The Maastricht Treaty and public debates about European integration: the emergence of a European public sphere?

Abstract

The Maastricht Treaty has widely been identified as a turning point in European integration. However, little dedicated research has been done into how 'Maastricht' affected media discourses about Europe. In this article, we aim to shed more light on this matter by means of a qualitative frame analysis of media discourses in Britain and Germany, two countries that have traditionally had different perspectives on European integration. We show that in the course of the debate about the Maastricht Treaty the media discourses in the two countries gradually converged along the same aspects of European integration and increasingly used negative values to evaluate these aspects. This convergence of debates can be seen as representing a nascent transnational public sphere for the discussion of EU affairs.© 2018 the author(s). published by informa uK limited, trading as taylor & francis Group. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons attribution-nonCommercial-noderivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

Can Euroscepticism Contribute to a European Public Sphere? The Europeanization of Media Discourses on Euroscepticism across Six Countries

“…Future research could compare election with non‐election year coverage to test whether our three structural factors still hold their explanatory power outside electoral cycles. In addition, we encourage scholars to use the 2019 EP elections to examine more nuanced frame convergence (Barth and Bijsmans, ) in topics relating to Euroscepticism.…”

“…Focusing on euroscepticism, Barth and Bijsmans () find a convergence of news frames and negative evaluations of the EU in German and British broadsheets around the Maastricht Treaty. Dutceac Segesten and Bossetta (), meanwhile, show that journalists’ and citizens’ discussions of euroscepticism can exhibit higher degrees of Europeanization than other EU‐related issues in both print and the social media.…”

The Eurozone crisis and Euroscepticism in the European press

“…In times of Brexit, questions about European integration have gained new prominence in debates about the European Union's (EU) future (Bijsmans, Galpin, and Leruth 2018;Dutceac Segesten and Bossetta 2019). The Treaty on European Union (the 'Maastricht Treaty') is generally seen as the key turning point in terms of the advance of a more critical public engagement with the EU (Barth and Bijsmans 2018;Usherwood and Startin 2013). Since Maastricht criticism on and opposition towards the EU and European integrationcommonly labelled 'Euroscepticism'have become 'mainstream' (Brack and Startin 2015).…”

Brexit: ‘Revolt’ against the ‘elites’ or Trojan horse for more deregulation?

“…It was only after the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which brought the Single Market, that ‘Euroscepticism’ in the Conservative Party began to grow (Barth and Bijsmans, 2018). This growth occurred because of the degree of integration that this Treaty incurred.…”

“…This growth occurred because of the degree of integration that this Treaty incurred. The Maastricht Treaty was also accompanied by the Social Chapter that sought to provide a platform of basic employment rights across EU member states, so as to allay fears from unions of a ‘race to the bottom’ (Barth and Bijsmans, 2018). The Eurosceptic group of Conservative MPs sought inspiration from Margaret Thatcher’s (1988) Bruges speech, where she commented that ‘we have not embarked on the business of throwing back the frontiers of the state at home, only to see a European super-state getting ready to exercise a new dominance from Brussels (Margaret Thatcher Foundation, 2019).…”