Contesting Europe. German Opposition to European Integration in Historical Perspective

This chapter investigates German forms of opposition to European integration from a historical perspective, focusing on three critical junctures: the 1950s, the 1990s and the period after the outbreak of the European debt crisis. The core aim of this contribution is to discuss the historical evidence behind three main arguments. First, German opposition to European integration first appeared roughly around the same time as the very first European organizations were being formed and was expressed by high-ranking leaders of both major parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, and by some leading German media. Second, West German opposition to European integration has always been, in Paul Taggart’s seminal definition of Euroscepticism, ‘contingent and conditional’ rather than ‘total and unconditional’, albeit changing in time and space and not implying a stable set of ideas. Third, in the more recent form of German opposition to European integration there are elements of both historical ‘normality’ and ‘distinctiveness’. In this context, it will be argued that the way Germany contested Europe from the 1990s onwards showed her to be better equipped than other member states to contest for it.