Re-evaluating the nature of Euroscepticism in border regions: Narratives of Europe in a European election year (Deliverable 3.2: Report on the results of interviews and focus groups)

In this report, we present a narrative analysis of our original politician interview and citizen focus group data to investigate how borders are featured and narrated in European election campaigns, and how border region residents respond to border narratives in the broader frame of their perceptions of the European project. We use ‘structured narrative analysis’, whereby we seek out recurring narratives about borders. In this, we include both master narratives that were identified a priori, and narratives that emerge spontaneously from the bottom up. Border regions are defined by politicians and border region residents in relation to a variety of scales and concepts. This was done by reference to historical-geographical regions such as Alsace or Silesia, to geographical features such as the Baltic Sea or the Carpathian basin, as well as different administrative scales such as municipalities or regions. Only in a few instances was ‘border region’ used as a key reference category, and in even fewer instances did definitions encompass two or more sides of a border. Politician interviewees and focus group participants sometimes drew on Europe, or parts of it such as Central Europe, in definitions. This was especially true among politician interviewees in the Franco-German border region. However, the notion that living in a border region predisposes border region residents to any particular pro-European orientation must be rejected. For example, Polish borderlanders from the Polish-German-Czech border region explicitly rebuffed any suggested links between their daily experience of open borders and neighbourship with lofty European ideals. Narratives of European borders in general are threefold: 1) Overwhelming support for open borders: for both practical and normative reasons, politicians and focus group participants narrated open borders inside the EU and Schengen Area as a positive development. Politicians from Danish-Swedish border region are an important exception but also the only exception. Support for ‘invisible’ borders cuts across political dividing lines, as interviewees from Eurosceptic and pro-European parties alike supported this narrative. The same can be said of focus group participants, most of whom hardly noticed borders and welcomed this invisibility. 2) This stands in contrast with the second narrative about the negative effects of a return to border visibility. This was witnessed during the Covid-related border closures and reintroductions of border controls at some borders. Some politician interviewees and focus group participants produced a highly critical narrative of a return to visibility, while others were more understanding. However, this disagreement does not run clearly along party lines or general orientation towards the EU. 3) A third narrative, promoted by pro-European and Eurosceptic politicians alike, is that open borders inside the EU and Schengen Area depend on strongly enforced external borders. In other words, support for open borders is not universal but hinges on the question of whether the border in question is an external or an internal one. This narrative did not feature prominently among border region residents, who tend to be more focused on the local effects of the local border. Narratives of the European Union and European integration are somewhat linked to narratives about borders: most politicians and focus group participants – even if they were broadly Eurosceptic – could name some benefits of European integration. Open borders were foremost among these, but we also detected narratives about beneficial economic exchanges resulting from European integration. At the same time, there was a recurrent Eurosceptic narrative of a bureaucratic and distant EU that tends towards over-centralisation. Specific policies were sometimes singled out as examples. The Green Deal and other environmental policies featured prominently in at least some border regions, but there was also a clear narrative that links the EU’s migration policy – which was criticised by politicians and focus group participants – with border narratives, notably the abovementioned narrative that the external border needed to be enforced more effectively. No politicians advocated leaving the European Union, but some produced narrative of alternative models of integration, such more state-centric models or older models like the European Community. Some of our focus group participants produced very Eurosceptic narratives, but only in the Danish and Swedish border region did we detect any – albeit muted – support for leaving the EU. Our politician interviews revealed that borders do not feature prominently in European election campaigns, but they feature to some extent. In all our border regions, we found evidence of standardised campaigns organised by national (or regional) parties that have some local overtones. This was noticed by some of our focus group participants, who would like to see more locally tailored campaigns, to overcome some of the perceived distance between the borderlands and the EU. There is some evidence of cross-border links between parties and some joint campaign activities. However, some parties also noted their difficulties in identifying partner parties in neighbouring countries. Finally, our focus group participants took on the role of co-analysts of our media analysis presented elsewhere (Bączkiewicz et al., 2024), and our politician interviews. This revealed that these citizen scientists are sceptical of some of the heavily pro-European narratives produced especially in the media in the Franco-German border region. This scepticism was also found among citizen scientists from the Franco-German border region itself. Elsewhere, we found that media narratives of local conflict over borders or environmental issues were received by citizen scientists with some scepticism, though sometimes also localised support. For example, the Polish focus group participants echoed Polish media concerns over the Turów coal mine, whereas the German and Czech participants did not. However, these citizen scientists also revealed some gaps in the media reporting and in politician narratives. They offered their own narratives, e.g. to highlight areas where the EU should take action (as on Slovakia’s treatment of Slovak-Hungarians taking Hungarian citizenship), or to point to differential contexts in border regions in Western Europe and East-Central Europe.