Swen Hutter, Edgar Grande and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds.), Politicising Europe: Integration and Mass Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1-107-12941-2 (hbk), 340 pages (original) (raw)

While the European Union has recently celebrated 60 years since its founding treaty was signed in Rome on March 25 1957, the European project seems to have entered a critical stage. Brexit is only the most recent development in a series of political controversies that reflect the challenges and problems the European integration process has faced since the mid 2000s when the Constitutional Treaty was rejected in two national referendums in France and the Netherlands. Political conflict over European integration became even more evident in the aftermath of the economic crisis. The rise of EU contestation is indicated by increasing levels of Euroscepticism among citizens, relatively favorable outcomes of Eurosceptic parties in national and European elections, public controversies on political strategies designed to cope with the euro crisis and more recently to deal with the refugees’ crisis. All these developments seem to suggest an increasing split between citizens and the elites that have led the European integration process since the beginning (Tătar, 2010). Against this background, the book edited by Swen Hutter, Edgar Grande and Hanspeter Kriesi assumes that a focus on the “politicization of Europe, both as an analytical concept and a political strategy is key to an understanding of the acute problems that the European integration project faces today” (p. xvi). The book is the result of a long-term collaborative research project that focuses on the development of political conflict over European integration in six west European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK). The study follows every important step of European integration for more than four decades, from the early 1970s to the euro crisis in 2012.

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