Sovereignty to the Leader

The European Union gives rise to competing claims regarding the nature‎ of sovereignty and democracy. While some view European integration as a‎ source of non-democratic domination against sovereignty, others see sovereignty ‎and democracy reinforced by integration processes. The former views‎ have been made vocal by some political actors in the Visegrad countries –‎Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Via analysing how sovereignty and‎ democracy are narrated by Eurosceptic actors in parliamentary debates on the‎ future of the EU between 2015 and 2019, we identify an archaic, absolutist,‎ pre-parliamentary, and pre-popular view of sovereignty by Eurosceptic actors ‎that, when linked to democracy, opposes EU integration. This narrative,‎ present particularly but not exclusively in Hungary, fosters a ‘discursive differentiation’ ‎in the EU that fails to be captured by the more traditional intergovernmental‎ narrative, whereby state sovereignty is contrasted to further EU ‎integration, and recognizes the extent to which the partisan leader-centric approach ‎can prevail.‎