In the post-Maastricht era of European integration, we witness two seemingly contradictory trends: the progressive deepening of integration and growing popular discontent. To make sense of this seeming paradox, we contend, one has to study the parliamentary arena, the only institutional connection to decision-making that most European countries afford their citizens. We argue that, in contrast to what we know about the politicization of the European Union (EU) in the public sphere, centrist parties, protected by majority-friendly arena rules, dominate the parliament and generate patterns of engagement with EU affairs more akin to “responsible parliamentarism” than “responsive Euroscepticism”. Centrist government and opposition parties rather than marginal challengers are the actors that set the EU-related parliamentary agenda; they focus on EU legislation and policy rather than fundamental institutional and membership questions; and they struggle over government competence and the direction of policy rather than demanding a fundamental overhaul of how the EU and its major policy regimes work. In other words, engagement with the EU in parliament has more to do with detailed legislative and policy work than salient conflict over the fundamental premises of European integration. We provide first evidence for these views on the basis of newly collected data on the treatment of the EU in the parliamentary plenaries of Austria, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain.
