National, popular, or neither? Sovereignty in the Rassemblement National’s Contestation of European Integration

Sovereignty is a core political concept; however, it is also deeply contested. While existing research has sought to provide definitions of sovereignty, we know little about how political actors conceive of it and use it in political conflict. This paper investigates how the Rassemblement National mobilized sovereignty in its contestation of the European Union. Relying on the qualitative analysis of national and EU election manifestoes produced between 1979 and 2019, it shows that in the RN’s early years, sovereignty remained uncontested and the party was mainly concerned about Europe being insufficiently powerful. The RN only developed a consistent sovereignist critique of the EU following the introduction of the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty. Drawing primarily on national sovereignty to define the EU as a violation of the principles of autonomy and self-rule, and then increasingly on popular sovereignty to present it as anti-democratic, the RN developed a comprehensive critique of the EU, while defending an alternative conception of Europe as a ‘Europe of the Nations.’