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The decade running up to 2023 has been the most challenging in the history of the European project. The European Union (EU), known as the European Economic Community (EEC) until 1992, came under pressure from political movements on both the left and the right, as the individual member states and the leaders of the EU institutions tried to find solutions to the Eurozone crisis and increasing migratory flows of refugees from the Middle East & North Africa, among other issues. In spite of these issues, which found their political expression in the movement which secured the UK's exit from the EU, Marine Le Pen's National Rally in France, and a resurgent far-right in Italy among others, public opinion in most member states is relatively positive or neutral towards the union in 2023. Remarkably, only one member state - Czechia - had more respondents with negative opinions of the EU than positive opinions. 

Europe and its discontents

The European Union has been a contested project from its beginning, with nationalists from the individual member states often opposing the aims of European federalists who wish to pursue "ever closer union" between the countries. While the initial foundations of the union in the post-war period were from an economic arrangement known as the European Coal & Steel Community (ECSC), the idea of a political union has been present in the project since the Treaty of Rome, signed in 1957. Since then, European Integration has progressed in a number of stages, usually propelled by the leaders of the largest member states, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, but also through the actions of semi-autonomous EU institutions, such as through the legal decisions of the European Court of Justice. As crucial steps in the integration process have rarely involved democratic procedures, populists have often latched onto this fact to fuel anti-EU sentiment and in some cases to advocate for their countries leaving the union entirely.

What fuels Euroscepticism?

Some of the key issues which have fueled euroscepticism have been the supposed lack of democratic procedure in the EU, the principle of freedom of movement (by which EU citizens are free to migrate within the union), the economic & financial policies of the union and the European Central Bank (ECB), and the perceived dominance of the bloc by France and Germany. Euroscepticism has in recent years been strong in countries where there has been a culmination of these factors, such as in Greece and Hungary, however, historically the country with the largest eurosceptic movement has been the United Kingdom, which finally left the EU in 2020. While euroscepticism tends to be strongest on the right, with nationalists seeing the EU as eroding national culture and sovereignty. There is also a strong tendency on the left who oppose the EU on the grounds of it promoting a liberal variety of capitalism, with free flows of capital and market competition being key founding principles of the union.