Ultan, Mehlika and Serdar Ornek. "Euroscepticism in the European Union". International Journal of Social Sciences, Vol.4, No.2 (2015): 49-57.

Ultan, Mehlika and Serdar Ornek. "Euroscepticism in the European Union". International Journal of Social Sciences, Vol.4, No.2 (2015): 49-57.

• The authors accept the definitions of 'hard' and 'soft' Euroscepticism supplied by Drs. Taggart and Szczerbiak, divided parties between those fundamentally opposed to the project of European economic and political integration, and those with limited objections to the current trajectory of the EU (50).
• The authors recognize that political parties are reactive in many ways and may adopt eurosceptic policies to attract votes or moderate their policies for the same purposes (51).
• Although it had always existed in Great Britain, popular Euroscepticism on continental Europe really began in the 1990s with opposition to the Maastricht Treaty, which was perceived as eroding national sovereignty and restrict economic rights of states. The permissive consensus for integration began to erode at this point (52).
• This increased popular skepticism in the EU beginning in the 1990s is reflected in the failure of the Constitutional Treaty referendums in France and Netherlands in 2005, and the Irish vote against the Lisbon Treaty in 2008 (54).