Nested, Pooled, or Exclusively National? Contested Sovereignty Models in Debates on the Future of Europe

Abstract

The increasing electoral support for right-wing and far-right parties in Europe has brought the question of sovereignty back to the forefront of debates on European integration. These parties often challenge the transfer of national powers to the EU, making sovereignty a central point of contention. The main axis of the dispute on the shape and future of the EU lies between views calling for deeper integration and those advocating the protection of national competencies. Exemplified by the calls of French President Emmanuel Macron, the notion of "European sovereignty" contradicts sovereign claims centred on the preservation of national sovereignty and even on repatriating parts of national competencies back to member states. At the theoretical level, we reveal how the notion of sovereignty intersects with and transforms the existing constitutional democratic visions of the EU. This article focuses on how political actors contest the division of competencies in the EU. We analyse this by mapping how political actors use the notion(s) of sovereignty in their discourses on European integration. The plenary debates on the future of Europe from the national parliaments of Germany, France, and Poland serve as our empirical material. We conducted a qualitative analysis of 45 plenary debates from the German Bundestag, the French Assemblée nationale, and the Polish Sejm, from 2015 to 2021. This timeframe marks a key phase of intense debate and redefinition of the EU's future. Through our comparative analysis, we identified three models of sovereignty related to key constitutional visions of the EU and demonstrated how they are constructed and understood by partisan actors in the three countries and where the key controversies lie. We also show that politicians instrumentally use models of sovereignty corresponding to the domestic political dynamics.