Europarties After Enlargement

Organization, Ideology and Competition

E. Bressanelli

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137348852
• eBook ISBN: 9781137348869
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

By comparing the importance of representative democracy to the EU as enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty with the political systems in the EU's newest member states, this study explores whether representative democracy can really exist in an enlarged EU and explores the constraints and opportunities for political parties operating the in the EU.

Part I

Context and Theory

1

EU Democracy and Europarty Institutionalization

1. Introduction

This first chapter critically reflects on the development of the Europarties, by asking: which analytical dimensions need to be considered to fully understand, and then empirically capture, their consolidation? Under what conditions is the strengthening of the Europarties and the EU party system conducive to democracy? In order to properly address these questions, this chapter presents an argument for the use of the concept of party institutionalization. In particular, it elaborates on this concept as it has been defined in the context of the developing polities and, distinctively, by Randall and Svåsand (1999, 2002), making it ‘travel’ to the Europarties.

I find the concept of party institutionalization to be particularly useful for two main reasons. First, that of institutionalization is a multidimensional concept, which is specifically apt to capture the essence of political parties, multifaceted organizations par excellence (Klouwer, 2006). Institutionalization includes both a ‘structural’ dimension, referring to the consolidation of political parties as organizations and to their autonomy from other organizations, and a ‘value’ dimension, pointing to the ideological cohesion of their members. Second, the literature makes an explicit connection between party institutionalization and the consolidation of democracy, which seems to be particularly promising for the EU, especially in the light of the provisions contained in the Treaty of Lisbon (art. 10.1: ‘the functioning of the Union shall be founded on representative democracy’). This literature emphasizes that institutionalized parties are a necessary, but not sufficient condition for party-based democracy. What is needed is also some degree of competition among the parties, and, distinctively, among the parties at the ‘core’ of the party system. I will argue that this holds also for the case of the Union.

While this chapter introduces the concept of Europarty institutionalization, Chapter 2 presents a theoretical framework to assess the impact of enlargement. Only after disentangling the different meanings of institutionalization, clear propositions on the impact of enlargement can be formulated. Indeed, as this chapter makes clear, the very different predictions made by scholars on the consequences of enlargement on the Europarties can be largely explained by the under-theorized and simplistic treatment of the concept of institutionalization.

The rest of this chapter develops as follows. Section 2 provides important background information on the process of Central and Eastern enlargement and the new member countries, underlining the distinctive nature of the 2004/07 expansion of the EU. Section 3 reviews the literature on the impact of enlargement on Europarty institutionalization, highlighting its contradictions. Section 4 defines the concept of party institutionalization, drawing on the literature on developing polities, while Section 5 makes it ‘travel’ to the Europarties. Finally, Section 6 concludes.

2. Background: Enlarging the Union

The Central and Eastern enlargement, which was completed in 2007 with the accession of Bulgaria and Romania, was the fifth enlargement of the EC/EU, and the most important one in terms of size (see Table 1.1). On 1 May 2004, eight post-communist countries – the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia – and two Mediterranean states – Cyprus and Malta – entered the EU. The EU-15 suddenly became the EU-25. On 1 January 2007, with the inclusion of Bulgaria and Romania, the EU-25 was transformed into the EU-27. Never in its history had the EU undertaken such a broad expansion. The previous ‘waves’ were more limited, and the new members had, notwithstanding a few exceptions, similar cultural, economic, political and social systems.

The original six members of the EC (Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux countries) were joined by Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom in 1973, when the EC-6 became the EC-9. Since its accession, the UK has been regarded as an awkward partner of the EU. The UK did not share the permissive consensus which characterized the old members, with its public opinion and elites deeply divided on the issue of integration. Broadly speaking, the UK considered the Community as a free market with beneficial effects for the economy, whereas the other members embraced also, to different degrees, the idea of a political Europe. By including the UK, deepening the Union seemed to become a more difficult task.

Table 1.1 Enlargements of the European Community/European Union

Year	Countries	EU members
1973	Denmark, Ireland, the United Kingdom	9
1981	Greece	10
1986	Portugal, Spain	12
1995	Austria, Finland, Sweden	15
2004	Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary	25
2007	Bulgaria, Romania	27
2013	Croatia	28
...	Montenegro, Macedonia, Serbia	...

In the 1980s, the Community further enlarged to the Mediterranean countries. Greece became a member in 1981 and Portugal and Spain in 1986. The so-called ‘southern enlargement’ was an important factor in bringing back to democracy countries which had experienced years of dictatorship. The acceding countries had underdeveloped and close economies, and membership represented also a key factor behind their steady development. The three Mediterranean countries have since then been convinced supporters of the integration project, at least so long as their economies were growing, before the economic and financial crisis of the EU.

A further round of enlargement took place in 1995, when Austria, Finland and Sweden became members. The so-called ‘northern enlargement’ was the least problematic of all enlargements, with rapid and successful negotiations. The new members were prosperous countries, with established democratic systems, and had been partners of the EC/EU through the European Free Trade Agreement. Their inclusion introduced new issues in the EU agenda: for instance, a renewed attention for openness and transparency, and increased salience for environmental issues, human and civil rights and consumer protection (Nugent, 2004).

The 2004–07 round of enlargement was welcomed as a historical accomplishment for having reunited Europe after the end of the Cold War.¹ However, there are two features which set it apart from the previous enlargement rounds (see Nugent, 2004). First of all is its sheer size: the EU expanded its geographical area by about a third and its overall population grew by more than 100 million people (see Table 1.2). Several of the newly admitted countries were rather small states, such as the Baltic republics and Slovenia, but the EU also included large countries, in terms of both area and population, like Poland and Romania. The doubling of the Union’s membership from 15 to 27 members was a dramatic and abrupt change which produced a long and uneasy reflection on the reform of the EU institutions. Indeed, because of its reach and numerical extension, the 2004–07 enlargement has been meaningfully labelled as the ‘mega’ or ‘big bang’ enlargement. Second, enlargement towards the post-communist region brought into the Union much increased diversity in the cultural, economic, political and social spheres. Before 1989, the East and the West of Europe were two completely different worlds, with radically different cultures and ideologies. Even after 1989, however, the legacy of the past and transition towards market democracy did not make the ‘return to Europe’ of the post-communist countries an easy and uncontested accomplishment (Zielonka, 2007).

Table 1.2 Population and area of the Central and Eastern members (2004)

Country	Population (millions)	Area (1000 sq. km)
Bulgaria	7.6	111
Czech Republic	10.3	79
Estonia	1.3	45
Hungary	10.0	93
Latvia	2.3	65
Lithuania	3.4	65
Poland	38.1	313
Romania	21.5	238
Slovenia	2.0	20
Slovakia	5.4	49
Central Eastern Europe	101.9	1,078
EU-15	395.8	3,191
EU-27	497.7	4,269

Source: Eurostat (2013).

In sum, to put it succinctly, the mega enlargement was perceived as an unprecedented task for the Union both for its size and for the history of the new members. It represented a potential problem both as enlargement, as well as Eastern enlargement.

Preparing the Eastward enlargement

Given the landmark task of integrating 12, and potentially more, members, the process of enlargement towards Eastern Europe spanned more than a decade. While early contacts between the EC and the potential members started soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, a comprehensive strategy for preparing the post-communist countries for membership was prepared by the Commission in 1994, including strong financial support and association agreements. The broader political guidelines for enlarging the Union were defined in June 1993 at the European Summit in Copenhagen. Political, economic and administrative criteria for membership (the so-called ‘Copenhagen criteria’) were laid down. It was stated that ‘accession will take place as soon as a country is able to assume the obligations of membership by satisfying the economic and social conditions’, and the specific conditions included the stability of democratic institutions; respect for the rule of law, human rights and the protection of minorities; the existence of a functioning market economy; and the ability to take on the obligations of membership.

Thus, the early applications for membership (Hungary and Poland) were received by the Union in 1994 and, between 1995 and 1996, eight other applications followed. The European Commission was responsible for screening the progress made by the applicants and it published an annual report on the progress of the candidates. A first group of countries was identified in 1997 as likely candidates to meet the conditions for membership (the ‘Luxembourg group’) and was followed in 1999 by a second group (the ‘Helsinki group’). The Commission and the applicant countries worked together to overcome the problems associated with the targets set for membership and, by the end 2002, the eight countries joining the EU in 2004 were deemed ready for accession (Avery, 2004). Overall, the EU – with the aid of other international institutions – did much more to assist applicants in meeting membership conditions than in the previous enlargement rounds, and its efforts were rewarded by the fact that, in less than ten years, the countries emerging from communism developed both a democratic political system and a functioning market economy.

Besides the need to prepare the applicants for membership, the EU faced the challenge of preparing itself for enlargement. The Copenhagen Summit already explicitly dealt with the issue, underlying that ‘the Union’s capacity to absorb the new members, while maintaining the momentum of European integration, is also an important one’. Practitioners and politicians feared that the intake of 12 new members would place an enormous challenge on the capacity of the Union institutional apparatus to ‘survive’. During the Intergovernmental Conference leading to the Amsterdam Treaty (1997), concern and frustration about the inadequate institutional preparations for enlargement were strongly expressed. More concrete reforms were made with the Treaty of Nice, which stated among its key objectives that of preparing the Union’s institutions to enlargement (de Witte, 2003). Thus, Nice introduced upper limits to the size of the Commission and the EP, it extended the use of qualified majority voting in the Council and it laid down provisions for enhanced, flexible cooperation.

In December 2001, the Laeken Summit established the ‘convention on the future of Europe’, with the aim of discussing the institutional future of the enlarged EU. The link between enlargement and institutional reform was clearly in the mind of the convention delegates:

many of the contents of the draft constitution it produced had enlargement very much in mind, including: replacing the rotating six-month Council presidency between all member states by a new and more flexible system designed to give the post greater solidity; the right of the Council to appoint its own President by Qualified Majority Voting; the reduction in the number of Commissioners.

(Nugent, 2004, pp. 48–50)

The negative outcomes of the referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005, which rejected the treaty adopting a constitution for Europe, meant that the EU had to base its functioning still on the institutional rules defined at Nice. After almost ten years of constitutional debate, however, with the Treaty of Lisbon entering into force in December 2009, some of the long-awaited EU reforms were finally implemented.

A more diverse union

The second problematic point that scholars and commentators were keen to emphasize on the eve of the 2004–07 enlargement centred on the increased diversity that the inclusion of the post-communist countries was likely to ‘produce’. This issue was often raised with a more general question in mind: how much diversity can the EU accommodate? The new members were not only poorer than the average West European member, but they were also new and potentially more fragile democracies, with less developed legal and administrative structures and with markedly distinct national histories and cultures (see Zielonka and Mair, 2002; Zielonka, 2007).

Diversity between the two sides of the former divide was particularly strong for the large economic and social gap existing between the West and the East European countries. Table 1.3 illustrates this point by presenting several macroeconomic indicators on the 12 countries entering the EU in 2004–07, and comparing them with the member states of the EU-15. Indeed, some important differences clearly stand out. For instance, both at the time of enlargement and (still) in 2012 – the year for which the most updated data are available – the average GDP per capita (at purchasing power standards) in the new Europe was about half that of the EU-15. Of course, there is variation also within the group of new members – for instance, the average GDP per capita in 2004 ranged between 8,719 dollars in Bulgaria (min.) and 21,830 in Slovenia (max.) – but, leaving Portugal aside, the poorest country in Western Europe had a higher GDP per capita than the richest country in Central and Eastern Europe.

Besides GDP per capita, other economic indicators also capture different economic conditions in Western and Eastern member countries. The minimum wage (in purchasing power standards) is, on average, about three times bigger in the EU-15. Thus, especially in the ear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Context and Theory
• Part II: Empirical Analysis
• Conclusions: Europarties’ Prospects beyond the 2014 EP Elections
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index