Euroscepticism

The UK’s departure from the EU is a pivotal moment in the history of Europe. The United Kingdom and the European Union has a longstanding relationship going back to 1973; however, against all expectations, in a referendum on June 23, 2016, the British people voted to leave the EU. According to the referendum result, more than 51.9% of the voters voted to leave. There is a hypothesis that British national identity can be the source of UK hostility to European integration. The main question to be posed here is that, how the unique formation of British identity drove the majority of people to vote in favour of leaving the EU in the 2016 referendum. In order to achieve this objective, Social Identity Theory has been applied as the main theoretical framework. Moreover, this study employed a qualitative methodology, and data was gathered from the existing survey polls such as Ipsos MORI, Eurobarometer and British Social Attitudes (BSA) surveys. The findings of this paper indicated that British identity has not been Europeanised as much as other European countries yet, and Britain’s weak sense of European identity was a key contributor to the Brexit vote.

The rise of the far right is one of the significant challenges facing European countries;  the growing Eurosceptic and nativist attitudes in Central Europe have resulted in transforming regional alliances according to anti-immigration concerns. Despite the fact that the Visegrád 4 group, (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia), was founded in the early 1990s with the aim of detaching itself from the legacy of communism and pushing towards the Western liberal democracy, it has recently become a base to oppose EU and promote nativism and illiberal democracy. Adopting a descriptive-analytical approach, this paper reviews the rise of nativism and Euroscepticism with a historical perspective, through an examination of the political geography of Central Europe. Findings reveal that the influxes of refugees to Europe and increasing xenophobia, along with cultural concerns, specially about Muslims, have been the driving force behind the growth of the far-right parties. Additionally, the geopolitical situation of these countries and the external borders of the European Union have an important role in turning the refugee crisis into a driving factor of Euroscepticism.

After the 2015 refugee crisis, the far right parties are not marginal anymore and they have become mainstream in most of the European countries. The present paper aims to (1) portray a perspective of the rise of the far right in Europe with emphasis on their characteristics specially Euroscepticism, nationalism and xenophobia (2) provide a summary for the main cause for the rise of the far right parties (3) to come to some further insights about their supporters and social base by analyses and review of the prior researches. In this article, we focus on immigration and refugee crises as the main reasons for the recent success of Far right parties in Europe, the study reveals that these parties benefited from the protest vote and rise of dissatisfaction among the citizen toward the ruling elites, however, the refugee crisis and arrival of foreign immigrants to Europe, and particularly Germany, and poor performance of traditional political left and right parties are among the main causes for their rise.