During the last 10-20 years Euroscepticism has become a mainstream phenomenon in European politics. Since Paul Taggart’s first elaboration of the term in 1998, the phenomenon has been disentangled and analysed in several aspects and, yet, it is evident that the literature lacks purely theoretical works on the nature of Euroscepticism as a concept per se. As such, it remains a blurred and misleading concept. Hence, we wonder, paraphrasing Raymond Carver, “what do we talk about when we talk about Euroscepticism?”.

“Euroscepticism” made its first appearance in The Times on 11 November 1985 in relation to British anti-marketers, but European Studies’ literature generally traces its rise to the post-Maastricht Treaty period and the change of a “permissive consensus” to a “constraining dissensus”. The mainstreaming of Euroscepticism follows from the economic crises, the refugee crisis, and Brexit. Although these and other historical and political events have resulted in an increase of academic work on the topic, scholars rarely focused on the inner nature of Euroscepticism as a concept. Instead, they approach it from the perspective of countries, parties, intensity, socio-cultural, political, or psychological causes, and ideological or strategical driving forces.

Along the way, Euroscepticism has become a contested term, a catch-all word referring to a broad range of positions. It appears as a general label containing political positions that fluctuate from certain doubts concerning some European policies or mechanisms to a complete rejection of the EU. Our work stems precisely from such conceptual confusion by aiming to shed light on, and clarify the, academic debates on the concept. We claim that it is crucial to handle the term “Euroscepticism” with caution, aware that criticisms towards the EU and its integration process cannot be exempt from the long history of the European project – with its ups and downs and various manifestations of criticism.

We aim, first, to present our idea of “concept” as a theoretical problem deriving from the necessity to face an unknown and blurred entity by answering the question “What is it?” and considering it a result of socio-cultural relationships and reactions. Next, we present a historical timeline of the European integration process from the Schuman Declaration onwards, highlighting how criticism towards European integration was already present during post-war years. Successively, we disentangle the literature on Euroscepticism into different categories, analysing how they approach and conceptualise the phenomenon.

Euroscepticism and populism are prominent political and social phenomena that are closely linked in studies of voter behavior in the European Union and candidate countries. Both concepts have received broad scholarly scrutiny and have been operationalized in widely diverse ways, in trying to observe such values among survey participants. Our new measure combines these two phenomena into a single scale of Europopulism, i.e., a scale of populism targeted towards European Union institutions. Specifically, it is comprised of two out of three ‘classical’ components of populism (anti-establishment and people-centric sentiments), while the third one (Manichean worldview) is a rather hard concept to measure among voters. This new measure was developed and evaluated on a national probabilistic survey conducted in late fall of 2021 in Croatia. The case of Croatia is particularly interesting for the testing of our new scale of Europopulism, as it is European Union’s newest member state, which is marking a decade of membership in 2023 and which joined the eurozone and the Schengen in the same year. It is also a post-communist and post-conflict country, with a challenging neighborhood of Western Balkans. In our paper, we test the relationship between Europopulism and five sets of predictors, pertaining to institutional trust, visions of the EU, key issues on the nexus of EU and national politics, visions of the society, and patterns of identity. We show that trust in the European Parliament, support for exclusively national migration policy, low perceived benefits from EU membership, non-vaccination against COVID-19, and the support for a pre-Maastricht idea of the EU are the best predictors of Europopulist values, with national migration policy being the single most important predictor.