Citzens against Europe? Civil society and Eurosceptic protest in Ireland, the United Kingdom and Denmark

This article seeks to broaden the study of Euroscepticism by developing a basic system of analysis for investigating civil-society-based opposition to European integration. Existing studies of Euroscepticism have almost exclusively focused on examining political parties and, as a result, theoretical approaches to understanding opposition to European integration have been strongly influenced by the party-based literature. By drawing from the body of work on both party-based Euroscepticism and European civil society, this article formulates a series of hypotheses and applies them to the case studies of Ireland, the United Kingdom and Denmark. Its main conclusion is that civil-society-based Euroscepticism generally conforms to the hard/soft model of opposition to the EU, but that this Euroscepticism is drawn from a more mainstream societal base than its party equivalent. Additionally, this study argues that civil-society-based Euroscepticism can be interpreted as a form of grass-roots civic engagement with the EU that mobilizes mainly around the salience of EU-related referendums.