The European Union under Threat of a Trend toward National Sovereignty

Abstract

The European Union represents the most advanced case of voluntary regional integration in the world. But today, after several decades of the pooling of sovereignty within the EU, Europe is experiencing a renaissance of national sovereignty supported by a nationalistic turn of public opinion and represented by parties on both ends of the political spectrum. The size of the national sovereignty trend among European citizens and discovery of its main drivers are the main problems that we address in the article. Through Eurobarometer data of the period before the referendum on Brexit, we show that seeing a better future outside the Union is related to shrinking support for globalization and liberal values among the population. Furthermore, popular disaffection toward EU membership did not develop in a vacuum but is fuelled by the contemporaneous occurrence of two shocks, the economic and the migration crises, a combination of circumstances that have aggravated the problem of the reduced legitimacy of the EU among citizens.

Keywords

• EU
• nationalism
• Nationalism
• liberalism
• Liberalism
• economic crisis