The Enemy Within or the Enemy Without:
Euroscepticism and the Syrian Refugee Crisis
Daniel T. Dye
American University, School of International Service
Paper prepared for the 2016 Political Studies Association Annual International Conference
Brighton, England – 21-23 March
Abstract
How has the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe affected the rhetoric of Eurosceptic parties in the
European Union? The crisis and the Union’s response touch upon many of the key objects of the
debate about European integration—sovereignty, identity, the need for regional coordination. But
they do so in a way that does not sit easily with the assumptions of nationalist Euroscepticism.
Moreover, the crisis has heightened public salience of humanitarian concerns to a degree that
makes the nativist discourse of some Eurosceptic parties more difficult to sustain politically. In
essence, the crisis and the inter-state divisions it has engendered pose opportunities and risks for
Eurosceptics. How they manage that tension will shape the direction of European policy on the
issue. This paper analyzes this dynamic by using European Parliament addresses and other public
rhetoric from UKIP and the Front National to compare arguments about migration, border control,
and asylum before and after the recent crisis. It considers these changes within both the policy and
political context of the parties involved. Finally, it advances the theoretical literature on
Euroscepticism by reevaluating the hard/soft and nationalist/populist typologies.
The European political space, and the transnational debates that take place within it, have
been radically upset twice in the past decade. First, the regional response to the global financial
crisis introduced “austerity” as a new touchstone for political rhetoric. The austerity narrative
came to define mainstream European Union leadership, a discursively-linked array including the
French and German governments, Angela Merkel personally, the European Central Bank, and
the European Commission. Meanwhile, the reaction against austerity (at least as “imposed” from
Brussels/Berlin/Frankfurt) came to define a European opposition made up of strange bedfellows
(from right-wing Eursceptics to left-wing movement). Had the austerity issue continued to
dominate EU political discourse, we might today see completely reworked political alignments
2
in Europe. However, over the past year and a half, the Syrian Refugee Crisis (and quasi-related
events like the November 2015 Paris terror attacks) has brought migration an identity issues back
to the fore. To some extent this has revived the left-right cleavage as the major axis of debates
about European integration. And it also potentially challenges a simplistic linkage of
Euroscepticism with xenophobia because of the possibility that an effective response to refugee
flows may actually require greater regional coordination.
In this paper, I study this development through the political rhetoric of Eurosceptic
parties represented in the European Parliament (EP). I am particularly interested in those on the
political right and which have been associated with populist and nativist sentiment. Such parties
have defined both the EU institutions and non-European (especially Muslim) migrants as
antagonists. Given a crisis in which expanded EU efforts (like the deployment of European
border guards) have been offered as a way to manage and staunch the refugee flow, how will
these parties respond? If they are rhetorically coerced to cede some of the benefits of regional
coordination (on a sovereignty issue like border control), we might expect a weakening of the
Eurosceptic position. But if they are able to discursively link their twin agendas, the high
salience of the refugee crisis could provide crucial leverage to the right-wing Eurosceptic
movement.
At this stage this is a very preliminary, exploratory study. It focuses on the British
Eurosceptic party UKIP, paired with some analysis of the far-right French Front National (FN).
In terms of data, the empirical analysis below is based on a fairly comprehensive collection of
UKIP texts and speeches, including essentially all statements by UKIP MEPs in EP plenary
debates related to migration and border control.1 The FN discussion is based on a more cursory
1
Many thanks to American University MA candidate Joseph Quinn for his able research assistance in putting
together this text archive.
3
analysis of that party’s rhetoric in the EP. Methodologically, these are intended as interpretive
reading based on qualitative textual analysis of the speeches and publications. As I have done
elsewhere, I draw upon some of the particular close textual analysis tools of critical discourse
analysis (CDA; especially Fairclough 2003) but without importing all of the normative and
ontological commitments of that approach (see the discussion in Dye 2015: 537-539). Looking
only at speeches related to migration obviously limits my ability to make broad claims about
how UKIP/FN discourse as a whole has changed over the past year, but in this case I am
interested in how they are making certain types of claims than in mapping their claims overall.
Particularly when speaking in the EP, Eurosceptic parties tend to always incorporate their
fundamental critiques of the EU into the policy discussion at hand. Thus, what I aim to interpret
here is how they are weaving Eurosceptic claims into debates about migration and border
control, in what ways that has changed over the course of the refugee crisis, and what effect it
might have on the broader contours of EU political discourse.
Analyzing Eurosceptic Parties: Literature and Theory
In order to systematically analyze the various parties opposed to European integration,
scholars of European party competition have developed a new approach to categorizing political
parties that moves beyond the existing silos of “left or right parties,” “regional parties,” etc.
Studies of anti-EU parties often focus on distinguishing “hard” and “soft” Euroskeptics
(Szczerbiak and Taggart 2003, 2008); the latter, also called “Eurorejectionism” (Kopecky and
Mudde 2002), reject both the principle of ever closer union as well as the current state of the EU
4
institutions.2 It is this rejectionist position that is notable in many of the emergent parties in the
recent European Parliament elections, such as UKIP. In any case, most of these distinctions are
built on mapping policy positions, or (for more traditional left-right divides) identifying the
social status of their supporters.
An alternative approach is to proceed by analyzing the “claims-making” of parties: That
is, not just who they are and what they stand for but how they make their arguments in the
context of political talk and text. On a theoretical and methodological level, this can be seen as
an incorporation of party politics into the tradition of rhetorical political studies (Finlayson and
Martin 2008), which has tended to focus on the rhetorical performances of individual leaders
(though see Atkins 2011). While leaders’ personality, styles, and beliefs are undeniably
important in shaping the language that is used, that rhetorical language also contributes to
binding and defining parties—as well as giving shape to the region-wide political debates. Thus,
understanding the details of speeches and texts is equally important to understanding parties as
organized actors.
Note that I refer to claims-making rather than argumentation, as is more common in
rhetorical or “political discourse” studies (Finlayson and Martin 2008; Fairclough and Fairclough
2012). This is for three reasons: First, I wish to deemphasize the process of collective
deliberation and decision-making, in order to focus on the claims of individual parties. Second, I
want to emphasize the fundamentally contentious nature of the politics around European
integration—in the contentious politics tradition, these anti-EU claims would be categorized as
either “programme” or “standing” claims (Tilly and Tarrow 2007: 83-85). Though made by
Note that while “Euroskepticism” has become broadly accepted in academic and political discourse, more specific
terms are still contested. For example, party sympathizers prefer the more positive “Eurorealist” (Gardner, 2006),
but Kopecky and Mudde’s (2002) similar-sounding “Europragmatist” refers to a different current entirely.
2
5
parties in this case rather than social movements (though the line is admittedly fuzzy in the case
of, say, UKIP in the 1990s), the claims are much the same. Finally, I want to suggest that, in
practice, the political claims often blur together with truth claims. It has often been empirical
claims about the nature of contemporary Europe that underpin the normative (or deontic)
imperative of opposing the European Union. The former are often contestable claims, but they
are presented as taken for granted in the context of the political arguments. This echoes a social
constructionist understanding of what would come to be called contentious politics as “the
activities of individuals or groups making assertions of grievances and claims with respect to
some putative conditions” (Spector and Kitsuse 1977: 75).
Of the forms available, populist claims-making will be the most familiar to scholars of
European parties (particularly right-wing parties) and party systems. Over the past two decades,
there has been substantial academic attention to the origins and characteristics of an emergent (or
re-emergent) European family of right-wing populist parties. This type of party has been given
several different labels in the literature (associated with slightly different definitions): Abedi
refers to “right wing-populist Anti-Political Establishment (APE)” parties (2004); Cas Mudde
influentially coined “populist radical right parties” (PRRPs) (2007); while Eatwell settles for “the
extreme right” in reference to many of the same parties (2000). In recent years, this conceptual
framework has been applied to many of the prominent Euroskeptic parties across the continent,
such as UKIP (Abedi and Lundberg 2009: 71).
A full review of this literature is beyond the scope of this paper. For the purpose of
analyzing different Euroskeptic claims, the element I extract from these approaches is a
particularly definition of “populism.” As defined by Mudde in his influential study of PRRPs,
populism “is a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two
6
homogenous and antagonistic groups, the ‘pure people’ versus the ‘corrupt elite,’ (2007: 23).
While Mudde’s search for the distinctive core features of the PRRP phenomenon is a different
goal from my analysis, three things are important about this definition: First, he makes note of
the fact that populism is “not merely a political style” (Mudde 2007: 23). Second, there is a clear
political claim about the current state of politics, that the greatest threat to society is the
corruption of the elite and powerlessness of the masses. And third, there is a corresponding claim
about political legitimacy, that it “should be an expression of the volonté générale” (Mudde
2007: 23).
Applied to the varieties of anti-EU claims, this suggests a particular species of “populist
Euroskeptic” argument. Such an argument holds that European integration is to be opposed
because it is part of the general conflict the corrupt elites and the masses that also happens at the
domestic level, and is a uniquely sharp example of unaccountable institutions taking decisions
contrary to the interests of the people. This claim would logically not make a firm distinction
between the actions of domestic elites and the European institutions. Stylistically, such party
rhetoric will emphasize “the people” or “citizens,” and oppose these to some broadly-defined
threat (so as to encompass both domestic- and European-level opponents). Finally, they will be
more likely to invoke ethnic and religious tensions in making their complaints against Europe—
that is, in some way rendering them as the EU’s fault, as opposed to general xenophobic speech
which properly belongs to the other parts of the party discourse beyond Euroskepticism (and is
outside of this analysis).
But populism—the general opposition between masses and elites, which exists at the
European level in parallel with the domestic level—is not the only way to formulate a political
claim against the EU and the process of European integration generally. Where Europe is seen
7
primarily as a distinctly supranational entity—inherently violating the principle that political
authority must be congruent with the national unit in order to be legitimate—the claim is better
described as a nationalist one.
“Nationalism” is of course a long-contested concept in social science, encompassing
political, cultural, and sociological conceptions of what it means to be and become a “nation.”
Gellner famously articulated nationalism “a political principle, which holds that the political and
national unit should be congruent” (1983: 1). This definition can be useful regardless of the
particular content assigned to the signifier “national unit.” It is this point, the nature of the
national unit and its historical development, which occupies much of the voluminous nationalism
literature. Anderson (1983), for example, argues that nations are a kind of “imagined
communities” which emerged from the socioeconomic processes of modernization, particularly
print capitalism. By contrast, the ethnosymbolist school associated with Armstrong (1982) and
Smith (1991) focuses on the necessity of long-standing ethnic symbols (like founding myths) for
modern national identities to exist. Other scholarship on nationalism has engaged with different
models of nationhood, such as the ethnic versus civic nationalism question (Ignatieff 1993) and
the idea of a “new nationalism,” which again do not necessarily conflict with nationalism as a
generic principle of political legitimacy.
I thus return here to Gellner’s notion of a political claim because my aim is to analyze
party discourses in their political contexts, rather than to evaluate or historicize their respective
imagined communities. According to this understanding, then, nationalist Euroskepticism entails
a different structure and style of argument from that of its populist analogue. The nationalist
claim is that deep European integration is by definition illegitimate, because it attaches political
power to something other than the national unit. More concretely, this will take the form of
8
arguments that focus on conflict between states and the European institutions, generally taking
for granted the normative preference for the former (e.g., that states will naturally be best placed
to respond to the lingering economic crisis, if only allowed a free hand in their policies).
UKIP Before and Since the Refugee Crisis
Through most of its short history, UKIP’s claims about Europe (setting aside domestic
issues, the social base of its support, etc.) have been distinctly nationalist: The party is organized
around the fundamental argument that the ills of British society could be largely ameliorated if
only the country were ruled exclusively from Westminster, free of foreign imposition from
Brussels. Indeed, this framing is one of the things that differentiates UKIP from the far-right
British National Party (whose shadow it is always keen to escape). The latter party’s extremist
populism implies that a significant political reorganization of the UK—not just its liberation
from the EU—would be necessary. This kind of nationalism—an avowedly forward-looking
version, of which UKIP is fond, likely to further distance themselves from the extreme right—is
reflected in this passage from the party’s 2010 manifesto:
While UKIP is realistic about the difficult economic and political challenges Britain
faces, we take a positive view of Britain’s place in the world - a stark contrast to the
defeatist and apologetic stance taken by other parties. UKIP recognises Britain as a global
player with a global destiny and not a regional state within a “United States of Europe.”
(UKIP 2010: 10)
Again we see the contrast between the image presented here and the regressive, isolationist
populism of which UKIP was accused by mainstream competitors. It is Europe that is seen as a
fundamentally provincial space, against a global economy that is linked with the future (“a
global destiny”). This assertion is also presented as an evident fact or empirical claim, rather than
a normative position of the party, with the verb “recognises.”
9
Likewise, this type of claims-making is also reflected in recent UKIP interventions in
European political discourse, such as this declaration by Farage in a June 2014 European
Parliament debate following a meeting of the European Council: “We are the ones who want
democracy, we are the ones who want nation states, we are the ones who want a global future for
our countries, and do not want to be trapped inside this museum.” In other words, supranational
governance is construed as problematic because it represents a major restraint on states’ ability
to achieve the progress that would naturally be possible (or so it is implied) absent the imposition
of Europe.
Through early-2015, this was precisely the type of framing evidenced in UKIP discourse
on migration. In particular, there was a heavy emphasis on constructing a logic of equivalence
between state-level border control and democracy. In a series of migration-related EP plenary
debates between 2011 and 2013, Farage variously claimed: that opposition to the free movement
of peoples is “fair, principle and democratic;” that the Union Jack “has represented liberal
democracy far more than any other Member State of this European Union and it will go on long
after your star-spangled banner has disappeared;” and that “when there is a crisis, when there is a
crisis, between the theory of European integration and the practicality of nation state, it is the
nation state that wins.” More specifically, he attacked the fundamental legitimacy of immigration
decisions being decided at the European level by criticizing the powers given to the EU
Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs, and Inclusion:
Mr President, not one in a thousand British people would know who Commissioner
Andor was. They would not be able to pick him out of a line-up and yet he is really rather
powerful. He is the governor. He is the man who decides who can come to Britain and
who can claim benefits. He has more power than a British Government Minister.
(Farage 2013)
10
And Farage’s fellow UKIP MEP (and now-Chair of the Europe of Freedom and Direct
Democracy Group) Paul Nuttall put this in even more direct terms when he argued in 2010 that
“one of the totems of a sovereign state is that it controls who can and who cannot come into its
own country. Unfortunately, several governments in the UK have given away this power to
unelected, faceless bureaucrats in Brussels.”
The cumulative effect of these statements is to equate the nation-state model of decisionmaking with democratic accountability in general. Note the stark contrast of the concrete images
of the Union Jack and the archetypal “British Government Minister” with the “faceless
bureaucrats in Brussels.” Where the people in general are invoked, as in the Farage passage
above, it is not to make a classical populist claim. Rather, it only serves to buttress the principled
nationalist claim that democracy as such can only exist within the nation. Indeed, the very notion
of “populism” is subsumed to this goal when Farage (2011) claims that “populists are actually
democrats and [European elites] abuse those who want to fly the populist flag.”
On the surface, and in terms of policy, little has changed since the Syrian Refugee Crisis
became the focal point of European debate: Fervent opposition to the free movement of people
within Europe remains the primary preoccupation of UKIP rhetoric in the EP. However, closer
reading reveals a noticeable shift in the way that they advance this claim. In a December 2015
debate related to the EU negotiations with Turkey over refugee management, Farage claimed that
“I have seen the idealized Schengen area lead to the free movement of Kaleshnikovs” (Farage
2015b) Here he is drawing upon images of mass migration associated with the refugee crisis and
linking it uncritically with terrorism. Moreover, the principled opposition between national
democracy and supranational tyranny found in the older rhetoric has been replaced by an
opposition between a naively optimistic (“idealized”) European vision and hard realities.
11
A month earlier UKIP MEP James Carver had essentially summarized this policy and
rhetorical position in a written submission to the EP debate on “Prevention of radicalization and
recruitment of EU citizens by terrorist organizations” (which is surely not a goal that UKIP
would oppose on principle):
UKIP voted against this non-legislative and non-binding report as it calls for yet more EU
interference, legislation and agencies. The report included paragraphs such as the
principle that "foreign fighters" should be allowed to return to Europe; that national
education systems and religious leaders should promote EU values; that the Commission
should create EU guidelines for prisons and also called for an EU definition of "hate
speech", which would no doubt mean anyone who criticise the EU or the free movement
of people. One of the biggest issues is the EU's free-movement of people is allowing
terrorists and weapons to move freely across Europe un-checked. UKIP is not against
individual countries working together and sharing intelligence to catch terrorists, but in
order to protect our country we must leave the EU and reinstate sensible border controls
with European countries to stop this open door immigration.
(Carver 2015)
The problem of the EU as an actor in this issue area is not its undemocratic character or lack of
accountability to the people. According to this line of reasoning, it is the way that the Union
operates in practice (its “interference”) that hinders any workable efforts against terrorist
activity. As another UKIP MEP noted in opposing common EU asylum standards: “The situation
with Syria is particularly complex, but is not by the helped European Union’s naïve and
misguided approach. I had no option but to vote against this resolution, which will in my view
prove to be counterproductive” (Arnott 2015). According to this narrative, the EU is not an
alternate vision of the future at odds with the time-tested institutions of national democracy. It is,
rather, a Cold War era fantasy, a backward-looking approach unable to cope with contemporary
threats like transnational terrorism. In this vein, Farage (2015a) has referred to the British EU
referendum as a “the first time in many decades that there will be a fundamental debate on the
existence of this Union and the need for it in the modern world” (emphasis added).
12
This narrative is reinforced by more specific complaints about EU policy from UKIP
MEPs. For example, about the difficulty in tracking migrants for security purposes—“you do not
know who has come in, you do not know who they are and you do not know they get here”
(Woolfe 2016). Or about external border control, according to Diane James’s 2016 claim:
“Schengen and Frontex are clearly unable to withstand or cope with this enormous migrant
pressure. Reactive European Union policy-making is just not working.” Public concern about the
crisis (well-founded or not) has essentially allowed the party to turn its traditional discourse on
its head. Rather than promising a tyrannical future where Europe usurps traditional sovereign
prerogatives, they allege a farcical present where EU agencies are unable to fulfill the basic
functions for which they were created. In CDA terms this is a shift from primarily deontic to
strong epistemic modalities (“clearly unable”), identifying the party with level-headed expertise
contra the naiveté of Europhiles. In less charitable terms we might see this as a long-term sleight
of hand, where the overbearing EU monster constructed in earlier UKIP rhetoric is revealed by
those selfsame orators as nothing but a paper tiger.
Front National Before and Since the Refugee Crisis
France’s FN is one of them most controversial and enduring radical-right parties in
Western Europe, most famously disrupting French politics and attracting worldwide attention
when then-leader Jean-Marie Le Pen bested the Socialist candidate and reached the Presidential
run-off in 2002. Though that peak heralded the beginning of a decline in popularity for the party,
it has recently become resurgent under the leadership of Le Pen’s daughter Marine. The FN of
Marine Le Pen has established itself as a key player in the contemporary wave of antiestablishment parties in the European Parliament, on the strength of a resounding first place
13
showing in the 2015 EP elections in France.3 Though the party’s far-right reputation has made
formal cooperation with other parties difficult—including a public spat between Le Pen and
UKIP’s Farage (Owen 2014)—it is an important party to consider in this analysis because of its
recent success (in one of the EU’s largest members) and its historical role as a paragon of rightwing populism.
Indeed, in the literature on the radical right, the FN was always a subject of particular
attention; Mudde calls it the “most famous” such party and notes that it is “considered the
prototype by various scholars” (2007: 41, citing Davies 1999 and Simmons 1996). As this
language makes clear, the party as it existed under the leadership of Jean-Marie Le Pen was an
archetypal populist party according to Mudde’s understanding (discussed above). Recent
analyses of the party under Marine Le Pen, however, suggest its resurgence has been
accompanied by a shift in its political claims. For example, Startin (2014) shows that, among
other strategies, the party has had increasing success tapping into the Gaullist legacy in France to
build up its own legitimacy. Without delving into the literature on that concept, it is clear enough
that Gaullism is not a populist ideology, and indeed was distinctly nationalist in its troubled
relationship to the European project.4 This discourse accompanies a general move by the FN to
integrate itself more into the French party system, while still retaining its oppositional policies
(Shields 2014). One scholar, expressing the wide-sweep of this change and its success in
attracting more young and female voters, calls it a “Marinisation” of the party and consequently
of French politics (Stadelmann 2014).
3
The FN, received 24.85% of the votes cast only 20.80% for the center-right UMP and only 13.98% for the
governing Socialist Party (European Parliament 2014).
4
There is an obvious parallel here with UKIP’s desire (basically from its earliest days) to associate itself with
Thatcherism.
14
In other words, this literature suggests that the FN is moving away from its “prototypical”
populist right-wing alignment, and possibly toward the nationalist pole as I have defined it
(especially if the party continues to appropriate the trappings of Gaullism). Turning then to
evidence from recent EP debates, the following remarks from an FN MEP on the 2015 EU
budget are illustrative:
The vote on the 2015 budget showed again the exorbitant amount of unfunded liabilities,
which are a form of debt to the Union. Taken together, they represent almost 30 billion
euros in unpaid bills end of 2014 and about €220 billion of commitment authorizations
not covered by payments. Therefore, what is the legitimacy of the Commission, which
commits these monthly sanction procedures for excessive deficits against France and
Italy, as she gathers herself these debts? That is the credibility of Mr. Juncker, who
announced a multi-year program to invest an additional €300 billion, without specifying
how it will be funded? Ultimately, it is still the Member States who will be involved,
unless a European tax is founded…European leaders will find its justification.
(Monot 2014; emphasis added)
Most notable here is the particular focus on the relationship between the EU and the member
states, as in the italicized passages. Despite invoking sensitive issues of taxation and spending,
there are no references (directly or indirectly) to the people, as we would expect from a populist
Euroskeptic claim. Instead, as we would expect from a nationalist Euroskeptic claim, the basic
argument is that the member states have a legitimate right to organize their economies (including
running deficits), and that it is the supranational authority which exceeds its ambit when it
sanctions their fiscal decisions and aims to usurp their monopoly on taxation. Again, the same
Euroskeptic attack on the EU budget could be made in other ways, but the fact that it takes a
nationalist form here is relevant. Of course, I do not claim that this is completely representative
of FN discourse, or empirical proof that “Marinisation” is happening, 5 but I do suggest that it
keenly illustrates the analysis of claims-making in terms of these ideal-types.
5
In a related economic debate, a different FN MEP made a clear (if not especially radical) populist claim in
complaining that “even as people undergo an economic crisis that never ends , this report proposes nothing less than
to continue the policy of austerity which we can only see harm” (Bilde 2015).
15
But since the onset of the refugee crisis, and particularly since the 13 November 2015
attacks in Paris, the FN appears to be following UKIP toward a narrative that the EU is no longer
capable of dealing with Europe’s most serious problems. Concluding a lengthy statement about
the attacks in an EP plenary debate two weeks later, Le Pen claimed:
Since 13 November, the French state of mind [l'état d'esprit des Français] has changed.
The European institutions must understand that, for us, nothing will ever be the same as
before. The migration folly, the hatred of borders, the “austerity” obsession, the poor
choice in matters of international alliances have become hazards recognized clearly by
the French. A growing minority share our views on these topics. There is no doubt that
the view from now on is overwhelmingly clear. We have not ceased to denounce these
dangers in order to defend the security of the French people in the face of what I consider
criminal actions by the European institutions.
(Le Pen 2015)
The force of these comments, and their placement at the end of her speech, is striking. Though
long associated with hard-right Islamaphobic and xenophobic positions, the FN is targeting its
rage not at Muslims or outsiders but at the European institutions themselves—the enemy within.
Drawing from the well-known commonplaces of contemporary terrorism discourse (“nothing
will ever be the same”), Le Pen is able to construct an even more forceful version of Farage’s
suggestion that the EU may not be useful in the modern world. And the “criminal actions” of
which the EU stands accused are not about its overextension in principle but about its practical
failure in the fundamental task of protecting Europeans. Indeed, she might have said criminally
insane, for the way that her description of the EU’s failures (“folly,” “hatred,” “obsession”)
suggests a pathology on the part of EU elites. In essence, they do not see the world clearly and in
failing to do so have the put the member states in danger. So while there is certainly a nationalist
cast to this discourse and its focus on the French, the overall identity being reinforced is
Eursceptics as clear-eyed experts diagnosing the fatal European condition.
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Conclusion: Continuity and Change
So what have we learned from this initial review of recent Eurosceptic rhetoric? The
change, it is fair to say, has been subtle. From a policy perspective, UKIP and the FN have not
shifted their positions; they remain opposed to the European project and in particular to the
principle of free movement of people. By itself this is notable, because it is possible to imagine a
different path: Right-wing parties more concerned with protecting “national security” or
“European identity” might have chosen to put aside some concerns about European integration if
it meant strong external border controls and security cooperation. Such an approach might have
aligned the parties more closely with Central and Eastern European leaders and drawn new
political battle lines in the EP. But for various reasons, it is clear now that this was not the path
taken (at least by these parties; see below).
However, these findings are also important for what they say about the way that
Eurosceptic claims are being made—most notably the shift from an emphasis on democratic
(il)legitimacy to an emphasis on the practical failures of the EU. One of the most important
activities of political parties is to use their public status to narrate political events in a way that
shapes political competition in their favor (what I have elsewhere called “discursive
heresthetics;” Dye 2015). In this process, epistemic claims (and the associated identify of
“politician-as-expert;” Fairclough 2003) tend to be much more effective than normative claims,
principally because they are more difficult to directly challenge: Detailed empirical discussion is
difficult in the context of political debate, particularly when the logical basis for the initial claim
is often elided (relying instead on a “logic of appearances” linking it indistinctly with concrete
events). This discursive strategy is almost transparent in some of the UKIP rhetoric; what use are
high-minded defenses of the principle of open borders if in reality it has led to the “free
17
movement of Kaleshnikovs,” as Farage claimed? In essence, this is an adoption of the strategy
used by others in Europe to defend austerity against the claim that it was undemocratic. In both
cases, an external imperative is invoked to override any normative opposition, and those who do
not accept it are delegitimized as “naïve,” “idealistic,” etc. As the global financial crisis was for
economic reformers, so the refugee crisis has proven to be for Eurosceptics (albeit that the latter
do not at present hold any levers of power).
Moving forward, it will be necessary to deepen this research in order to more
systematically establish changes in rhetoric across time. The normative, “democratic
accountability” critique of EU border policy was likely connected to the way that Eurosceptics
were using that argument against ECB-mandated austerity. It will be important to see whether
current UKIP and FN discourse on economic issues has changed to fit their current “line” on
migration. This would help us to understand the degree to which rhetorical strategies are issuespecific or unified around a common part identity, which would in turn help us know how future
events will shape political debate. It will also be important to broaden this work to other parties,
even just within the broad “Eurosceptic” umbrella. For example, the Five Star Movement in Italy
(a new party associated with comedian Beppe Grillo) is an interesting case. It is UKIP’s de facto
partner in the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group in the EP, but comes from a less
hard-right and less vehemently Eurosceptic tradition. It was one of the “strange bedfellows”
created by the linkage between Eurosceptic and anti-austerity movements. Five Star may be
more open to coordinated EU action to support Italian border control, in which case it will be
instructive to see whether and how they rhetorically connect that issue with their opposition to
what they see as undemocratic European mandates.
18
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