Chapter from the book: Butnaru Troncotă, M et al. 2024. Reconfiguring EU Peripheries: Political Elites, Contestation, and Geopolitical Shifts.
The nature of perceptions of the EU among Romania’s elites is an under-studied and seldom explored issue. The central research question of this chapter is whether the major events of the 2020–2022 interval (marked by the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, the start of the war in Ukraine, and the rejection of Romania’s second attempt to join the Schengen area) have altered Romanian elites’ perceptions of the EU. The empirical part discusses qualitative data resulting from ten semi-structured interviews, analysed in relation to three main theoretical taxonomies of political party attitudes towards the EU – those of Kopecký and Mudde (2002), Lubbers and Scheepers (2005), and Krouwel and Abts (2007) – to highlight the particularities of Romanian Eurosceptic discourse and its ambivalent nature.
Butnaru Troncotă M. & Cucută R. 2024. The Ambivalent ‘Eurosceptics’ of the EU’s ‘Inner Periphery: Assessing Perceptions of the EU among Political Elites in Romania during Turbulent Times. In: Butnaru Troncotă, M et al (eds.), Reconfiguring EU Peripheries. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/pro-et-contra-3-3
This chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution + Noncommercial 4.0 license. Copyright is retained by the author(s)
This book has been peer reviewed. See our Peer Review Policies for more information.
Published on June 19, 2024