The Global and International Studies Program would like to announce our first Works-in-Progress speaker, Dr. Achim Hurrelmann, whose paper “The Eurozone Crisis and Citizen Engagement in EU Affairs” will be presented on Friday, November 27th at 12pm in Room 2420 R River Building. The discussant for this paper will be Dr. Stephen White from Political Science.
All papers will be pre-circulated two weeks in advance of each paper presentation. Please register in advance using the form below in order to receive copies of discussion papers.
While the Eurozone crisis has contributed to Europeanization trends in the domestic politics of EU member states, it has not to the same extent triggered citizen mobilization in EU-level democratic procedures. This talk (based on a paper co-authored with Sebastian Baglioni) suggests that the weakness of supranational citizen mobilization is linked to factors that restrict the citizens’ receptiveness to EU-related messages: limited knowledge of the EU and a weak sense of political efficacy, a discursive framing that conceptualizes the EU as a consortium of member states rather than a supranational entity, and attributions of responsibility for the crisis that de-emphasize the role of EU policies. These factors constitute cultural opportunity structures that influence patterns of political engagement. They imply that the much-discussed “politicization” of European integration is, under present conditions, more likely to result in a renationalization than in a supranationalization of EU politics.