ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we locate the democratizing potential for contestation over Europe within national domestic politics. We focus on national domestic contestation because, given the existing structural conditions, we think that it is from within national political spaces that the politicization of European-level issues is most likely to grow. We saw in Chapter 3 that there was only a very limited development of multi-levelled or transnational forms of political communication in response to the EU’s Constitution-making compared with that which remained encapsulated within country or polity level. Also, national-level political arenas remain the important locus for democratic input from the citizenry and political action, even for concerns that are constituted transnationally across the European region. On this we agree with Kriesi et al. that: ‘paradoxically, the political reactions to economic and cultural globalization are bound to manifest themselves above all at the national level: given that the democratic political inclusion of citizens is still mainly a national affair, nation states still constitute the major arenas for political mobilization’ (2008: 3). To be clear, this does not mean that we are talking about ‘old’ nation-state politics where nothing has changed, but a relatively Europeanized national politics which addresses the structural changes that result from advancing integration. As we argued in the Introduction, contestation over European integration between domestic political actors can normalize Europe by making it part of national politics. At the same time, it can transform national politics by providing a basis for new patterns of alignments between political actors within a national political space. In the literature, this has been presented as competition between the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of globalization, and its consequences, within nation-level politics (Fligstein 2008; Kriesi et al. 2008; Statham 2010c).
