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What were the French telling us by voting down the 'EU constitution'? A case for interpretive research on referendum debates

Sternberg, C; (2018) What were the French telling us by voting down the 'EU constitution'? A case for interpretive research on referendum debates. Comparative European Politics , 16 (2) pp. 145-170. 10.1057/cep.2015.21. Green open access

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Abstract

How to make sense of a popular vote is a question raised once again by the prospect of a Brexit referendum. To date the French rejection of the European Union constitutional treaty’s ratification has been one of the most consequential electoral statements in the history of European integration. Still, what its actual message was con- tinues to puzzle analysts. What were the French telling us? The article approaches this question of from the angle of the discursive processes of meaning making in the public sphere, through arguments, narratives and images. Complementing available explanatory accounts based on survey date or quantitative textual analysis, it presents a non-quantitative interpretive discourse analysis of political ideas providing structures of meaning in the debate around the treaty, as it was reflected in the press. The focus is on discursive and narrative techniques of meaning making and knowledge production. These are situated against embedding webs of beliefs, languages, and traditions. The reading offered pre- sents the debate as structured (i) by the motif of an open-ended search for a better Europe, rather than an outright rejection of the integration project (ii) by a deep opposition between ‘social Europe’ and a world where political agency over market forces is lost, and (iii) by an overarching discourse about reclaiming this agency,

Type: Article
Title: What were the French telling us by voting down the 'EU constitution'? A case for interpretive research on referendum debates
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1057/cep.2015.21
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/cep.2015.21
Language: English
Additional information: The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/cep.2015.21.
Keywords: European Union, draft constitutional treaty, referendum, France, interpretive discourse analysis
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Laws
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1503447
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