Laure Neumayer
Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne, Sciences politiques, Faculty Member
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Political radicalism has generated a large scholarly interest in recent years, both in Western and in Central Europe. Two series of explanations have been used to account for the success of radical parties in the scientific literature.... more
Political radicalism has generated a large scholarly interest in recent years, both in Western and in Central Europe. Two series of explanations have been used to account for the success of radical parties in the scientific literature. The first one analyzes the rise of far right political actors in a context of decline of traditional political affiliations (i.e. Communist, Social-Democratic and Christian-Democratic parties), of transformation of the welfare state and of opening of national political fields to single-issue parties denouncing what their leaders call " the immigration threat " (Ignazi 2006; Merkl and Weinberg 2003). The phenomenon is labelled populism or radical politics and studied through an analysis of electoral behaviour and/or radical groups' strategies at the national level of government. The second perspective, focusing on the European dimension of radical politics, links the rise of extremist parties to a broader reflexion on the constitution of a multi-level European polity composed of subnational, national and supranational arenas of political representation. Under the generic term Euroscepticism 1 , it focuses on critical attitudes regarding European integration expressed by politicians that either oppose the Europeanization of national policies (Taggart 1998) or reject acceding to the EU in candidate countries (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2005). These two approaches to political radicalism have developed simultaneously but in an isolated way from each one other. Yet regardless of their different terminologies, they both rely on the implicit or explicit assumption that political games have become influenced by European dynamics since the 1980s. Research on populism underlines the European dimension, in the geographical sense, of the populist phenomenon which spread over the continent since the late 1980s, while the Euroscepticism perspective analyses the creation of arenas of political competition that are more and more distinct from national political games. The EU is portrayed as an autonomous and differentiated political field, where actors are involved in specific activities. This field of research sheds light on the process of Europeanization, i.e. the inclusion of European issues into domestic politics which blurs the distinction between national and European political competitions and provides political actors with new constraints and new opportunities (Featherstone and Radaelli 2003; Goetz 2000). This volume aims at bridging the gap between these two fields of research in order to analyse the potential links between the Europeanization of political competition on the one hand, and the rise of radical parties on the other hand. It takes into consideration Western but also Central Europe, where comparable processes have taken place between the fall of communism in 1989 and the accession to the European Union in 2004. To what extent are positions on European integration the basis for the classification of political organisations as 1 The first public use of this term dates back to an article published by the Times on June 30 th , 1986 on the position of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher regarding the development of the European Community (Harmsen and Spiering 2004). Hooghe and Marks (2007) also note that the word 'Eurosceptic' became more commonly used after 1992, first to describe the negative reactions of the German people after the EU asked Germany to revise its 'purity rules on beer', and more generally to underline the changes in public opinion on European integration after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty.
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... Fondé en 1957 grâce au dirigeant communiste Jiří Hájek, qui place son assistant Vladimír Soják à sa tête, l'ÚMPE remplit une mission de formation ... Zuzana Lehmanová succède ainsi à Alexandr Ort à la tête du Centre Jan Masaryk à... more
... Fondé en 1957 grâce au dirigeant communiste Jiří Hájek, qui place son assistant Vladimír Soják à sa tête, l'ÚMPE remplit une mission de formation ... Zuzana Lehmanová succède ainsi à Alexandr Ort à la tête du Centre Jan Masaryk à la VŠE et Milan Znoj à Theodor Syllaba à l ...
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Abstract. During the 1990s, political consensus on European Union (EU) membership in Central Europe gave way to widespread ambiguous positions – many parties approved the principle of European integration while criticizing EU policies.... more
Abstract. During the 1990s, political consensus on European Union (EU) membership in Central Europe gave way to widespread ambiguous positions – many parties approved the principle of European integration while criticizing EU policies. In the late 1990s, two analytical frameworks – cleavage theories and typologies of Euroscepticism – were developed to account for this change in political debate. Cleavage theories tend to downplay the evolution of party positions during the 1990s, whereas typologies of Euroscepticism create analytical categories that are difficult to operationalize. Both perspectives have a limited understanding of the relationship between ideology and strategy with regard to party positions on European integration. This article follows a broader research design focusing on the use of European issues in political competition in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic after the fall of communism. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, ideology and strategy are closely related because ideologies are created by politicians in order to differentiate themselves from their competitors and to gain political capital. Politics is essentially a competition to impose certain lines of division in the political field and to classify actors along those lines. In Central Europe after 1989, references to Europe allowed politicians to shape and reshape three lines of division, distinguishing mainstream from protest parties, mainstream political actors from their competitors and intra-party currents from each other. Yet EU issues could be used only according to some general rules of political competition that evolved over time. As early as 1990, a pro-European stance was a political norm acting as a normative theme– that is, a general rule that determined political actors' behaviours. As the pre-accession process unfolded, a tension emerged between a necessary collusion between parties that moderated their criticisms in order to appear to be legitimate political actors, and instrumentalization of EU issues to gain political capital at the expense of competitors. In the late 1990s, saying ‘yes, but’ to accession to the EU became a pragmatic rule of the political game – that is, a set of rules of a lesser importance that actors could freely define without any risk of stigmatization. This shift resulted in ambiguous party positions on EU integration. Considering the word ‘Euroscepticism’ as a tool for political classification rather than as an analytical notion sheds a new light on the dynamics of party positions on European issues. These findings have wider relevance for the study of the Europeanization of national political systems in the enlarged EU because pre-accession politics in Central Europe amplified logics that also exist in Western Europe. There is a difference in degree, but not in kind, between the uses of the European themes in political competitions in new and in old EU Member States.
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This contribution presents the state of the art of the EU enlargement research and opens further analytical perspectives.
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After the Cold War, a new constellation of actors entered transnational European assemblies. Their interpretation of European history, which was based on the equivalence of the two 'totalitarianisms', Stalinism and Nazism, directly... more
After the Cold War, a new constellation of actors entered transnational European assemblies. Their interpretation of European history, which was based on the equivalence of the two 'totalitarianisms', Stalinism and Nazism, directly challenged the prevailing Western European narrative constructed on the uniqueness of the Holocaust as the epitome of evil. This article focuses on the mobilizations of these memory entrepreneurs in the European Parliament in order to take into account the issue of agency in European memory politics. Drawing on a social and political analysis centered on institutionally embedded actors, a process-tracing analysis investigates the adoption of the furthest-reaching official expression of a 'totalitarian' interpretation of Communism to date: the Resolution on European Conscience and Totalitarianism from April 2009. This case study shows that the issue was put on the parliamentary agenda by a small group of Central and Eastern European politicians who had managed to 'learn the ropes' of effective advocacy in the Assembly. An official vision of Communism then emerged through intense negotiations structured by interwoven ideological and national lines of division. However, this narrative largely remains of regional, rather than pan-European, relevance. In the competition for the definition of 'Europe' and its values, the persistent diversity in the assessment of Communism gives evidence of the local rootedness of remembrance despite the pan-European ambitions of memory entrepreneurs. Since the 1950s, the Council of Europe and the European Community/European Union have implemented a whole set of policies aimed at strengthening a hypothetical 'European identity' through the recollection of a common history and the promotion of shared values. The European political field is a complex configuration, composed of several interconnected but partially independent institutional arenas which produce a variety of public and official narratives about the past. The main institutional sources of these discourses are the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), the European Parliament (EP), the EU Council and the European Commission. After the Cold War, a new constellation of actors has entered these arenas and upheld an interpretation of the history of Central and Eastern Europe based on the equivalence of the two 'totalitarianisms', Stalinism and Nazism. This vision challenged the core of the historical narrative that prevailed in Western European at the time: the uniqueness of the Holocaust as the epitome of evil (Mälksoo 2010; Pakier and Stråth 2010).
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L’adhésion à l’Union européenne des dix nouveaux pays membres issus d’Europe centrale et orientale et de la Méditerranée, survenue le 1er mai 2004, invite à un approfondissement des recherches menées sur les réformes politiques et... more
L’adhésion à l’Union européenne des dix nouveaux pays
membres issus d’Europe centrale et orientale et de la Méditerranée, survenue le 1er mai 2004, invite à un approfondissement des recherches menées sur les réformes politiques et institutionnelles effectuées dans ces pays sous l’impact du facteur européen, en les associant à la réflexion sur l’intégration européenne. Ce basculement fonde la nécessité d’un renouvellement épistémologique des études de l’Union européenne élargie, en développant des approches moins centrées sur le caractère asymétrique des relations entre les anciens et les nouveaux États membres et plus tournées vers leur interdépendance.
membres issus d’Europe centrale et orientale et de la Méditerranée, survenue le 1er mai 2004, invite à un approfondissement des recherches menées sur les réformes politiques et institutionnelles effectuées dans ces pays sous l’impact du facteur européen, en les associant à la réflexion sur l’intégration européenne. Ce basculement fonde la nécessité d’un renouvellement épistémologique des études de l’Union européenne élargie, en développant des approches moins centrées sur le caractère asymétrique des relations entre les anciens et les nouveaux États membres et plus tournées vers leur interdépendance.
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CfP for a conference at University of Bucharest, 1-2 April 2019 The scholarship on reckoning with the past after the " third wave of democratisation " has generally provided analysis of national case studies or comparative accounts of... more
CfP for a conference at University of Bucharest, 1-2 April 2019
The scholarship on reckoning with the past after the " third wave of democratisation " has generally provided analysis of national case studies or comparative accounts of countries seen as discrete units, disconnected from transnational or international developments. This approach has overlooked the impact of globalization of memory cultures on national settings as well as the multiplicity of cross-borders and cross-regional entanglements that have framed justice and memory processes since the 1970s. A transnational turn in memory studies developed in the last decade. Such an approach has mainly focused on how the memory of the Holocaust has influenced and has been appropriated to criminalize wars and dictatorships in other historical contexts. Within Europe itself, this scholarship has primarily examined the competition between remembering the crimes of the Holocaust and the crimes of the gulag. The interactions and mutual influences outside this major axis, including the transfer of ideas and practices between " third wave " processes of dealing with the pasts as well as their effects at a global scale remain understudied. This conference aims to fill this gap by looking at how post-dictatorial justice and memory experiences in Southern Europe, Central Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union after the " third wave of democratisation " have reciprocally affected each other. It also seeks to unpack how memorialization practices in these regions were shaped by and influenced in turn criminalization discourses in other geographical contexts (Latin America, Asia, Africa). The conference focuses on transnational activism, transfers of knowledge and expertise at bilateral, regional or international levels, the impact of legal and mnemonic narratives outside their countries of origin, and the role of international organizations and NGOs in dealing with mass violence. The conference aims thus to trace the multidirectional circulation of ideas, norms and models of reckoning with authoritarian regimes both within these regions, and between them and other areas of the world. Possible topics include, but are not restricted to, the following subjects: Circulation of ideas, norms and practices across national borders in various professional and social fields (e.g. law, memorialization sites and practices, historiography, forensics, heritage etc.).
The scholarship on reckoning with the past after the " third wave of democratisation " has generally provided analysis of national case studies or comparative accounts of countries seen as discrete units, disconnected from transnational or international developments. This approach has overlooked the impact of globalization of memory cultures on national settings as well as the multiplicity of cross-borders and cross-regional entanglements that have framed justice and memory processes since the 1970s. A transnational turn in memory studies developed in the last decade. Such an approach has mainly focused on how the memory of the Holocaust has influenced and has been appropriated to criminalize wars and dictatorships in other historical contexts. Within Europe itself, this scholarship has primarily examined the competition between remembering the crimes of the Holocaust and the crimes of the gulag. The interactions and mutual influences outside this major axis, including the transfer of ideas and practices between " third wave " processes of dealing with the pasts as well as their effects at a global scale remain understudied. This conference aims to fill this gap by looking at how post-dictatorial justice and memory experiences in Southern Europe, Central Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union after the " third wave of democratisation " have reciprocally affected each other. It also seeks to unpack how memorialization practices in these regions were shaped by and influenced in turn criminalization discourses in other geographical contexts (Latin America, Asia, Africa). The conference focuses on transnational activism, transfers of knowledge and expertise at bilateral, regional or international levels, the impact of legal and mnemonic narratives outside their countries of origin, and the role of international organizations and NGOs in dealing with mass violence. The conference aims thus to trace the multidirectional circulation of ideas, norms and models of reckoning with authoritarian regimes both within these regions, and between them and other areas of the world. Possible topics include, but are not restricted to, the following subjects: Circulation of ideas, norms and practices across national borders in various professional and social fields (e.g. law, memorialization sites and practices, historiography, forensics, heritage etc.).