The (non-)politicization of European defence in France and Great Britain (1992-2016). A cultural horizon that cannot be overcome?

The support for European defence in French surveys and the enthusiastic discourse of French elites cannot hide very contrasted apprehensions of the issue across European countries. In this paper, we study the public debates on this topic in two States representing opposite positions: France and Great Britain. We rely on a definition of politicization based on three dimensions: the salience of the issue (its visibility), the diversification of the publics involved, and the intensity (or polarization) of the conflict over the issue (Hutter et al. 2015). Through an analysis of European defence media coverage in Le Monde and Le Figaro for France, and The Times and The Guardian for the United Kingdom, from 1992 (adoption of the Maastricht Treaty) to 2016 (Brexit referendum), we show that the framing of the debate in each of these two national spaces follows mirroring logics. In France, the promotional and consensual discourses on a common defence and European power refer to a representation of national power transposed to the European level, mainly characterized by a desire for independence from the US. It is above all a symbolic discourse on an issue that is little debated, as France adopts a strategy of non-politicization. In the UK, the debate exists and is politicized, following the European cleavage, that involves a refusal to transfer competences to the EU, out of a commitment to the Atlantic Alliance and a rejection of any European "superstate". The frames of reference around which the debates on the establishment of a European defence have been built have changed very little despite the institutional and operational progress made by this policy since the 1990s. It seems that the implementation of a European defence comes up against unbridgeable differences in strategic cultures, which constrain the debates in each of these national public spaces.