Against the backdrop of increasing politicisation and legitimacy challenges, the EU has faced multiple crises, which have tested the EU’s ability to maintain its legitimacy and respond effectively to these issues. Whilst growing scholarly attention has examined the role of political myths in the legitimation of the EU, very few have specifically looked at, or properly conceptualised, the role that the myth of exceptionalism plays in legitimising the EU’s responses to crises. As such, this thesis explores how EU elites use the myth of exceptionalism to legitimise the European Union’s responses in moments of perceived crisis.

To address this question, this thesis conducts an in-depth interpretive thematic analysis of official speeches, statements, and press releases from key, relevant EU supranational elites during the three crises: the Eurozone crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. In doing so, this thesis applies an original analytical framework consisting of three mechanisms through which political myths engage in legitimation: narrative coherence, emotional appeal, and symbolic representation. These mechanisms are used to understanding specifically how the myth of exceptionalism is used to establish widely-held understandings of why specific policy responses are necessary and the EU’s continued existence is justified.

This thesis’s core assertion is that supranational EU elites are more likely to reproduce the myth of exceptionalism in crisis contexts in which it appears to be more relevant and resonant. To legitimise their crisis responses, EU elites primarily recontextualised historical narratives (narrative coherence) of the myth of exceptionalism. When this proved ineffective or impractical, they relied on semiotic symbols (symbolic representation), particularly the EU’s core values, to transmit and justify the myth as part of the EU’s broader belief system. By contrast, appeals to specific emotions (emotional appeal), were seldom used exclusively. However, it nonetheless operated as a secondary mechanism, amplifying the persuasive force of narrative coherence and symbolic representation.

This paper aims to propose a theoretical and methodological framework for encouraging Europeanization studies through historical approaches. This research addresses Europeanization in a broad sense. It is understood as a cultural shock, catalysed but not necessarily rooted in the EEC/EU, and composed of the diverse effects and influences stemming from the growing interdependence of European societies. Historians such as Ulrike von Hirschhausen and Kiran K. Patel have converged with political scientists as Claudio Radaelli and Robert Ladrech that Europeanization is better comprehended as a transnational process composed by cooperation and divergence between European actors, politics, policies, and polities towards domestic and social dynamics.

Hence, how can historians participate in these intricate debates and conceptualizations of such a diffuse topic as Europeanization? Authors such as Ben Rosamond, Amandine Crespy, Ian Manners, and Trine Flockhart paved the way for a theoretical complexity of the historical consequences of European Integration and Interdependence, something that historians such as Wolfram Kaiser, Florian Greiner, and Mark Gilbert have understood as exploring the historical effects of the European Integration process and Interdependence consequences in Europe. Therefore, as Laurent Warlouzet and N. Piers Ludlow have pointed out, exploring the meeting points of political, economic and social effects of European Integration since the 1970s, —framing the end of the Cold War, globalization, the transformation of capitalism and the European Communities´ reform in the 1990s—, suppose a critical turn on this period and European history which questions aspects as the EMU, social policy, commercial agreements, industrial restructuring, political cooperation and the European integration model itself. Focusing on multi-level governance dynamics, the impact of European politics and policy-making, and the cultural aspects of economics, historians can have a voice to help flesh out or epistemologically define the concept of Europeanization through multi-archival and transnational investigations.

The main idea of this paper is that history can contribute to Europeanization studies and conceptualization of it as a processual phenomenon of relative permeability during the end of the 20^th century, yet of great significance and discursive power. Moreover, history can distinguish the dynamics of resistance to Europeanization regarding the Maastricht Treaty, during a historical period conceived as the best years for Integration and Cooperation in Western Europe. Therefore, through the theories and methodologies of European and European Integration history, Europeanization can be understood as something which must be delved into and given specific —yet not teleological—qualifiers for welfare, fiscality, labour affairs, and commercial dynamics.

Research on norm contestation frequently operates on the implicit assumption that contestation and contesters are normatively negative. Although there is nuance in the debate acknowledging some types of contestation can strengthen legitimacy, researchers predominantly assess the damage done to the liberal international order. Within European Studies, this has resulted in a body of literature that favours downstream policy impacts and voting results, often neglecting the underlying rationale and the discursive processes that construct certain actors as "illegitimate" contesters in the first place. This paper seeks to rethink this conceptualisation by investigating how the boundaries between legitimate disagreement and illegitimate contestation are discursively made and remade in the EU context. Critically, this contestation is no longer a peripheral phenomenon but increasingly driven by populist radical right (PRR) movements. As these actors move to shape mainstream discourse, the boundaries dividing "acceptable" from "unacceptable" politics change too. How can we conceptualise the changing relationship between the EU’s normative core and those who challenge it?

This paper proposes a new approach to understanding this dynamic by applying the concept of boundary work (the process of constituting and reconfiguring groups by defining the divisions between them) to the study of contestation in the European Parliament. The core theoretical aim of this paper is to reconceptualise the ‘cordon sanitaire’ between the centre and radical right as boundary work in response to contestation, rather than as a strategic or ideological choice. This approach reshapes how mainstream political actors define “acceptable” and “unacceptable” right wing politics within the EU. The framework to achieve this is based on the work of Wimmer (2008) regarding the malleability of social boundaries and Haker & Otterspeer's (2020) multi-dimensional analysis of populist discourse using boundary work.

Empirically, the paper employs content analysis and process tracing of plenary debates and speeches from the ninth legislature of the European Parliament (2019–2024). It focuses on the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) response to contestation of EU climate and gender norms by PRR actors, two domains where the line between the mainstream and the radical right is increasingly blurred. The study tracks how boundaries of acceptable content, social practice and rationality shift over time and the implications for institutional resilience in the face of contestation.

The debate over the concept used to define actors who adopt a critical stance toward European integration has a long-standing tradition and trajectory; nevertheless, it remains fully relevant today. Although most studies quickly adopted the concept of Euroscepticism coined by Paul Taggart and Aleks Szczerbiak, the 2000s witnessed the emergence of numerous new concepts that sought to conceptualize this phenomenon in a more nuanced, complex, and in-depth manner. Scholars introduced terms such as critical Europeanism, eurorejects, and europhobes in an effort to capture these variations more precisely.

The most significant conceptual shift came with Crespy and Verschueren, who introduced the notion of “resistances to Europe”. A decade later, Birte Wassenberg aimed to historicize this concept by rejecting the idea that the phenomenon was novel and by tracing it back to the very beginnings of European integration.

This paper seeks to provide a historicized definition of the concept of alter-Europeanism, drawing on the brief yet suggestive definition proposed by political scientists Michael Holmes and Knut Roder, who describe it as support for European integration combined with an alternative agenda that prioritizes different issues, such as the social dimension of integration.

To this end, the paper adopts a case study focused on Spanish Euroscepticism within political parties and trade unions between 1985 and 1997. This period allows for a clear observation of how different political and social actors articulated critical discourses toward the process of European integration. This approach proves particularly suitable for explaining, defining, historicizing, and delimiting the concept of critiques of European construction in the Spanish context, while also allowing for extrapolation to other European cases.

This perspective does not contradict the notion of resistances to Europe, which may benefit from a terminological evolution toward resistances to European integration. On the contrary, the conceptualization of the term itself reveals alternative orientations and proposals regarding the model of European integration advocated by various political parties and trade unions.

This paper examines how Euroscepticism (Taggart & Szczerbiak, 2002) and Euro-alternativism (FitzGibbon, 2013) are constructed and circulated through Turkish media coverage of official political communication. Focusing on the speeches and related communication of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Foreign Ministers Ahmet Davutoğlu, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, and Hakan Fidan between 2010 and 2025, the study analyzes how critiques of the European Union (EU), contestation over Türkiye’s membership prospects, and references to alternative international alignments are framed in both discourse and policy practice.

While the Euroscepticism literature has predominantly centered on party strategies and public opinion toward European integration (Kopecký & Mudde, 2002; Statham et al., 2010; De Wilde et al., 2013; Guerra, 2021), comparatively less attention has been paid to media portrayals of Euroscepticism (Conti & Memoli, 2016), particularly in non-EU contexts. Addressing this gap, the paper conceptualizes anti-Europeanism in relation to Türkiye’s internal political dynamics and their external ramifications, tracing how domestically rooted concerns are mobilized to justify policy preferences, renegotiate Europe–Türkiye relations, and legitimate alternative membership imaginaries.

Methodologically, the study employs Qualitative Content Analysis to identify recurrent themes and interpretive patterns in media coverage. The corpus includes Anadolu Agency as a primary source, complemented by outlets representing diverse ideological positions and linguistic registers (Yeni Şafak, Sözcü, BBC Turkish, and BBC News). A coding scheme operationalizes established typologies of Euroscepticism by assigning relevant passages on EU affairs and alternative organizations to pre-defined categories; intercoder reliability is strengthened through repeated coding in MAXQDA by an independent coder at a different time-point and subsequent comparison of results.

Empirically, the analysis maps the issue areas most frequently linked to Eurosceptic and Euro-alternativist framing—such as migration, counterterrorism, conflict prevention, and the expansion of Türkiye’s economic and diplomatic engagement in Africa—and assesses how these policy domains shape media narratives about distancing from the EU and considering alternative institutional memberships. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for the study of Euroscepticism beyond Europe, highlighting how media-mediated elite discourse can reconfigure transnational belonging, legitimize strategic diversification, and inform future research on EU–Türkiye relations amid overlapping domestic challenges, including economic volatility, refugee governance, and disaster politics.