Vegetarian, faith-based, local and/or organic meals, flexible pricing, enrolment of unemployed children... Since the end of the 1990s, the issues associated with school catering have become contentious, in line with the more general politicization of food issues. This article examines the politicization of school canteens, based on two main hypotheses. Firstly, school canteen issues have become more visible and conflictual on a national scale because they are part of the two new cleavages that have developed within Western European political systems, between identity and cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and between ecology and productivism on the other. Secondly, the autonomy and diversity of local actors in implementation would explain the limited and differentiated influence of this national partisan politicization on the public debate concerning school catering at local level. To confirm these hypotheses, we analyze quantitatively (classification) and qualitatively two corpuses of over 10,000 press articles devoted to this subject, which allow us to distinguish between national and regional arenas of politicization; we also rely on five case studies in rural communes in the two départements, based on interview and observation material. These data confirm the hypothesis of national politicization through increased visibility and conflict, as well as association with new cleavages, but indicate that the effects of this politicization remain limited and differentiated at the local level.

Changes in public opinion and civil society over the last decade have shown that citizens, particularly in old EU Member States, have developed more complex attitudes towards European integration. While the European project was previously generally described as a teleological depoliticized project, aiming at building peace and comforting growth, different competing visions of the European project are nowadays acknowledged and surface among the public on occasions, like referendums or treaty negotiations. While EU official narratives are documented by studies on the European institutions or the visions of leaders and parties, their empirical analysis at the citizens' level is still fragmented. Using focus group data in four countries (France, Portugal, Italy and Belgium) and three social groups (21 group interviews), we provide a comparative qualitative answer to how citizens envision European integration. Our results show that, first, official narratives do not fail to reach citizens, but they are also loosened, contested, and do not systematically produce a sense of common belonging. Second, they highlight the importance of socio-economic contexts, as well as national and personal experience in the re-appropriation of these narratives.

Whilst the politicization of the EU has been increasingly studied over recent years, the analysis has been focusing mainly on political parties and media. Thus, although not completely overlooked, studies looking at EU politicization amongst individuals remain scarce. This article presents a new qualitative dataset from 21 focus groups conducted across social groups and four countries. It was designed to observe processes of (de-)politicization at citizens' level, how they talk about the EU and along which cleavages are their attitudes structured. This comparative research design sheds new light on discourses and opinions on Europe, mechanisms of politicization and political discussions.