Sovereignty to the Leader: Visegrad Four Eurosceptic Narratives on the Future of the European Union
Sovereignty to the Leader: Visegrad Four Eurosceptic Narratives on the Future of the European Union

Summary/Abstract: The European Union gives rise to competing claims regarding the nature of sovereignty and democracy. While some view European integration as a source of non-democratic domination against sovereignty, others see sovereignty and democracy reinforced by integration processes. The former views have been made vocal by some political actors in the Visegrad countries – Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Via analysing how sovereignty and democracy are narrated by Eurosceptic actors in parliamentary debates on the future of the EU between 2015 and 2019, we identify an archaic, absolutist, pre-parliamentary, and pre-popular view of sovereignty by Eurosceptic actors that, when linked to democracy, opposes EU integration. This narrative, present particularly but not exclusively in Hungary, fosters a ‘discursive differentiation’ in the EU that fails to be captured by the more traditional intergovernmental narrative, whereby state sovereignty is contrasted to further EU integration, and recognizes the extent to which the partisan leader-centric approach can prevail.

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