 Comparative Perspectives on Parliamentary

Discourse and Polarization 193

8 Conclusion 219

Bibliography 239

Index 265

v
 LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 5.1 Core arguments in the general appraisal

of European integration 89
Fig. 5.2 Core arguments in the debate on democracy in the EU 98
Fig. 5.3 Core arguments in the debate on EU Treaty Reform 106
Fig. 5.4 Core arguments in the debate on the
Eurozone financial crisis 117
Fig. 5.5 Core arguments in the debate on EU enlargement 131
Fig. 6.1 Party positions within the dimension of pragmatic discourse 146
Fig. 6.2 Party positions within the dimension
of normative discourse 150
Fig. 6.3 Party positions within the identity-based
dimension of discourse 153
Fig. 6.4 Party positions within the ethical dimension of discourse 155
Fig. 6.5 Party positions within the moral dimension of discourse 156
Fig. 7.1 Discursive framing and level of contestation in
four legislatures 214
Fig. 7.2 Discursive framing and level of contestation in five
thematic debates 216
Fig. 7.3 Discursive framing and position scores by types
of parliamentary party 218

vii
 LIST OF TABLES

Table 6.1 Party positions in five thematic fields

in the pragmatic dimension of discourse 163
Table 6.2 Party positions in five thematic fields
in the normative dimension of discourse 170
Table 6.3 Party positions in five thematic fields
in the ethical dimension of discourse 175
Table 6.4 Party positions in five thematic fields
in the moral dimension of discourse 182

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1.1 THE PURPOSE OF THE BOOK

National parliaments have become the most important and visible arena
for public political debate about the state and future of European inte-
gration. This is a new development, as policy-making in the European
Union (EU) remained out of the spotlight of public debate at the national
level well beyond the transition to political union in the Maastricht Treaty.
More recently, however, several important and contentious events in
EU decision-making have contributed to a more active engagement of
national parliaments in the debate on questions of European integration.
Events such as the failure of the Constitutional Treaty, decisions related
to the Eurozone financial crisis, questions of European foreign policy,
and the ongoing enlargement of the EU to and beyond its current 28
Member States have brought European issues into the spotlight of public
debate (cp. Cramme and Hobolt 2015; Risse 2014). From a political sci-
ence perspective, studying the public debate about the EU in parliaments
is attractive for several reasons. The stances of political actors and par-
ties can be studied firsthand from statements in parliamentary debate and
do not have to be derived from secondary sources such as media reports
or expert surveys (Bakker et al. 2012). Parliamentary debate opens up a
multifaceted and dynamic picture of party positions as a variety of issues
related to the EU are debated, and discussions evolve and can be studied
over time. Most importantly, parliamentary debate is arguably the only
level of empirical investigation where leaders of political parties engage

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

F. Wendler, Debating Europe in National Parliaments, Palgrave Studies
in European Union Politics, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51727-2_1
2 F. WENDLER

with each other in a direct and interactive exchange of claims and argu-
ments, in contrast to party manifestos or campaign statements, where no
such direct interaction can be observed. In this sense, the study of parlia-
mentary debate opens up an exceptionally rich and promising insight into
the political positions of parliamentary parties and their leaders toward a
variety of EU-related topics and the contention that evolves between rep-
resentatives of competing political parties.
So far, little research exists that investigates public parliamentary debate
about European integration beyond the quantitative measurement of
the amount and length of debates. This book seeks to fill this gap in the
literature. The main task of this book is to uncover how public political
contention evolves in parliamentary debates, and what forms of political
polarization between parliamentary parties can be observed in a compari-
son of four European legislatures. Against this background, the purpose
of this book is to link two debates that currently play a central role for
research about European integration: first, the investigation of the effects
of EU decision-making on the politics of its Member States, as commonly
addressed through the term “Europeanization” (Ladrech 2010; Graziano
and Vink 2008); and second, research dealing with the perception that the
process of European integration is going through a transformative change
through the increased public visibility, political salience, and contestation
of its policies and decisions, as expressed through the term “politicization”
(Risse 2015a; Statham and Trenz 2013; Hooghe and Marks 2012; de
Wilde and Zürn 2012; Hooghe and Marks 2009). Through this connec-
tion, the book positions itself both in the study of European integration
and in the comparative study of parliaments and party systems.
In this context, the book seeks to achieve three specific goals. The
first task is descriptive and aims at analyzing the content of parliamentary
debates about governance in the EU. This study seeks to specify what
aspects of European integration are contested in the public debate between
domestic political actors. This includes a clarification of the institutional
level of reference—that is, to what degree supranational institutions and
policies are contested in parliamentary debate in comparison to contention
about domestic actors, institutions, and decisions that are addressed in
debates about European multilevel governance. Furthermore, this study
presents a comparison between different topics of debate that deal either
with the EU as a political system or with specific policies conducted within
this political system. Through the comparison of these topics, the study
 INTRODUCTION 3

seeks to compare political contestation that emerges with regard to rela-

tively fundamental, “constitutional” questions of European integration,
and contention that addresses specific decisions taken within the political
framework of the EU. To address these questions, the empirical chapters
of the book present data to map debates about European integration, and
to compare points of reference and degrees of contention to learn more
about what aspects of European integration are contested. In essence,
this descriptive part of the study aims at a clarification of the question of
whether it is the EU and its institutions or just specific decisions and poli-
cies that are contested in domestic political debates. The presentation of
this empirical data fills a gap in the existing research literature: although
the term “politicization” is now widely used to describe changes in the
public perception of European governance, the term lacks empirical speci-
fication with regard to the objects and levels of reference of political con-
tention. It is, however, of critical importance whether politicization means
an increased contestation of European institutions as such, or just specific
decisions taken within them. In order to specify how public debate about
the EU in national parliaments results in a contestation of European gov-
ernance, the empirical evidence collected in this volume presents empiri-
cal insights about three aspects of debate: the intensity of contention in
a comparison between various issues, the relative frequency of different
types of mobilizing argument that are used to justify and contest politics
at the EU level, and patterns of political polarization emerging between
political parties in the parliamentary arena.
The second task is theoretical. This study combines a discourse theoreti-
cal approach with a model of differential Europeanization and insights from
the literature on party politics and national parliaments to present an inte-
grated framework for the comparative analysis of parliamentary discourse.
This theoretical model is used to investigate two essential aspects of public
parliamentary debate, namely the two distinct dimensions of discursive justi-
fication and party political polarization. Linking both dimensions, the main
question asked in this book is how the use of different discursive frames that
are used by parliamentary speakers for the justification and contestation of
European politics relates to the emergence of different patterns of political
polarization between parliamentary parties. Moreover, beyond the search
for generalizable links between discourse and polarization, the theoretical
model that will be presented in this study is designed to allow systematic
comparisons between debates that differ with regard to topics, types of dis-
4 F. WENDLER

course, involved sets of political parties, and that take place within different
national contexts. A second question investigated in this study is how these
various context factors influence forms of justification and contestation in
parliamentary debates. To explore these questions, the theoretical approach
presented here distinguishes two main types of discursive frames used for
the public justification of European decision-making: normative arguments
that are based on claims about values, conceptions of collective identity,
and the normative standards of justice and legitimacy on the one hand,
and pragmatic arguments based on claims about the effects of decisions on
the gain or loss of political, legal, and economic resources, on the other.
This approach builds on discourse theoretical approaches that have previ-
ously been used in studies about EU enlargement (Sjursen 2002; 2006a, b,
c), but expands this approach to a distinction of six discursive frames that
will be used for the empirical analysis of parliamentary debate. Beyond the
task of systematization and comparison, the distinction of these discursive
frames relates the present study to research that discusses the politicization
of European (and globalized) governance in relation to the rising conten-
tiousness of cultural identifications and claims, and investigates the relative
salience of economic and cultural frames in public debates on globaliza-
tion (Kriesi et al. 2012; Kriesi et al. 2008, 2012; Hoeglinger et al. 2012,
p. 237ff.; Hooghe and Marks 2009). Distinguishing different forms of jus-
tification of European integration according to these six discursive frames,
and measuring their relative salience as a source of political contention, can
therefore help us to understand what types of mobilizing argument are
most important as drivers of public contention about European integration
in the public discourse of national parliaments—particularly in a comparison
of cultural, normative, and resource-based claims. Moreover, the distinction
of normative and pragmatic types of argument is used to investigate how
different types of political parties frame their position toward European
integration, and how their interaction evolves within levels of debate that
are framed in different ways. In this sense, one of the main aims of this study
is to show that patterns of polarization between parliamentary parties differ
considerably in a comparison of different levels of discourse—and therefore,
that the emergence of different forms of polarization between parties can
be explained through the use of different discursive frames in the politi-
cal debate. Through its discourse theoretical approach, the study therefore
seeks to contribute to both the explanation of the sources of political con-
tention about the EU and the description and explanation of the forms of
 INTRODUCTION 5

polarization that emerge through this contention between parliamentary

parties.
The third task of the study is comparative. The research question and
theoretical approach of this book are primarily aimed at uncovering links
between structures of discourse and party political polarization that can
be generalized across a variety of cases. However, an additional question
considered in this study asks how institutional, topical, and party politi-
cal factors influence the intensity of contestation and polarization in a
comparison between different cases. To explore both generalizable com-
monalities and case-specific differences, the book therefore investigates
parliamentary debates about European integration in the main chamber
of parliament of four EU Member States: the Austrian Nationalrat, the
French Assemblée Nationale, the German Bundestag, and the British
House of Commons. This choice of cases includes considerable variation
in several factors that can be expected to influence the interaction and
polarization of parliamentary parties: in institutional terms, this selection
of cases includes both majoritarian democracies (France, UK) and two of
the most prominent examples for consensus systems in Europe (Germany,
Austria). Within this distinction, the role of the main chamber of parlia-
ment is typically described as an arena legislature in the first two cases, and
as a transformative legislature in the latter two cases. Furthermore, the
cases differ with regard to the expected polarization of parliamentary par-
ties in relation to European integration. The choice of countries includes
cases in which the major mainstream parties have considerable (UK), con-
ditional (France), or only relatively minor (Austria, Germany) differences
in their position toward the issue of European integration. With regard
to smaller Eurosceptic challenger parties, the four cases include examples
where such parties are either absent (UK), present on the political left
(France, Germany), or on the populist right (Austria) end of the political
spectrum. Against this background, it is important to clarify that within
this study, a case considered for comparison is not the entire parliamen-
tary debate in one of the four countries, but specific segments of debate
within each parliament, as distinguished through different topics of debate
and levels of discourse. The number of cases considered for comparison
is therefore bigger than four. Each of the four specific institutional and
party political conditions in the four countries compared can therefore
be related to more than one case study, increasing the possibilities for
comparison.
6 F. WENDLER

In summation, this book seeks to advance the research debate about

the Europeanization of debates in the public sphere, and the politiciza-
tion of European governance by investigating a still underresearched
setting of public debate—namely, plenary debates of national parliaments.
Combining both questions outlined above, the more general purpose of
the book is to demonstrate how aspects of diversity in the arguments, posi-
tions, and discursive frames of parliamentary actors combine with gener-
alizable similarities of political debate across different topics and national
boundaries. In this sense, the book will show that discursive frames used
in the debate on European integration are generally linked to specific
and different patterns of party political polarization across very diverse
cases. In this sense, debates that are based on pragmatic, resource-based
justifications for European integration evolve through relatively simple,
familiar patterns of domestic parliamentary politics between government
majorities and opposition parties, whereas normative questions lead to
more variegated and partly transformative patterns, highlighting the role
of Eurosceptic challenger parties from both the left and the right fringes of
the political spectrum. In addition, the study also shows the considerable
diversity in discursive perspectives and intensities of contestation, while
demonstrating that most of this diversity is explained by the specific party
political constellation in the respective cases, and only less consistently by
institutional or cultural factors present in a particular Member State. In
order to set the main questions and findings of this study in perspective,
the subsequent section discusses how they relate and seek to add to the
existing research literature.

1.2 REVIEWING THE STATE OF RESEARCH

By analyzing public debates about European integration in national par-
liaments, this study involves aspects of party politics, comparative (par-
liamentary) politics, the investigation of political communication and
discourse, and the “Europeanization” of domestic politics through supra-
national decision-making. Against this background, this projects speaks
to four bodies of literature, which will be reviewed in the subsequent
paragraphs: the debate about an empirically observable change in the way
questions of European integration are perceived, debated, and emerge
as a subject of political contention (or, in short, the research debate
about the “politicization” of European governance); the theoretical lit-
erature dealing with explanations for the emergence of political conflict
18 F. WENDLER

context of the subsidiarity mechanism that was introduced through the

Lisbon Treaty (Bellamy and Kröger 2014; Kiiver 2012). Beyond empirical
studies, this debate includes a conceptual and theoretical discussion about
the emerging role of national parliaments as “virtual third chambers” of the
EU (Cooper 2006, 2012, 2013). In the context of a broader debate about
the diversity and potential transformations of representation in the EU
(Kröger and Friedrich 2012a, b, 2013; Bellamy and Kröger 2013), a more
fundamental debate has emerged about the state and future of the repre-
sentative role of national parliaments in relation to supranational institu-
tions, including the European Parliament. A new approach to studying the
role of national parliaments in this sense is to conceptualize them as part of
a “multilevel parliamentary field”, in which parliamentary representation at
the national and European level is discussed and theorized as interrelated,
dynamic, and mutually complementary (Fossum and Crum 2012; Crum
and Fossum 2009; for related empirical perspectives, cp. also Herranz-
Surrallés 2014; Winzen et al. 2015). A more normative turn of this discus-
sion is found in concepts of multilevel parliamentarism in which the role
of national parliaments is set in the perspective of a closer transnational
cooperation and representation with an authorizing role for constitutional
changes in the development of the EU (Neyer 2012, 2014). In summa-
tion, a novelty of these contributions to research compared to earlier stages
is certainly that national parliaments are understood as representative insti-
tutions that can and should directly relate to supranational institutions and
decision-making processes, rather than through the classical route of del-
egation and control through their national governments.
Considering this state of research, an important observation for this
study is that the debating function of national parliaments has initially
been neglected or declared secondary, before receiving more attention
only in the most recent study of the Europeanization of national parlia-
ments. At the outset, public debate was considered as one of the most
unlikely forms of involvement of national parliaments in European affairs.
In this sense, earlier research suggested that parliamentary actors do not
encounter any political incentives to engage in public debates about the
EU due to the lack of political salience of European affairs. Moreover,
internal dissent within parties about European affairs, the considerable
gap between the generally strong support for European integration at the
level of political elites, and more critical attitudes at the level of the gen-
eral public were considered as factors that turned European politics into a
liability rather than an asset for mainstream political parties. These factors
 INTRODUCTION 19

appeared to establish strong incentives for political actors in parliament

to avoid rather than seek public debate (Ladrech 2010, p. 128ff.).
For these reasons, parties in parliament were expected to refrain from
communicating European issues toward the broader public, with the
result that EU matters are only “seldom debated by the whole chamber”
(Raunio 2011, p. 305). The lack of transparency of negotiations between
executive actors at the European level—which usually take place behind
closed doors—appeared to be further aggravated by a lack of commu-
nication of national parliaments, to which these executive actors were
accountable. In addition, the European Parliament never appeared as a
likely candidate for the task of communication to a broader public, given
its multilingual composition and rather technical working style. These
observations probably increase the perception of a “democratic deficit”
of decision-making in the EU (Follesdal and Hix 2006), but certainly
contribute to the debate about an emerging reconfiguration of democratic
politics between the EU and the nation-state (Eriksen and Fossum 2012).
More recently, however, this assessment appears to have changed.
Plenary debates about European affairs, especially in relation to meetings of
the European Council and Eurogroup ministers, have become much more
regular. They often attracted high political attention, especially during the
onset and management of the Eurozone crisis, when bailout packages and
subjects such as the creation of the European Stability Mechanism were
debated and authorized by national parliaments. The most recent research
has recognized the increased debating activity of legislatures, acknowledg-
ing that the “parliamentary communication function is at least as impor-
tant in EU politics” as the control function toward governments (Auel
and Raunio 2014b, p. 13). The fact that increased attention is given to the
debating role of parliament is also reflected in the fact that one of the five
ideal types of parliamentary activity discussed above—namely, the func-
tion of parliament as a public forum—refers to this role (Rozenberg and
Hefftler 2015). Moreover, one of the most recent proposals to measure
the activity of national parliaments, developed within the framework of
the research network OPAL, considers a combination of two aspects of
public communication—the number of plenary debates about European
affairs and the percentage of average plenary time spent on EU issues in
relation to overall plenary time—as one of the four indicators to measure
parliamentary activity (Auel et al. 2015).
Research about public debate on European integration in national par-
liaments is still in its early stages, however. So far, existing contributions to
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