In his provocative book, Adrian Favell advocates a grand normative theory for migration scholarship. He aims to debunk research focussing on “integration” and the liberal nation-state. He constructs a lumpen “mainstream” straw man of scholarship that remains wedded to an outdated container model of the nation-state–a feature he argues is effectively apologist for colonialism and empire. Against this, he advocates a theory of society based on postnational borderless, human rights and free movement, that draws its conviction from decolonizing, critical race perspectives on the liberal nation-state and global (racial) inequalities. In my view, the historical evolution of knowledge production on “integration” perspectives is more engaged, diverse, critical, imaginative and socially relevant than this binary master-narrative critique could present. Ultimately, I remain to be convinced whether his prognosis offers a viable way forward, as a scholarly statement, or for migrants in the social world. Readers should decide for themselves.

Partnerships between Thai women and western men, often much older, are an increasingly common sight in cities across North America, Europe, and Australia. An alien sociologist landing at the massive gateway to the Suvarnabhumi Bangkok International Airport could easily deduce this as the most common type of family structure. While Thai-westerner relationships are remarkably prevalent, women in them are subject to stigmatizing stereotypes in Thailand and the West. Mia farang has the connation of a gold-digging prostitute in Thailand, while Thai women from all walks of life face similar sexualized discrimination in the West. An article of mine on women’s experiences was greeted on social media by a western man posting a picture of a Thai woman with an ATM machine superimposed over her body, backed by approving vindictive comments by others. My surprise was they bothered to read it at all. Love, Money and Obligation: Transnational Marriage in a Northeastern Thai Village, by Patcharin Lapanun, sets out to confront the idea that these relationships are just about money.

This article studies the hidden world of extraterritorial liaison officers, mid-level civil servants posted abroad whose agency influences UK visa implementation within a global framework. Specifically, we unpack their influential role in translating vague policy objectives into specific institutional justifications, norms, and practices, which bureaucrats apply when implementing visa decisions on location. ‘Risk’ knowledge production is crucial: they mobilise, broker and communicate so-called ‘immigration risks’ applied to specific foreign nationals across institutional levels and national boundaries. Liaison officers are intermediaries, ‘risk’ brokers, who: (a) interpret (and feedback on) the Home Office’s supposedly objective central ‘risk’ assessments; (b) construct ‘risk’ assessments based on local knowledge and intelligence to guide and legitimate street-level bureaucrats’ (consulate, airline) decisions; and (c) co-operate to a surprisingly high degree over ‘risk’ assessments with peers in Global North multi-state frameworks. Importantly, their interventions for the UK state effectively reinforces an unequal North–South global mobility regime. To examine how ally and target states are treated differently, we compare across France, USA, Thailand, Ghana, and Egypt. High state secrecy makes studying liaison officers difficult. Our original research applies document analysis of public policy statements, interventions via freedom of information requests, and interviews with twenty mid-level operational officers.

This article studies life-trajectories of a specific generation of Kathoey and gay men, born into rural poverty in Northeastern Isaan 30–50 years ago, based on biographical accounts. Subjects are male-to-female transgender Kathoey and cisgendered (masculine-identified or gender-normative) gay men. A ‘sustainable nonheteronormative life’ is one providing sufficient resources of recognition for validating gender identity (Kathoey) or sexuality (gay men), and wealth to be economically viable. How did they strive to make spaces for nonheteronormative living when confronted by ‘blocked’ social opportunities of double discrimination based on transphobia (Kathoey) and homophobia (gay men), and class/status? The research unpacks which strong barriers of discrimination confronted them at distinct life-stages, and their agency and strategies to challenge these. Family, work and place are investigated as core social factors influentially defining a person’s positioning and life-chances, while shaping their pathway through social space over time. The empirical study reconstructs subjects’ lived experiences in distinct life-stages: village childhood; early postmigration city experiences; building lives in tourist-zone scenes; and reaching back ‘home’. The main finding is that tourist-zone scenes present new social opportunities that enable a few to transform their social and geographical displacement away from mainstream heteronormative society into an asset and achieve ‘success’. Tourist-zones transgress dominant (hetero)norms and values, but provide social infrastructures, communities and countercultural norms that support specific forms of nonheteronormative living, albeit dependent on foreign men. By migrating to tourist-zones, subjects stepped out of mainstream society, but over time drew on resources to build new social pathways towards living nonheteronormatively.

This article studies a specific form of transnational living that results from Thai–Western cross‐border marriage migration: Thai women's experiences of intercultural partnerships with a Western man. The study is explicitly from a Thai female partner's perspective. It unpacks women's experiences and perceptions of living this life from their own accounts. We refer to their experiences and perceptions of living this form of transnational life as unintended transnationalism, that is, that living a life defined by dependent gendered intercultural exchanges with a foreign man was a by‐product, not an aspiration of her strategy for a better life. Living ‘unintended transnationalism’ refers to how women negotiate the specific high challenges and sociocultural pressures arising from dependency on a foreign man, who largely decides where, when and how you live. Women face strong acculturation pressures to adapt to their husbands' Western cultural needs, on his terms, even when they share a home in Thailand—a process we define as imported assimilationism. The study shows how her experiences of transnational living are importantly shaped by her: access to rights, cultural differences with her partner, and positioning in social space and place in Thailand, over this life journey. It draws from 20 biographical interviews with women in partnerships (between 7 and 30 years) with Westerners, currently resident in Thailand. Overall, we find that living ‘unintended transnationalism’ is a challenging life, even for women who make significant material gains. It can lead to isolation, dissociation from family, and dissimilation from belonging in Thailand.

Extraterritorial migration management perspectives on how states try to enforce immigration controls beyond their juridical borders are strongly influenced by ‘remote control’ metaphors. This is conceptually limited and outdated. Most research fails to sufficiently acknowledge agency by a destination state's officials acting abroad, foreign states and their officials, when evaluating extraterritorial measures and ‘outcomes’. We study UK liaison officers abroad, specifically, how they see their efforts to implement extraterritorial immigration control through interactions with foreign state officials. Our approach links inter-state relations to the social world of on-the-ground ‘street-level’ interactions between officers abroad and their foreign counterparts. The empirical analysis draws from original interviews and official sources. We compare factors accounting for the UK's activities and perceived ‘outcomes’ across USA, France, Thailand, Egypt and Ghana. Findings show the UK's extraterritorial migration management results from a very long chain of decisions and actions, by foreign and UK state actors, operating at different institutional-levels, with uncontrollable local circumstances abroad. Realising extraterritorial goals depends strongly on liaison officers’ agency, ‘soft power’ over foreign officials and foreign officials’ willingness to cooperate. Meanwhile liaison officers’ ‘feedbacks’ importantly influence Home Office decision-making. Against the simplistic one-way causality of ‘remote control’, this is ‘street-level’ agency beyond ‘remote control’.

This article explains why significant Thai-Western ‘both-ways’ migration pathways have evolved, grown and sustained over the last decades. It introduces a set of research contributions on transnational social relationships and cross-border connections between people that arise from the increasingly large-scale mobilities and migrations between Thailand and ‘the West’ – countries from Europe, North America and Australia. While Thai and Western people’s social relationships are usually studied as personal stories within a cross-border marriage migration perspective, we consider it necessary to see them as more than marriage migration. Specifically, we argue that the growing ‘both-ways’ Thai-Western migration pathways can only be understood by reference to three features of globalisation processes specific to Thailand: first, cross-border connections and social networks generated by massive West-to-Thailand tourist mobilities that incentivise Western men to see living permanently with a Thai partner as ‘realistic’; second, the radical transformations of Thai rural societies under conditions of economic development that produces ‘surplus’ mobile women; and third, the restrictive state immigration and citizenship regimes in the West and Thailand that leaves few pathways open for migration, other than by ‘marriage’. In sum, Thailand’s specific experience of globalisation is the explanatory backstory to the extraordinary prevalence of Thai-Western ‘both-ways’ migrations.

This article examines how relationships between Thai women and older Western men transform over the long-term, from a woman’s perspective. We present a model that identifies stages in the life-cycle or ‘narrative arc’ of a long-term partnership. This framework allows us to study how negotiated exchanges (material, emotional) between the couple evolve in ‘stages’ over time, and the degree to which a woman is empowered from her initial position of relative subservient dependency. We examine three factors that shape her relative autonomy in a partnership in ways that can result in greater security, wellbeing, and status. First, increasing access to individual formal rights (primarily through marriage) can lead to relative financial independence and security. Second, differential ageing in a couple can shift the balance of dependency as he becomes relatively infirm. Third, her changing obligations to natal family members, balanced with caring for her partner, can importantly shape her wellbeing. The study is based on 20 biographical interviews with women in partnerships for 7–30 years. We find that almost every aspect of a woman’s life transforms radically. Most consider it a worthwhile life-strategy, but many suffer hidden psychological costs as a result of living this ‘unintended transnationalism’ over the long-term.

The study of migration has transformed and expanded massively, especially over the last 30 years, as issues of migration have moved from the relative margins to the core of politics and global societal change. This is not to say that migration and ethnic relations are more important today than before, but issues about movement, mobility, and the increasing cultural, ethnic and religious diversity this brings, are seen as important challenges to states, legal systems, international relations, and how people live with one another. Migration as a topic has become an important interpretive lens through which societies and people understand the core changes that we experience as a consequence of the increasing globalization processes that shape the contemporary world. This can be ‘for good’, for example, in public mobilizations to support refugees and people displaced from their homes by international conflicts, or ‘for bad’ in the reactionary populist politics that attempts to justify anti-immigration policies by stigmatizing groups on religious, ethnic or racial grounds, such as ‘Muslim bans’ and ‘Building walls’. Here is not the place to unpack these complex developments nor explain the role of migration as a driver and outcome of globalization processes. None the less, it is important to flag up the moving target that our research is trying to understand, because this informs our approaches to teaching migration, and shapes the range of perspectives and topics that we select and group together under the label ‘migration studies’ at a particular historical moment. It is important to ask where migration should rightly sit within teaching programmes today. How can we adapt to keep pace with advancing understanding of the world developments that drive, and are driven by, migration, on one side, and the institutional changes within the university sector that delivers teaching and learning, on the other?to understand, because this informs our approaches to teaching migration, and shapes the range of perspectives and topics that we select and group together under the label ‘migration studies’ at a particular historical moment. It is important to ask where migration should rightly sit within teaching programmes today. How can we adapt to keep pace with advancing understanding of the world developments that drive, and are driven by, migration, on one side, and the institutional changes within the university sector that delivers teaching and learning, on the other?

In "Strangers No More" Richard Alba and Nancy Foner present the most comprehensive cross-national comparative study of migrant integration to date. Their achievement is significant with a remarkable depth and coverage of integration fields and scope, covering the four major northern European countries and the US and Canada. This review assesses their contribution to the discipline by setting a cross-national comparative agenda for research on migrants' 'integration' to their societies of settlement that covers Europe and North America.

This chapter examines the strength of “symbolic barriers” between majorities and Muslims of immigrant origin over the accommodation of Islam as a minority religion in their European countries of settlement. The study uses original survey data on public attitudes towards religious rights in schooling in four countries with distinct church-state relations and minority policies: Britain, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. We find highly significant “barriers” over religious rights for Muslims in all countries, notwithstanding the different degrees to which they institutionally accommodate Islam. In addition, the strength of majority opposition towards including Islam, compared to Christianity, is especially striking. Conversely, Muslims tend to favour an extension of rights for both religions to the same degree. Although European societies are broadly secular, we conclude that resistant majority views matter a great deal in creating a large socio-cultural distance between majorities and Muslims over accommodating Islam. This is especially the case in Britain, even though the state has been relatively accommodating to Islam. We think the existence of enduring strong “barriers” demarcating Muslims from the rest of society in the public imagination will importantly impact on the chances of the second generation to be full members of society, independently from socio-economic factors.

The article critically evaluates existing theories and approaches on European Union (EU) politicization to understand how the EU's democratic politics can potentially work in an era of `mediated politics'. Moving beyond questions of why politicization has occurred, and what kind of EU will it lead to, we outline a theoretical perspective on the mechanisms of how the EU's politicization is taking place. Against the backdrop of a post-functionalist theory of integration, the contours of which have been recently discussed within political science, we think that the dynamics of EU politicization can be better grasped from a public sphere perspective within the framework of what we will call a `democratic functionalism' approach. The Eurozone debt crisis case is used as an example of deep and broad EU politicization to explicate the mechanisms at work.

Islam has become the key site for demarcating boundaries between majority populations and individuals of immigrant origin across Europe. This article outlines a research agenda on the socio-cultural integration of Muslims in their Western European societies of settlement. Integration issues with regard to Muslims have especially tended to focus on cultural and religious aspects. This raises questions. First, does culture/religion matter in shaping Muslims' relative disadvantage in the socio-economic domain? Alternatively, does Muslim social disadvantage result from majority society's discrimination and bias against religious/cultural difference? Second, religious and cultural difference seems to matter in its own right. Do Muslims identify with their countries of settlement and accept the core liberal democratic values and norms? Or do persistent socio-cultural "gaps" between Muslims and non-Muslims result from intolerance by the majority population? The article outlines a theoretical approach and empirical research programme. The framework is cross-national comparative, including France, Germany, Britain, Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland. The main data source is a survey that includes four groups of Muslims from distinct countries of origin (Turks, Moroccans, former-Yugoslavians, and Pakistanis) plus a majority sample, which facilitates cross-group, cross-national comparison. This introduction concludes by introducing contributions that address a specific question embedded within the overall framework.

Taking four countries—Britain, the Netherlands, France and Germany—with distinct state approaches and public debates over accommodating Muslims, we study the views of ordinary people from the majority and Muslim populations on Muslim group rights. We compare their responses to questions on mosque-building, teachers wearing religious symbols, and religious classes in schools, to determine whether there is a significant ‘gap’ between the majority and Muslim minorities. We find highly significant ‘gaps’ between the majorities and Muslims over Muslim group rights in all countries, with the majorities less supportive. Importantly, it is a shift by the majority population against Muslim group rights that produces this ‘gap’ as the question moves from provision for Christians to Muslims, while Muslims hold similar views over rights for Christians and their own religion. In Britain and Germany, the two countries where church/state relations privilege Christianity over other religions, majorities especially support Christian over Muslim group rights. The British findings are remarkable, because a country which substantially grants and has the most supportive public debate for Muslim group rights, produces the largest ‘gaps’ between its majority and Muslims. We think this is due to political context, where in contrast to the Netherlands, there is no outlet for political opposition to Muslim group rights.

This book investigates an important source of the European Union's recent legitimacy problems. It shows how European integration is debated in mass media, and how this affects democratic inclusiveness. Advancing integration implies a shift in power between governments, parliaments, and civil society. Behind debates over Europe's 'democratic deficit' is a deeper concern: whether democratic politics can perform effectively under conditions of Europeanization and globalization. This study is based on a wealth of unique data from seven European countries, combining newspaper content analyses, an innovative study of Internet communication structures, and hundreds of interviews with leading political and media representatives across Europe. It is by far the most far-reaching and empirically grounded study on the Europeanization of media discourse and political contention to date, and a must-read for anyone interested in how European integration changes democratic politics and why European integration has become increasingly contested.

This article documents the methodological steps taken to use news analysis as a ‘tool’ for retrieving systematic information on political events to be used in the interpretation of findings from surveys on public opinion. The approach uses the selection function of mass media in producing ‘news’ as a proxy to identify the ‘political climate’ of a specific country at a specific time. This information on ‘political climate’ can be used to control whether ‘exceptional’ political events occurred during the period of fieldwork for surveys on public opinion that may have unduly biased the findings. Such a tool is especially useful for cross-national comparative survey research that is also longitudinal and the project described here was conducted within the framework of the European Social Survey (ESS). The specific news analysis method used to develop the tool draws inspiration from ‘claims-making analysis’.

This article takes the European Union's constitution-making as a case study to examine 'how' politicization can emerge through contestation by political actors in response to political opportunities. It advances understanding of the conditions and processes through which politicization emerges by undertaking empirical analysis. The primary data source is an original sample of political actors' claims-making over European integration issues retrieved from news samples in France, Germany and Britain during the constitution event (2000-05). Main tenets of prominent theories on politicization are unpacked and tested in relation to the evidence from the claims-making analysis. The findings demonstrate the transformative impact of the French referendum as a specific opportunity: politicization was largely restricted to internal national contestation by French actors; political party competition was the prominent contestation form; and the Socialists mobilized against the constitution by advocating 'Social Europe'. This transformed the political space by introducing competition over Europe into the party system's core.

This article uses a political opportunity approach to study the relationship of minority groups to the political community in Britain. The main argument is that the
British race relations approach established in the 1960s had an important effect that still shapes the patterns of political contention by different minority groups today. Original data on political claims-making by minorities demonstrate that British 'racialised' cultural pluralism has structured an inequality of opportunities for the two main groups, African-Caribbeans and Indian subcontinent minorities. African-Caribbeans mobilise along racial lines, use a strongly assimilative 'black' identity, conventional action forms, and target state institutions with demands for justice that are framed within the recognised framework of race relations. Conversely, a high proportion of the Indian subcontinent minority mobilisation is by Muslim groups, a non-assimilative religious identity. These are autonomously organised, but largely make public demands for extending the principle of racial equality to their non-racial group. Within the Indian subcontinent minorities, the relative absence of mobilisation by Indian, Sikh and Hindu minorities, who have achieved much better levels of socio-economic success than Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims, suggests that there is also a strong socioeconomic basis for shared experiences and grievances as Muslims in Britain. This relativises the notion that Muslim mobilisation is Britain is purely an expression of the right for cultural difference per se, and sees it as a product of the paradoxes of British race relations.

As important aspects of purported tendencies toward globalization and pluralization, recent immigration waves and the resulting presence of culturally different ethnic minorities are often seen as fundamentally challenging liberal nation-states and traditional models of citizenship. According to this perspective, migrants and ethnic minorities contribute through their claims making both to the external erosion of sovereignty (the postnational challenge), and to the internal cultural differentiation of liberal nation-states (the multicultural
challenge). In contrast, alternative theoretical approaches have emphasized the continuing relevance of the nation-state in the processes of inclusion and exclusion of minorities. From these three perspectives on citizenship (postnational, multicultural, and national) a set of hypotheses is derived and tested with data on the collective claims making of migrants and ethnic minorities in two European countries, Britain and Germany, for the period 1990–95. The data show very little support for the postnational approach, mixed results regarding the multicultural model, and strong support for the continuing
relevance of national models of citizenship. Counter to claims that national modes of migrant incorporation have become insignificant, the evidence shows that migrant claims making is still forged in the image of a particular nation-state.

This article undertakes an analysis of British public debates on European integration by recourse to an original data set on political claims-making. The public sphere is conceptualized as a space where citizens interact through their acts of public communication. Such public communications are an important source of the Europe-building process, because they potentially provide public inputs to the elite-led processes of European political institutional integration. Our empirical findings show that British public debates are internalized within the nation-state rather than creating links to supra- or transnational European polities. In addition, we find relatively low levels of civil society engagement compared to that of political elites, and a high level of political competition between the two major political parties, Labour and Conservative. Overall, we argue that elite ambivalence to Britain’s position within the European Union has created this climate of uncertainty and political competition over Europe.

Questions of media performance seem to be inherently linked to any proposed solutions to Europe’s perceived ‘democratic deficit’. This article addresses a specific part of this story: the attempts by journalists from the national press to commentate politically on European affairs, and their selfperceptions about the opportunities and constraints facing them. The article’s main enquiry is whether commentating on Europe is different from commentating on national affairs. A model was constructed to assess types of political advocacy. The empirical study is based on interviews with a sample of journalists with four different roles, and from four different types of newspaper, from seven European countries. The main finding is that to the extent that they take on an advocacy role at all with regard to Europe, journalists see themselves as adopting an educational mode of raising public awareness, more than a political ‘partisan’ or ‘ideological campaign’ mode. Such findings are then discussed in relation to the broader issue of media performance over Europe.

This empirical study addresses the question of the emergent adaptation processes of the pro-migrant NGO sector in Britain in response to the advancing Europeanization of immigration policy. Our findings show European-level engagement by some key pioneer non-governmental organizations (NGOs), who have importantly built pathways and linkages to politics beyond the nation-state, as well as participating in the European arena through interaction within a new transnational organization, the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE). Influence at the European level remains limited, however, largely due to the continued dominance of the restrictive nation-state policy imperatives.

Different European nation-states use the most diverse statistical constructions of foreign origin or ethnic minority populations. Several countries traditionally even shun from producing such data. This makes international comparison a very difficult endeavour. Anyone wanting to perform comparativeresearch on immigrants or (immigrant origin) ethnic minorities in Europe is unavoidably confronted with the most diverse types of national statistical data and has to opt for ad hoc solutions. Attempts at international comparison can thus be very tricky due to data characteristics. It is important that researchers are aware of these problems and do not simply accept data (especially in comparisons) at face value. In this article we embark on a comparative explorative study of the way in which immigrant background and immigration related ethnicity is taken stock of by national statistical institutes in a set of European nation-states.

This article investigates multiculturalism by examining the relationship between migrants’ group demands and liberal states’ policies for politically accommodating cultural and religious difference. It focuses especially on Islam. The empirical research compares migrants’ claims-making for group demands in countries with different traditions for granting recognition to migrants’ cultural difference – Britain, France and the Netherlands. Overall, we find very modest levels of group demands indicating that the challenge of group demands to liberal democracies is quantitatively less than the impression given by much multicultural literature. Group demands turn out to be significant only for Muslims, which holds across different countries. Qualitative analysis reveals problematic relationships between Islam and the state, in the overtly multicultural Dutch approach, within British race relations, and French civic universalism. This implies that there is no easy blueprint for politically accommodating Islam, whose public and religious nature makes it especially resilient to political adaptation.

This article examines the role of the ‘organised public’, collective action by interest groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), in British immigration politics. The impact of the ‘organised public’ on policy outcomes has been a subject for theoretical speculation, especially by Gary Freeman. Here the authors test some of Freeman’s assumptions regarding what political mechanisms could account for what he sees as a persistent ‘gap’ between expansionist policies and restrictive public opinion through recourse to original empirical evidence. Their findings largely go against Freeman’s predictions. Immigration is an elite-led highly institutionalised field with a relatively weak level of civil society engagement. Elites dominate the field and hold a decisively restrictionist stance. This points toward an explanation where the direction of immigration policies is not an outcome of an organised pro-migrant lobby winning over a resource-weak diffuse anti-migrant lobby, as Freeman suggests, but determined in a relatively autonomous way by political elites.

This article examines the Muslim organizational field in Britain based on interviews with activists. It applies a political opportunity perspective to address the degree to which organizations’ aims and activities have been shaped by the contextual factors confronting them, or more independently, by ‘bottom-up’ beliefs and commitments drawn from their relationships to the community. Specifically, the empirical part examines, first, how activists perceive media representation as an opportunity or constraint, and second, how their organizations have constructed collective identities in order to advance their aims within the UK context. Generally, we find that organizations have come together using under a broad ascriptive ‘Muslim’ label that works across denominational, national and ethnic differences. Not only is this orientation a direct response to the pressures of community cohesion policies and discourses but it also has a strong independent and faith-based component in serving the community and its social needs. The resultant Muslim organizational field is strongly acculturative to UK society, but remains critically independent of governing authorities. Finally, organizations have responded to what they see as poor media representation of Muslims by proactively engaging in media work.

This article addresses `media performance' and European governance. It examines how newspaper journalists view different aspects of their practices and roles in this process. First, the study provides a general picture of how journalism has responded to the transformation of politics resulting from advancing European integration. Second, it examines whether, based on journalists' assessments, this has involved a transformation of the practices and norms of journalism. The sample consists of 110 interviews with journalists from newspapers in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland, plus four transnationals. We find a limited but emergent `Europeanization' of journalism, carried by transnational newspapers serving specialist audiences and to a limited extent by European correspondents on the national press. Regarding `performance', we consider that journalists would be able to adapt and `Europeanize' to a greater extent if politicians improved their own communication efforts and made European governance more relevant to citizens.

This study examines political party contestation over Europe, its relationship to the left/right cleavage, and the nature and emergence of Euroscepticism. The analysis is based on a large original sample of parties’ claims systematically drawn from political discourses in the mass media in seven countries: Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. It addresses questions concerning parties’ mobilized criticisms of European integration and the European Union (EU), specifically: their degree and form; their location among party families and within party systems; cross-national and diachronic trends; their substantive issue contents; whether their ‘Euro-criticism’ is more tactical or ideological; whether claims construct a cleavage; and their potential for transforming party politics. Findings show that a party’s country of origin has little explanatory power, once differences between compositions of party systems are accounted for. Also governing parties are significantly more likely to be pro-European, regardless of party-type. Regional party representatives, by contrast, are significantly more likely to be ‘Euro-critical’. Overall, we find a lop-sided ‘inverted U’ on the right of the political spectrum, but this is generated entirely by the significant, committed Euroscepticism of the British Conservatives and Schweizerische Volkspartei. There is relatively little evidence for Euroscepticism elsewhere at the core, where pro-Europeanism persists. Finally, parties’ Euro-criticism from the periphery mostly constructs substantive political and economic critiques of European integration and the EU, and is not reducible to strategic anti-systemic challenges.

This book examines how mass media debates have contributed to the politicization of the European Union. The public controversies over the EU’s attempted Constitution-making (and its failure) sowed the seeds for a process of politicization that has advanced ever since: an increasing visibility for the EU in mass-mediated public debates that is combined with a growing public contestation over Europe within national politics. The book presents an original systematic study of the emerging field of political discourse carried by the mass media in France, Germany and Britain to examine the performance of Europe’s public sphere. Whilst the EU’s increasing politicization can be seen as beneficial to European democracy, potentially ‘normalizing’ the EU-level within national politics, the same developments can also be a threat to democracy, leading to populist and xenophobic responses and a decline in political trust. Such discussions are key to understanding the EU’s legitimacy and how its democratic politics can work in an era of mediated politics.

The Politicization of Europe will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, media studies, communication, sociology and European studies.