Challenging Domestic Politics? European Debates of National Parliaments in France, Germany and the UK

Abstract

The thesis of a ‘politicisation’ of European integration has been influential both for research about the EU and comparative research on political parties. However, the debate triggered by this thesis remains elusive, inter alia, with regard to the thematic structure and the interaction modes of parties within controversies about EU multi-level governance. Against this background, the present article maps the thematic and party political dimension of controversies and asks for linkages between both dimensions in 31 parliamentary debates about the EU in France, Germany and the UK between 2005 and 2009. The empirical evidence from these debates suggests that a categorisation of different thematic aspects of debates can be used to map and explain the emergence of several types of polarisation between political parties, thus elucidating different variants of ‘politicisation’ of European affairs and working towards their systematic explanation.

Key words:

• Politicisation
• political debate
• national parliaments
• party politics

Notes

1. For the Bundestag, the analysis considers seven debates about meetings of the EU Council (on 17 March, 11 May and 14 December 2006, 14 June 2007, 19 June and 4 December 2008 and 19 March 2009), three debates about the legislative agenda of the EU Commission (on 15 November 2007, 11 April 2008 and 23 April 2009) and two debates about the Lisbon Treaty and its ratification in Germany (on 12 December 2007 and 26 August 2009). For the House of Commons, six debates about the EU Council (on 19 December 2005, 27 March and 18 December 2006, 12 March 2007, 20 October 2008 and 29 March 2009), two debates about European affairs (on 16 June and 3 December 2009) and two about the Constitutional Treaty and Lisbon Treaty (on 6 June 2005 and 22 October 2007) were considered. For the Assemblée Nationale, the analysis considers seven debates about the EU Council (on 22 March and 14 June 2006, 12 December 2007, 15 October 2008, 10 June and 15 October 2009 and 9 December 2010), one about the French presidency of the EU (on 19 June 2008) and one about the Lisbon Treaty (on 5 July 2007)

2. In the Chapel Hill survey, the overall position of parties towards the EU is expressed by a value between 1 (strong opposition to the EU) to 7 (strong support for the EU). Based on the values of the 2006 survey, the parties compared here are aligned in the left/right dimension in the following way: GDR (0.89), LINKE (1.27), SRC (2.89), GRUENE (3.09), SPD (3.55), LD (4.33), LAB (4.88), NC (5.33), CDU (6.36), FDP (6.64), CON (6.56), UMP (7.44), CSU (7.64). Within the pro-/anti-EU dimension, they are aligned in the following way: CDU (6.36), NC (6.33), FDP (6.27), LD (6.22), SPD (6.00), GRUENE (5.82), UMP (5.67), CSU (5.36), LAB (5.22), SRC (5.00), LINKE (3.27), CON (2.56), GDR (2.11). For three of the French parliamentary groups, this comparison had to use values assigned to affiliated political parties, as the parliamentary groups are not considered in the Chapel Hill survey. In this sense, the present analysis used values for the Union pour la démocratie francaise (UDF) for the NC parliamentary group, of the Parti Socialiste (PS) for the SRC parliamentary group and of the Parti Communiste Francaise (PCF) for the GDR parliamentary group.