Introduction
This book examines how political parties make difficult decisions as well as change their fundamental stances and alter polices in an increasingly complex environment of contemporary Europe. It does so by studying party responses to European integration, one of the most—if not the most—contentious issues in European politics. The book specifically aims to provide insight into how political parties respond to the EU by examining the party systems of two former Yugoslav states—Serbia and Croatia. The issue of European integration has been one of the most pervasive causes of intense political debates cutting across the whole political spectrum in both countries. As a result, some parties have consistently supported or opposed European integration despite conflicting relations with the EU and shifting domestic party politics, while the others have fundamentally changed their stances and, in most cases, became more Euroenthusiastic. Having been torn between Eurosceptic, often anti-European, ideological convictions and strategic electoral incentives to pragmatically respond to European integration, these parties underwent a rapid Damascene conversion rarely seen in the contemporary European party systems. This volte-face was primarily a strategically driven response to internal and external incentives in the context of dynamic party competition and a strong EU presence in candidate countries. It is recognised in the comparative literature that, though rarely, parties may undergo fundamental changes of ideology and stance on European integration. Examples are the British Labour Party in the 1980s and Greek PASOK in the 1990s. Yet, there are different opinions on what exactly drives party responses to European integration and why some parties turn into pragmatic advocates of the EU after a long history of seemingly firm opposition to it.
Parties are generally found to determine positions and change their stances in relation to the four key goals they constantly seek to balance (Müller and Strøm 1999), namely organisational survival, pursuing core policy preferences, securing votes and accessing executive office. Party positions on the EU therefore may draw on long-term goals—parties’ identities or core policy preferences—or more strategic, short-term goals—garnering votes and winning elections. A debate about the factors that motivate parties to take or shift stances on this issue reflects this pattern, with some form of party ideology or strategy most often cited (Sitter 2001, 2002; Kopecký and Mudde 2002; Rovny 2004; Steenbergen et al. 2007; Sitter and Batory 2008; Szczerbiak and Taggart 2008a, b). However, there remain a number of controversies about the exact mechanism by which these factors drive party responses to European integration. The book engages directly with these issues and the central research questions it addresses are: How do political parties adopt and why do they shift their positions on European integration? What are the most important factors that may induce their stances on the EU? More specifically, this study seeks to understand the nature of the relation between party views on the EU and their ideologies, and whether certain ideologies predispose parties to oppose European integration. Does the EU serve as a new dimension of political conflicts or are European issues accommodated into the existing patterns of domestic politics? In what ways are the issues stemming from the process of European integration strategically politicised or depoliticised? Which strategic incentives do parties face when determining positions on this issue in the context of dynamic electoral competition?
These dilemmas have been particularly pronounced in the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe . Political and economic transition to market-oriented liberal democracies have crucially shaped these societies and corresponding social cleavages (Kitschelt 1995; Markowski 1997; Kitschelt et al. 1999; Hloušek and Kopeček 2010) resulting in predominantly unstable political and party systems. The book is therefore about party responses to the EU and politics in a state of flux. It aims to draw a conclusion on how Central and East European parties form and alter positions in the milieu of post-communist political transition . The study specifically addresses the issue of how far the arguments derived from the Western European experience can travel to the East. In other words, does post-communist and post-conflict transition shape party views on the EU in any particular manner, different from Western Europe? Likewise, do post-communist parties express any ideological commitments or do they mostly act in response to electoral incentives, and how does this relate to their stances on the EU?
The book also seeks to draw more general conclusions about the impact of European integration on national party politics. Parties do not respond to the EU in a vacuum; they are rather influenced—to a varying degree though—by European integration (Grabbe 2003, 2006; Enyedi and Lewis 2006). The EU has been particularly strongly present in Central and Eastern European countries from the beginning of their post-communist transitions , in the context of their EU accession. Although well recognised as an important factor, the depth of the EU’s impact on party politics as well as the reach of its transformative power remain a contested issue. The external force of the EU has been perceived both as an important catalyst for significant pro-European changes (Pridham 2002, 2008; Vachudova 2012) and as a factor that has a relatively limited impact on parties (Mair 2000; Ladrech 2002; Haughton 2009; Szczerbiak and Bil 2009). This book thus aims to help us understand how the EU attempts to structure party contestation in candidate countries. In what way does it empower and legitimise some, while at the same time constrain and delegitimise other, political actors? Finally, how do domestic political actors react to EU presence and how do they mediate EU influence? These general issues constitute the central comparative framework that guides this study. The book thus examines how parties faced with the significant EU impact on party politics, in the context of unstable political and party systems, respond to the increasingly controversial process of European integration. In other words, do they seek to transform, oppose or indeed defy the EU when adopting and shifting their views on European integration?
These dilemmas are addressed in the following chapters by looking at the cases of Serbian and Croatian party politics and their relations with the EU. The book specifically examines how European issues have played out in Serbian and Croatian party politics, in the context of significant challenges brought by protracted European integration of the Western Balkans since 2000. In both countries, European issues have entailed difficult and all-important choices of whether these countries should join the EU, if so under which (political) conditions as well as whether there are alternatives to the EU and fundamental values underpinning its concept of social and economic development. The book seeks to shed light on how Serbian and Croatian parties adopted and shifted positions on these issues, and how European integration permeated the nature of these party systems and consequently framed party responses to the EU. To do so, the study employs a comparative method (which has rarely been used in the analysis of Central and Eastern European party systems) and draws on four explanatory variables derived from the comparative theoretical literature: party ideology and identity, party strategy, party relations with the general public and core voters, as well as transnational party linkages. It utilises an original dataset compiled through an extensive set of interviews with senior party officials, country experts and officials of the EU and European transnational party federations in addition to qualitative content analysis of parties’ programmatic documents.
There are three main reasons for the case selection. First, party positions on the EU in Serbia and Croatia have been very rarely examined in the existing literature and, as such, they merit an in-depth comprehensive study. Very little is known about why some mainstream Serbian and Croatian parties have fundamentally shifted their positions on the EU, and this is a surprise given the surge of studies of the positions taken on the EU by Central and Eastern European parties (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2001, 2002; Rohrschneider and Whitefield 2007; Batory 2008a, b, 2009). With a few notable exceptions (Fisher 2006; Haughton and Fisher 2008; Konitzer 2011; Vachudova 2012, Stojić 2013, 2017), the comparative literature has mostly ignored these ‘difficult’ cases on the European periphery, particularly the Serbian one. Thus, this book aims to bring into academic debate the under-researched, yet empirically rich, cases of Serbian and Croatian parties, and move forward the scholarly debate on the key determinants of party responses to European integration.
Second, these countries share key empirical features that render them suitable for comparative analysis. Both Serbia and Croatia assumed central roles in the former Yugoslavia, experiencing violent conflict following the federation’s disintegration. The two countries were candidates for EU membership and faced a strikingly similar set of challenges, including relations with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), significant radical right political forces opposing EU membership in addition to delayed and difficult democratisation and transformation due to the nature of authoritarian regimes in both countries throughout the 1990s. Nevertheless, there are some variances in these two cases, most notably a different level of integration with the EU. Unlike Serbia, Croatia more successfully pursued its EU membership bid, experiencing related political and economic transformation. The important difference also lies in the relative stability of Croatian and high volatility of Serbian party system. Significantly, Croatia solved crucial statehood issues in the late 1990s, while Serbia struggled with outstanding national issues well into the 2010s, crucially impeding its EU accession. These factors, therefore, provide a rich comparative basis for this analysis and allow for the discernment of the causal mechanism under investigation.
Third, the purpose of this study is theory testing which in principle requires peculiar cases that should be different from those on which the current literature based its postulations. Serbian and Croatian cases present a contrast to most other European states, readily allowing for the testing of existing theoretical propositions. Their specificity can be attributed to the fact that they were latecomers to the process of EU integration, complex relations with the EU—for instance, Western intervention in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the EU’s unofficial policy of isolating Croatia in the 1990s, the prevalence of statehood and identity issues, and the long-term negative impact of the post-Yugoslav wa...