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42 | Tamás Dezső Ziegler and their governments made choices that enabled further integration, but also generated opposition and tensions. At the party politics level, two kinds of parties criticise European cooperation. 1he first group that of Eurosceptic parties, which are against EU cooperation, and which would abolish such an empire-like system at large. The second group of parties are challenger parties: they do not want to abolish cooperation completely, but to change policy outcomes. Challenger parties do not make an open assault against the EU, but they develop “an ambivalent Euroscepticism when in power” (Hodson and Puetter 2019, 1162). As European cooperation largely depends on governmental negotiations, the more influence such parties have, the more they can turn integration around. Another explanation, from a realist perspective, was suggested by Barbara Kunz. Kunz put European disintegration into the realist framework of countries cooperating and competing with each other in an anarchic international system (Kunz 2013). When doing so, she adopts a realist perspective that is first and foremost characterised by the assumption that states’ behaviour is shaped by the conditions in their environment. In her opinion, the circumstances that push European countries towards disintegration could have several reasons. First, since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been absent from stabilising intra-European politics. The more the US removes itself from international politics, the more this tendency will strengthen. This also means that the lack of a common enemy, like the Soviet Union in the past, also weakens cooperation, as common enemies can force countries to stand together and encourage regional cooperation. Moreover, there are differences in visions of a grand strategy among EU countries, and there is also a lack of means to put any grand strategy into practice. The Union’s lame duck situations can be a result of this lack of vision. Furthermore, competition around influence and diverging incompatible interests among Member States can also tear countries apart. Finally, constructivist scholars would focus on people and communities in European disintegration. If the framework of our social environment is constructed, then deconstruction can also happen, which could result in disintegration. A good example of this is Brexit, which had a very important social backdrop, where the key core driver of the ‘leave’ decision was the strong presence of post-empire thinking in British society (Beaumont 2017; Dorling 2019). Such new deconstructions or reconstructions of cooperation can happen at all levels of European integration, both in the EU and at the domestic level. The change of mainstream values can even reach family life and all forms of collective living. If EU policies and Member States’ foreign policies are politicised, and they increasingly will be so in the future, identity politics in Member States will have greater relevance (Borzel and Risse 2018). If citizens elect far-right leaders, this will have an effect on EU and intraEU politics. Policy changes will greatly reflect this in Member States, and
