Eurogroup meets in Brussels for final Greek proposals. Demotix/Sander de Wilde. All rights reserved.
Anyone (still) following the “Greek crisis” in the social and traditional media will have noticed the growing expressions of Euroscepticism. What once was a minor nuisance in the European Union (EU), relegated to mostly ostracized extreme and radical parties, is rapidly becoming the predominant sentiment across Europe, whatever the position on the EU-Greece negotiations.
The term “Euroscepticism” has always been a container concept, initially denoting anyone who had some critique on “The European Project,” however small or detailed. This was not very problematic until the late 1980s, as European integration was still an elite-driven process profiting from a “permissive consensus” of the vast majority of the European peoples. The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 changed this, slowly but steadily. It did not only introduce the European Union and the (now increasingly cursed) Euro, but also birthed mass Euroscepticism. Sure, it took some time, but by the late 1990s Euroscepticism was so diverse and widespread, at both the elite and mass levels, that scholars like Aleks Szczerbiak and Paul Taggart started to distinguish between “soft” and “hard” Euroscepticism, in which the former referred to detailed critique and the latter to more fundamental criticism.
