The impact of enhanced politicization on citizens’ attitudes: the mechanisms of indifference by ambivalence and by defection.

The enhanced politicization of the European integration has marked the EU post-Maastricht development. This text aims at understanding how this politicization has impacted on the acceptance and the appropriation of the political order by lay citizens. Using focus group conducted in 2006 in Belgium, France and Great Britain as a microscope, we challenge the idea that a growing politicization leads necessarily to a polarization of citizens’ attitudes towards the EU. We propose an alternative interpretation, which argues that the acceptance of a European political order stems from at least two rationales. On one hand, amongst the elites (understood in a broad sense as political or economic or even simply citizens interested in the political sphere) we observe indeed a polarization of opinion characterized by a decline in support and a reinforcement of opposition to the processes of European integration. This tendency is emphasized and explained by the model of “constraining dissensus”. On the other hand, we observe the reinforcement of indifference and indecision amongst ordinary citizens not expert in political matters, faced with this same process. The first rational of appropriation is linked to an active form of contentment or rejection, whereas the second demonstrates a mode of tacit acceptance. In the latter case, the politicization of the EU leads ordinary citizens at the same time to develop more ambivalent attitudes towards the integration process and to consider the EU as “normal politics”. Through these two mechanisms, the enhanced politicization of the EU leads to indifference, in one case by ambivalence and in the other by defection