Public Attitude Towards the Union: The EU and Canada Compared

Nedanstående innehåll är skapat av Mimers Brunns besökare. Kommentera arbete

Euroscepticism has been portrayed as the corollary of increased integration. The rapid EU development of the last fifteen years has, somehow, caused a breakdown in public support for integration. From a relative mass quiescence associated to the traditional permissive consensus over integration, European citizens have shown growing discontentment towards the EU and its orientations. This study is an attempt to conceptualise the main explanatory factors accounting for support ? and shortage of support leading to sceptical attitudes. I develop a bi-dimensional model of utilitarian (specific) and affective (diffuse) factors which are associated to different degrees of scepticism: from hard to soft attitudes. The main innovation of this study lies in its comparative approach. Several authors have tried to understand the emergent phenomenon by comparing Member States with one another with relative success. I take the debate over the Atlantic and compare the EU and Canada, another highly complex and plurinational post-modern entity. The model developed using Europe...