CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Dunne, James Michael |
|---|---|
| Title | A 'new voice in the land'? The EU and its Nationalist Challengers in Comparative Perspective |
| Summary | This project departs from the recognition that political nationalism has been and remains a critical explanatory variable in the process of European (dis)integration; the observation that nationalism has frequently been elided in studies of political opposition to European integration; and a hunch that incorporating insights from classical accounts of nationalism into debates on the EU’s recent crises may shed light on the prospects for further integration, or indeed disintegration. This approach, by inviting a comparison between the EU’s encounter with nationalist opposition and that of other polities, also focuses renewed attention on how the contemporary EU is best conceptualised, and on whether it is now better understood as a form of state than in earlier stages of the integration project. Informed by John Breuilly’s typology of nationalist opposition movements and his understanding of nationalism as a political phenomenon that arises in the context of the modern state, the core of this project is a comparative study of the encounters between nationalist challengers and the state in, respectively, Scotland and the United Kingdom, Quebec and Canada, and Flanders and Belgium. On the basis of an inductive analysis of these case studies, insights are applied to the EU case. This comparative analysis is intended as a heuristic device, and claims made on the basis of its conceptualisation of the EU - as a federal-type polity - are likely to be weak. This project finds that the roots of national projects remain salient for extremely long periods, that the politics of nationalist opposition in federal-type polities are messy, protracted, and inconclusive, and that while a search for a finalité politique is therefore likely to be in vain, nationalist opposition can also become an entrenched feature of federal politics without having a disintegrative impact on the federal polity. It finds that the windows of opportunity that enable nationalist projects to succeed in secession can be fleeting, and that federal-type polities can demonstrate significant resilience and constitutional creativity. It concludes that pro-integration actors in the contemporary EU may have an opportunity to constructively engage with nationalist opposition and recognise it as representing a legitimate strand of public opinion. Doing so may strengthen the EU through narrowing its legitimacy gap. |
| Supervisor | Fetzer, Thomas |
| Department | International Relations PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/dunne_james.pdf |
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