The ENEC-2014 project aims to evaluate the effects of the economic and political crisis European countries (particularly those in the Eurozone) have been experiencing since 2008 upon the attitudes of national political (and, eventually, economic) elites towards the EU. 

 

In the 1990s, as the ‘permissive consensus’ hypothesis that had dominated the interpretation of the European integration process started being challenged, an increased attention went to the more critical role of a less passive (and more sceptical) public opinion. At the same time however, as mechanisms of democratic representation and accountability remain essentially national, domestic political elites (with their double national and supranational role), continue being the main mediators between the changing views on Europe of national electorates and the European institutions and decisions. Exploring and tracing the views of national elites, their variety, stability and change, offers a crucial point of view for understanding the legitimacy of the integration process and the politics of the European Union in an age of greater politicization of these issues. In this respect, this project aims to shed greater light on the present and the future of the EU, by examining the attitudes of national political elites in this critical juncture.

 
​The ENEC 2014 project has been conceived as a follow-up of the previous INTUNE project (Integrated and United: A Quest for Citizenship in an ever Closer Europe), funded by the EU 6th Framework Programme between 2005 and 2009. This project focused on the attitudes of public opinion and political and social elites on different aspects of the European integration process in 17 countries (all of them EU members but Serbia), aiming to explore the variations and the dimensionality of these attitudes in order to establish to what extent the positions of public opinion and elites could be better described by one or more dimensions of Europeanness (particularly, those referring to identity, representation, and scope of governance).

 

The basic research questions are:

 

1) How the Eurozone crisis has affected the attitudes of political elites towards the EU? 

 

2) How national political elites evaluate the role played by EU institutions in the management of the crisis?

 

3) How do they perceive the future of European integration?

 

4) How the crisis has affected the mediating (and eventually, legitimating) role of elites between EU and their fellow citizens?

 

5) Which factors explain the configuration of political elites’ attitudes towards the EU?

 

6) Are elites influenced, as some authors argue, by a ‘constraining dissensus’ towards the EU leading to a conflictual politicization of EU issues in national arenas?

 

A survey to member os the national parliaments is planned to be carried out at each of the participant countries during 2014.