EU critique beyond Euroscepticism and progressive stories

Critical stances towards the EU have long been marginalized. In the political realm, they have been, and still frequently are, depicted as the business of “Eurosceptics” who are fundamentally questioning an established normative consensus. In the academic realm, integration theory somewhat similarly builds on “stories of progress” which construct a simplistic and largely uncritical history of European integration. In this introduction to the special issue, we argue that these tendencies do more harm than good, as they stand in the way of meaningful investigations of the diversity, the ambivalences, the symbolic underpinnings and the socio-political functions of EU critique. We picture how and with what consequences EU critique is typically delineated as a marginal phenomenon, and we sketch alternative perspectives based on an idea of EU critique as a field of knowledge that emerges in discourse and practice. Ultimately, both the introduction and the papers in this special issue make the case for freeing EU critique from its outside position in order to get a more nuanced picture of European integration and the current challenges it faces.