Driver, Conductor or Fellow Passenger? EU Membership and Party Politics in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

Although accession to the European Union created some expectations of change, an examination of party politics in the new member states of Central and Eastern Europe between 2004 and 2008 indicates that EU membership had only a limited impact on party organization and programmes across the region. Nonetheless, in the realm of party politics the EU acted as a constraint, a source of spill-over and a point of reference.

Introduction

The European Union's impact on the politics of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has provoked a large body of literature in recent years, with scholars’ opinions varying markedly. While some authors see the EU as a powerful ‘magnet’ and ‘causal behemoth’, others have expressed some caution when assessing the ‘transformative power’ of the Union.1 The vast bulk of this literature, however, has focused almost exclusively on the accession period and largely on policy and institutional change, rather than party politics,2 although some work has investigated the impact of parties’ (and other actors’) choices on preferences articulated at the European level.3 What discussion there has been of post-2004 developments in party politics has tended to focus upon the elevation to power of ‘populists’ and pariah parties,4 provoking some analysts into describing the region as ‘unhinged’.5

The impact of the EU on party politics in post-2004 CEE merits attention for four reasons. First, although this collection recognizes the contribution of Lewis and Mansfeldová's edited volume, The European Union and Party Politics in Central and Eastern Europe,6 that book was published soon after accession. While all member states had by then experienced elections to the European Parliament (EP), many of the countries studied had not held parliamentary elections when the contributions were written, precluding an analysis of party manifestos and campaigns before and after accession. Although we acknowledge that even our analysis based on four years of membership is an insufficient period to draw definitive conclusions, sufficient time has elapsed for us to reach more robust assessments. Second, some of the findings from the study of the post-accession period feed back into our understanding of how, when and why the EU had an impact on party politics during the accession period. Third, it highlights the interactions between the two levels of politics – the domestic and EU – yielding insights that feed into debates surrounding the impact of the European Union on party politics across the 27 member states. Fourth, it casts a light on factors shaping the development of party politics in the region, and indeed across a broader range of countries as well.

Following this introductory overview, the collection contains detailed case studies of party politics in Hungary (Agnes Batory), Poland (Aleks Szczerbiak and Monika Bil), Estonia (Allan Sikk), Slovenia (Alenka Krašovec and Damjan Lajh), the Czech Republic (Vít Hloušek and Pavel Pšeja) and Slovakia (Tim Haughton and Marek Rybář). Four member states from Central and Eastern Europe are not covered in as much depth. Romania and Bulgaria were excluded given their later date of entry into the EU, whereas pressure of space precludes separate chapters devoted to Latvia and Lithuania. Nevertheless, all four countries are included in Whitefield and Rohrschneider's comparative contribution examining issue stances, salience and programmatic coherence across all ten new EU member states from CEE.

No single, rigid methodological framework was imposed on the contributors for two reasons. First, just as golfers recognize that a single club is ill-suited for all the shots required to get the ball from the tee to the hole, so we acknowledge that no single methodological super-club can provide a satisfactory answer by itself. Second, we recognize that this is an emerging field into which not just our findings, but our approaches (detailed studies of party programmes and manifestos, analysis of the media, semi-structured interviews and expert surveys), can feed into debates about the most suitable tools to use in order to assess the influence of the EU on party politics. Hence, the collection contains both in-depth country case studies drawing on qualitative approaches and a region-wide quantitative contribution based on an expert survey. Nonetheless, in order to achieve coherence and cohesion contributors were asked to consider the following seven questions designed to assess the impact of EU membership on party organizations, programmes and systems:

1.	Has EU membership had any impact on the division of labour within political parties? That is, what is the role of European specialists and has this changed since accession?
2.	Has EU membership had any impact on the distribution of power within parties?
3.	Have parties used the European issue more in inter-party competition since EU accession?
4.	Has the prominence of European issues in party programmes increased since EU accession?
5.	Have links with European party federations or European Parliament groupings had a greater impact on parties since EU accession?
6.	Are there any other areas where we can detect the impact of EU membership on political parties and policy discussions in the respective countries and why?
7.	How can the role played by the EU during both the accession and membership periods be best conceptualized?

Expectations of Change

As Whitefield and Rohrscheider note in their contribution, we can theorize the impact of the European Union on political parties in two ways. The first stream of thought, what they label ‘dynamic representation’, is rooted in an appreciation of the dynamism of post-communist politics. Given the rapid changes in the external environment of politics experienced by CEE, including economic and political integration associated with EU membership, and the fact that political parties in the region are themselves relatively new and organizationally ‘in flux’, we might expect significant change and adaptation on the part of individual parties and the party system. Indeed, experience of integration (especially negative experiences) may reduce support for membership of the EU – which was largely a consensus item prior to joining7 – and may provoke parties to package their appeals differently. In line with this approach – and following the work of Ladrech8 on the older member states – we might expect that membership of, and interaction with, EU-level institutions may generate some organizational changes such as a role for MEPs in party bodies.

Whitefield and Rohrschneider, however, also posit an alternative perspective, which draws on the broader comparative party literature, producing expectations of stability rather than change. This view suggests that parties need to present ‘coherent and stably coherent’ policy packages to voters to help the development of party identification, and also recognizes the barriers and costs that produce incentives to parties (and to voters) to maintain stability in their issue stances and programmatically. Hence the expectation here, in line with the work of Peter Mair on Western Europe,9 is of limited impact on policy stances and national party competition before and after EU entry.

The level of expectations of change is likely to be rooted in one of these two perspectives, but in addition contrasts can be made between party organization and party programmes. Indeed, there are two channels for the EU to have an impact: institutions (including Europarties, MEPs and so on) and the policy agenda. In line with the work of Poguntke and his associates, we did not expect to see much of an impact in organizational terms (although we did expect to see minor changes, such as the incorporation of MEPs into party organs), but we did foresee some impact in policy terms given the fact the EU is involved in virtually every policy area.10

Moreover, the literature examining the Europeanization of parties in Western Europe hints at possible varieties across CEE. For example, the study by Poguntke and colleagues suggested that we would expect to see the intra-party power of EU specialists strengthen in large parties and large countries. Those authors maintain that ‘the argument about EU specialists presupposes a degree of organisational differentiation that will be absent in many smaller countries (and smaller parties in large countries), where it is more realistic to expect that party elites will double as EU specialists’.11 We might, therefore, expect to see a different impact in, for instance, the Estonian and the Polish cases.

Research into the role of trans-national party actors suggested that they played a significant role during the accession process.12 Spirova, for instance, suggested that ‘even though Europarties have had only a limited and indirect impact on national party systems in the older member countries … their involvement in the East has been more pronounced’. There is logic to expecting the role of trans-national party actors to be significant even after accession. We might presume that the links created with Western parties and membership of international party organizations – what Ágh calls ‘external Europeanization’13 – would intensify as the parties became full members of groupings in the European Parliament.

More broadly, as Batory argues in her contribution, there are several reasons for expecting the impact of the EU to gain in influence after accession. Indeed, once a country becomes a member state, its engagement with various EU structures intensifies. Involvement in Council decision making, parliamentary scrutiny and EP elections, for instance, all may have knock-on effects on the internal balance of power in parties and the attention paid to European issues reflected in party programmes and manifestos. Such expectations of change in the policy area, however, are tempered by questions of size. As Sikk notes in his contribution, given the recognition of Estonia's clout at the EU level amongst its politicians, it is more of an EU policy-taker rather than an EU policy-maker. Nonetheless, following the expansion a number of issues, including agriculture, energy security and relations with Russia, now have a distinctly European flavour.

The preceding discussion, therefore, highlights that our expectations are likely to be tied to whether we see party politics in CEE as dynamic and fluid or more stable, although our analysis also feeds back into this debate by identifying elements of stability and change. Moreover, the literature also provokes different expectations of impact on party organizations, party programmes and the role of trans-national party actors. In order to provide a more robust analysis of the impact of the EU membership on party politics, contributors analysing particular countries were asked to assess the level of impact (high, medium or low) using the framework in Table 1.

TABLE 1
FRAMEWORK: LOW IMPACT AND HIGH IMPACT BENCHMARKS

Dimension	High	Medium	Low
Role of European Policy Specialists (EPS) within party decision-making	EPS involved in all major policy areas	EPS only involved in explicitly ‘European issues’	EPS marginalized in all major policy areas
Impact on the distribution of power within parties	Those holding European posts (i.e. MEPs) hold majority of top positions or are most influential in the party	MEPs incorporated ex officio on to party governing bodies	No MEPs etc. on governing bodies
Use of the European issue in inter-party competition	One of the top two or three most-often invoked themes	One of the top ten themes	Barely mentioned; whenever mentioned only in conjunction with other themes
Prominence of European issues in party programmes	One of the major themes of the manifesto in terms of both space and salience (i.e. prominence in list of key policy areas and large amount of space devoted to it)	Chapter devoted to the EU, but not placed in a prominent position in the manifesto	Occasional mentions, or just a few lines in the manifesto
Impact of links with European party federations or EP groupings	Clear evidence of significant policy borrowing from such groups	Evidence of policy borrowing only on explicitly ‘European issues’	Very little evidence of any impact

As Batory discusses in her contribution, any attempt to assess the impact of the EU raises the perennial problem of causality. Indeed, scholars assessing the impact of the EU on Western Europe have acknowledged the difficulties in separating out analytically the impact of Europe from national-level explanatory factors.14 We recognize that the five themes highlighted in Table 1 do not constitute the whole picture of potential and actual impacts of the EU; however, using research techniques rooted in the tradition of ‘process tracing’15 that were employed so effectively when studying conditionality,16 we can examine the causal chains and mechanisms.

Party Organization

EU membership has had some impact on party organization. In most cases there were formal changes. Thanks to the European Parliament (EP) elections, the most notable change in terms of party organization was the acquisition of MEPs and the linked changes to party statutes to incorporate MEPs ex officio into decision-making bodies, but some parties such as Civic Platform and the League of Polish Families also created new specialist EU party bodies. Occasionally the 2004 EP elections prompted organizational innovations. The Social Democrats in Slovenia, for example, established a new post of a ‘permanent deputy leader’ following the party president's election to the European Parliament.

The formal incorporation of MEPs into formal party bodies, however, appears to have had a limited impact on the distribution of power, although there were some exceptions. For instance, as Szczerbiak and Bil note, MEP participation in the party's parliamentary caucus and in national and regional boards brought an increased role for European policy specialists within the Civic Platform party in Poland, and led to the establishment of a new post of deputy secretary responsible for international affairs, who was in charge of a small office dealing with contacts with the party's MEPs and Civic Platform's sister parties.

Thanks in no small part to the size of the countries and the relative small number of MEPs for each country, even the ex officio institutional changes did not in practice have an effect for many parties that failed to win any seats in the EP. In some cases, as Sikk notes in the case of Estonia, where a party has MEPs they were perceived as ‘ambassadors to Brussels’ rather than as domestic politicians. Where MEPs do appear to have had influence in their parties, such as the Hungarian politician Jozsef Szájer (of Fidesz), their impact seems to owe more to their respective standing in the party in general than to their position in the European Parliament. In other words, the impact of MEPs, as Batory argues, is contextual rather than systematically related to the importance of Europe or European issues to their respective parties.

Krašovec and Lajh's research indicates that in Slovenia the younger generation of party politicians are much more active in the field of EU issues. This finding may provide a pointer to the salience of European experts in the future, but it may also indicate that demonstrating a mastery of EU politics (which is perhaps easier for younger, Western-educated party politicians) is merely a useful way up the internal ladder of politics.

The most striking impact of EU membership in terms of party organization, however, has not been a change, but the continuation of a trend in evidence during accession: consolidating the centralization of power and top-down decision making by providing the party leadership – in particular cabinet ministers – with an arena of control over which the party organization exercises little influence. Although this finding fits in well with an analysis of parties in CEE that would stress their novelty and elite-creation, such a concentration of power has also been observed in the longer-standing member states.17

Party Policy

The present contributions indicate that EU issues have not been prominent in party programmes. Hloušek and Pšeja's detailed statistical analysis of the Czech case, for instance, demonstrates clearly that the relative importance of EU-related issues in the 2006 election was lower than four years previously; a finding echoed in many of the contributions. This is unsurprising for two reasons. First, as Batory argues, prior to entry EU membership represented a historic and ‘civilizational’ choice, whereas since enlargement the EU ‘acquired the character of a series of largely technical questions’. The issues most voters care about (taxation, health care, education, law and order, pensions and social security) are ‘largely beyond the purview of the Union’.18 Those things the EU does do – such as monetary policy, market creation and regulation – do not tend to set voters’ pulses running. Second, even though membership impinges on a range of different policy areas, the EU is still treated largely as a foreign policy issue. Indeed, it is striking in the statistical analyses of the Czech Republic, for instance, that the EU is mentioned much more frequently in the field of foreign and security policy than in many other policy areas, indicating that the EU is perceived as an actor external to the domestic political arena.

Whitefield and Rohrschneider's analysis of party positions indicates that entry has had little impact on party stances, but a far greater impact on the salience of issues concerning integration. Drawing on the ‘dynamic representation’ and comparative party traditions mentioned above, they maintain that the expert survey highlights ‘the central importance of distinguishing between stability that is expressed in issue positions and programmes and dynamic responsiveness expressed through motivated shifts in issue salience’. In contrast to issue positions that remained ‘tightly packaged’ despite entry into the EU, ‘salience remains clearly multi-dimensional and more subject to change over time’. Their finding for the whole region appears bolstered by Szczerbiak and Bil, who find that the salience of EU issues in the programmes of Polish parties varies both between parties and over time. Civic Platform, for instance, devoted much more space to EU policy in its 2007 manifesto than two years earlier, but this change in emphasis was mirrored by the Law and Justice party, which devoted more space to this issue in the party programme in 2005 than in 2007.

Most parties in the region, in line with public opinion, remain broadly supportive of their country's membership of the European Union, although there are parties that have articulated eurosceptic sentiments. In particular, parties of the centre-right and the right have expressed their concerns, often rooted in a Christian critique of the liberalism and what they see as the permissiveness of the EU, but also in the case of the Civic Democratic Party in the Czech Republic in a Thatcherite critique of the over-regulation and perceived socialism of the European Union.19 Many parties that we might not instinctively see as enthusiastic Europeans, such as the xenophobic Slovak National Party, have articulated positive views of the European Union, but their support appears to depend on the flow of EU funds to Slovakia. The immediate possibility of losing office, and the longer-term scenario that Slovakia might become a net contributor to EU funds, are both likely to diminish their enthusiasm.

Trans-national Parties

The country studies in this collection argue that there is little evidence of trans-national parties having an impact after accession, although there were some notable exceptions. As Szczerbiak and Bil argue, while membership of European party federations had a marked impact in some parties such as Civic Platform and the Democratic Left Alliance, in others including the Polish Peasant Party, Self-Defence and the League of Polish Families the impact appeared minimal. Szczerbiak and Bil see the size of the EP delegation and the choice of grouping as being significant here, but in the case of the League of Polish Families and Self-Defence the reason was more fundamental: neither was a member of any EP grouping or European party federation.

There is some acknowledgement of policy borrowing in the region. The Czech Christian and Democratic Union, for example, explicitly referred to the EPP programme as one of the major sources of its own inspiration, but across CEE it seems that borrowing may be less on the European level than from other European parties. Fidesz in Hungary, for example, drew inspiration from Forza Italia, and Civic Platform in Poland drew on links with the German Christian Democrats. It may therefore be more helpful to refer to bilateral rather than trans-national borrowing.

In Slovakia, trans-national parties played some role in domestic politics, largely by providing what Haughton and Rybář term a ‘badge of approval’. Nonetheless, there were limits to the power of external approval to affect internal developments. Despite the howls of discontent emanating from the Party of European Socialists (PES) after the 2006 elections, for example, Smer-SD decided to form a government which included the xenophobic nationalists of the Slovak National Party. Robert Fico's party was let back into PES in 2008 after the leader of the Nationalists, Ján Slota, signed a letter condemning all aspects of discrimination, showing perhaps some impact of EU membership in affecting the discourse; but, as Haughton and Rybář argue, the letter should be seen as a gesture that could be used as an attempt to save face on the part of PES rather than demonstrating a change in the values and programme of the Slovak National Party.

The badge of approval and increased stature that can be acquired by becoming a member of a trans-national grouping did not play a role in Slovakia alone. As Sikk notes, in Estonia membership of such bodies has been perhaps more significant and visible in the case of parties that are not themselves represented in the European and national parliaments such as the Greens, the Left Party and the Christian Democrats. These ‘emerging or marginal parties’ have attempted to make use of such links at the European level to send out signals to the electorate about their significance and standing.20

Role of the EU in Domestic Party Politics

Table 2 summarizes the impact of EU membership on various dimensions of parties’ activities and identities. In short, EU membership appears to have had a limited impact on party organization and programmes, but the contributions to this collection also shine a spotlight on the role played by the European Union in domestic party politics. The EU acts as a constraint, a source of spillover and a point of reference.

TABLE 2
GENERAL ASSESSMENT OF EU MEMBERSHIP ON PARTIES: LOW, MEDIUM OR HIGH IMPACT

Dimension	High/Medium/Low
Role of European Policy Specialists (EPS) within party decision-making	Low, but variations linked to size and the personalities of the EPS
Impact on the distribution of power within parties	Low to Medium, but some variations linked to size and the personalities of the EPS
Use of the European issue in inter-party competition	Low, but themes invoked to highlight (in)competence
Prominence of European issues in party programmes	Low, but EU funds frequently mentioned
Impact of links with European party federations or EP groupings	Low to Medium, but some stark variations within countries such as Poland and Slovenia

The EU acted as a constraint in two ways. First, although the various countries joined the EU on 1 May 2004, integration was not complete. Two major tasks remained: joining the Schengen zone and adopting the single currency. In terms of the latter, in particular, the need to fulfil the Maastricht criteria represented a continuation of conditionality – albeit one arguably more pressing in the smaller member states whose more trade-dependent economies stood more to lose outside the eurozone.21 Second, and more generally, membership played a limiting role, setting out the broad parameters of political possibility.

Nonetheless, accession also loosened the constraints. While there is some evidence that the EU played some role in the formation and termination of coalitions during the process of accession,22 the formation of the coalition between Law and Justice, Self-Defence and the League of Polish Families in Poland in 2005, and that between Smer-SD, HZDS and SNS in Slovakia in 2006 – both of which brought into government politicians with policies and attitudes not suited to liberal palates in Brussels – indicated that external pressure on member states was limited.23

Second, EU membership provided a change of context and a switch in status from that of object to being the subject of decision-making. Membership brought opportunities but also new challenges, and changed the framing of debates, all of which were reflected in party programmes. The use and misuse of EU funds, and the simple ability to tap into such funds, for example, were significant themes in party politics in Lithuania, Slovakia and other new member states.24 Moreover, the large numbers of Latvian citizens who had taken up the possibility of emigration to the UK and Ireland became a significant issue in Latvia's 2006 parliamentary elections.25 More broadly, the change of context gave a distinctive EU spin to policy challenges, most notably in the realm of energy. Even arch-Atlanticists such as the Czech deputy prime minister for European affairs, Alexandr Vondra, called for ‘European solutions’.26 This appeal – and indeed Vondra's more enthusiastic attitude towards the EU than he had previously expressed – may have been linked to his country's then approaching presidency of the EU.27 Indeed, as the case of Slovenia demonstrates, holding the presidency of the European Council can have a significant impact on politics. In May 2007, many but not all Slovenian parties signed an agreement on co-operation among parties designed to ensure that the country's presidency of the EU in the first half of 2008 was not derailed by domestic party bickering.

Third, the EU played a role as a reference point. At times this took the form of the evocation of European standards, such as when Slovakia's prime minister trumpeted his new labour code in 2007 as ‘European’, but it was also deployed in debate. In the 2007 parliamentary election campaign in Poland, for instance, Europe entered into the debate largely as a means of highlighting an individual or party's effectiveness and competence or the ineffectiveness and incompetence of opponents. This use of Europe as a ‘valence’ issue helps explain the prominence of Schengen and the euro in political discourse in Slovakia after the 2006 elections, although the frequent reference to these themes is also intimately linked to the completion of integration mentioned above.

Conclusion

This collection raises a number of broader lessons and highlights avenues for further research. I will briefly mention a finding of broader import before concluding by sketching out a possible line for future research and an attempt to encapsulate the impact of the EU in metaphor.

Placing the contributions into a broader perspective, in particular comparing and contrasting the findings with the work of other scholars working on the longer-standing member states, we can see that the impact on the new member states largely resembles the impact in the older member states,28 indicating perhaps that increasingly we should be examining all the member states together rather than focusing attention on the new. Second, and linked to this point and the different expectations sketched out by Whitefield and Rohrschneider, the impact of EU membership indicates that perhaps the comparative politics model, with its expectations of stability, may be a more appropriate framework in which to analyse political parties than the dynamic representation model stressing the fluidity of party politics in Central and Eastern Europe.

EU membership has clearly had an impact on government policy. The ever-expanding acquis communautaire, participation in meetings of the council of ministers, and similar forms of involvement force governments to react and engage daily with the EU level of politics. It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that we see the direct impact of EU membership more markedly in this field. Parties play a role in government and in some ways can be seen, as Pšeja puts it, as ‘carriers of Europeanization’.29 Indeed, the studies of Slovakia and Slovenia highlight that parties that have spent time in government tend to devote much more space in their party programmes and manifestos and place greater influence on European issues than those outside government, perhaps highlighting a recognition by party politicians of the impact of the EU on the shaping of government policy. Given this finding, we encourage further research along the lines proposed by Haughton and Rybář in their contribution. Their distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ Europeanization seeks not just to examine party organization and party policy, but to assess the extent of isolated or coordinated change across a broader set of arenas including the legislature, the executive and civil society.

The contributions to this volume employ a range of different metaphors ranging from the ‘joker in the pack’ (Krašovec and Lajh) and ‘a tool in the toolbox’ (Haughton and Rybář) to the ‘dog that did not bark’ (Batory); but perhaps we can best encapsulate the role of the European Union in a transport metaphor, so frequently employed in coverage of European integration where integration ‘trains’ are described as ‘leaving the station’ and countries are thought to be at risk of ‘missing the boat’.

The EU does not appear to be the driver or navigator of party politics. The direction of travel is shaped by forces other than the EU. Rather, the EU's impact and role is better encapsulated in the metaphor of the conductor or the fellow passenger. In the former case, the conductor ensures that the passengers have paid the fare and abide by the rules (no smoking, and making sure no dirty boots are placed on the seats) by imposing sanctions or applying moral pressure. This metaphor encapsulates the role of the EU in politics more broadly, but in terms of party politics it may be better to see the EU's influence as a lively, talkative and large fellow passenger in the compartment, seeking to influence the other passengers’ behaviour through engagement and force of argument, and by offering food and drink and the loan of reading material.

This collection does not claim to be the last word on the subject. Many phenomena visible today may be ‘short-lived while other, longer-lasting consequences are not yet discernible’,30 hence all we can provide at this stage are provisional conclusions. After more years have elapsed and more elections have taken place we shall be able to judge whether the first four years were exceptional or indicative of an emerging trend.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Earlier versions of the papers in this volume were presented at the ECPR General Conference in Pisa in September 2007 and at a Centre for East European Language Based Area Studies (CEELBAS) funded workshop in London in May 2008. I thank the contributors for their input, willingness to respond to constructive criticism, and patience. We are grateful to all those who commented on the papers, especially Zsolt Enyedi, Seán Hanley, Paul Lewis and Ingrid van Biezen who acted as discussants at the London workshop. Thanks are also extended to Agnes Batory, Vít Hloušek, Pavel Pšeja, Allan Sikk and Aleks Szczerbiak for comments on a draft of this paper and to Harvard University's Center for European Studies for providing such a congenial location to edit the collection and write this opening contribution.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tim Haughton

Tim Haughton is Senior Lecturer in the Politics of Central and Eastern Europe at the University of Birmingham. He is currently undertaking research on party politics in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, and the electoral fortunes of ‘new’ and ‘populist parties’ and has embarked on an ESRC-funded project examining National Preference Formation in three new EU member states: Slovakia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic.

Notes

See, for example, Milada Anna Vachudova and Liesbet Hooghe, ‘Postcommunist Politics in a Magnetic Field: How Transition and EU Accession Structure Party Competition on European Integration’, Comparative European Politics, Vol.7, No.2 (2009), pp.179–212; Milada Anna Vachudova, ‘The European Union: The Causal Behemoth of Transnational Influence on Postcommunist Politics’, in Mitchell A. Orenstein, Stephen Bloom and Nicole Lindstrom (eds.), Transnational Actors in Central and East European Transitions (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburg Press, 2008); Wade Jacoby, The Enlargement of the European Union and NATO: Ordering from the Menu in Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelemier (eds.), The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2005); Heather Grabbe, The EU's Transformative Power: Europeanization Through Conditionality in Central and Eastern Europe (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006); Geoffrey Pridham, Designing Democracy: EU Enlargement and Regime Change in Post-Communist Europe (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005); Tim Haughton ‘When Does the EU Make a Difference? Conditionality and the Accession Process in Central and Eastern Europe’, Political Studies Review, Vol.5, No.2 (2007), pp.233–46.

Even some accounts that do look at the Europeanization of political parties are focused mostly on the accession period: for example, John Ishiyama, ‘Europeanization and the Communist Successor Parties in Post-Communist Politics’, Politics and Policy, Vol.34, No.1 (2006), pp.3–29; on trans-national parties see, for example, Giorgia Delsodato, ‘Eastward Enlargement by the European Union and Transnational Parties’, International Political Science Review, Vol.3, No.2 (2002), pp.269–89; Abby Innes, ‘Party Competition in Post-Communist Europe: The Great Electoral Lottery’, Comparative Politics, Vol.35, No.1 (2002), pp.85–104; and Paul G. Lewis, ‘EU Enlargement and Party Systems in Central Europe’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, Vol.21, No.2 (2005), pp.171–99.

See, for example, Tim Haughton and Darina Malová, ‘Open for Business: Slovakia as a New Member State’, International Issues and Slovak Foreign Policy Affairs, Vol.12, No.2 (2007), pp.3–22.

See, for example, the collections of articles under the title ‘Is East-Central Europe Backsliding?’, Journal of Democracy, Vol.18, No.4 (2007); and Ol'ga Gyárfášová, Grigorij Mesežnikov and Daniel Smilov (eds.), Populist Politics and Liberal Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe (Bratislava: Institute for Public Affairs, 2008).

Vlad Sobell, Central Europe Unhinged (London and Hong Kong: Daiwa Institute of Research, 2006).

Paul G. Lewis and Zdenka Mansfeldová (eds.), The European Union and Party Politics in Central and Eastern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006).

Robert Rohrschneider and Stephen Whitefield, ‘Political Parties, Public Opinion and European Integration in Post-Communist Countries: The State of the Art’, European Union Politics, Vol.7, No.1 (2006), pp.141–60. However, there were some eurosceptic parties: see Paul Taggart and Aleks Szczerbiak, ‘Contemporary Euroscepticism in the Party System of the EU Candidate States of Central and Eastern Europe’, European Journal of Political Research, Vol.43, No.1 (2004), pp.1–27.

Robert Ladrech, ‘Europeanization and Political Parties: Towards a Framework for Analysis’, Party Politics, Vol.8, No.4 (2002), pp.389–403.

Peter Mair, ‘The Limited Impact of Europe on National Party Systems’, West European Politics, Vol.23, No.4 (2000), pp.27–51.

Thomas Poguntke, Nicholas Aylott, Robert Ladrech and Kurt Richard Luther, ‘The Europeanisation of National Party Organisations: A Conceptual Analysis’, European Journal of Political Research, Vol.46, No.6 (2007), pp.747–71.

Ibid.

See, for instance, Geoffrey Pridham, ‘Patterns of Europeanization and Transnational Party Cooperation: Party Development in Central and Eastern Europe’, in Paul G. Lewis (ed.), Party Development and Democratic Change in Post-Communist Europe (London: Cass, 2001), pp.178–98; Geoffrey Pridham, ‘Complying with the European Union's Democratic Conditionality: Transnational Party Linkages and Regime Change in Slovakia, 1993–1998’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol.51, No.7 (1999), pp.1221–44; and Maria Spirova, ‘Europarties and Party Development in EU-candidate States: The Case of Bulgaria’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol.60, No.5 (2008), pp.791–808.

Attila Ágh, Eastern Enlargement and the Future of the EU27 (Budapest: Together for Europe Research Centre, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2007).

Tapio Raunio, ‘Why European Integration Increases Leadership Autonomy within Political Parties’, Party Politics, Vol.8, No.4 (2002), pp.405–25.

Alexander George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

Frank Schimmelfennig, Stefan Engert and Heiko Knobel, International Socialization in Europe: European Organizations, Political Conditionality and Democratic Change (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006).

Raunio, ‘Why European Integration Increases Leadership Autonomy’.

Anand Menon, Europe: The State of the Union (London: Atlantic Books, 2008), p.220.

Seán Hanley, The New Right in the New Europe: Czech Transformation and Right-wing Politics, 1989–2006 (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p.191.

See Sikk's contribution to this volume.

Juliet Johnson, ‘The Remains of Conditionality: The Faltering Enlargement of the Euro Zone’, Journal of European Public Policy, Vol.15, No.6 (2008), pp.826–41.

The most striking example in the region was the 1998–2002 coalition in Slovakia: see Geoffrey Pridham, ‘Coalition Behaviour in New Democracies of Central and Eastern Europe: the Case of Slovakia’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, Vol.18, No.2 (2002), pp.75–102.

Szczerbiak, ‘“Social Poland” Defeats “Liberal Poland”?: The September–October 2005 Polish Parliamentary and Presidential Elections’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, Vol.23, No.2 (2007), pp.202–32; Tim Haughton and Marek Rybář, ‘A Change of Direction? The 2006 Parliamentary Elections and Party Politics in Slovakia’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, Vol.24, No.2 (2008), pp.232–55.

Algis Krupavicius, ‘Lithuania’, European Journal of Political Research, Vol.46, Nos.5–6 (2007), pp.1019–31 (p.1027).

Jānis Ikstens, ‘Latvia’, European Journal of Political Research, Vol.46, Nos.5–6 (2007), pp.1012–8.

Alexandr Vondra, ‘Energy as a Topic of the Czech EU Presidency’, speech delivered in Prague, 23 May 2008, available at <http://www.vlada.cz/scripts/detail.php?id=38402>, accessed 25 June 2008.

Tim Haughton, ‘For Business, For Pleasure or For Necessity? The Czech Republic's Choices for Europe’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol.61, No.8 (2009), pp.1371–92.

Poguntke et al., ‘The Europeanisation of National Party Organisations’.

Pavel Pšeja, contribution to the discussion at Centre for East European Language Based Area Studies workshop, London, May 2008.

Zsolt Enyedi and Paul G. Lewis, ‘The Impact of the European Union on Party Politics in Central and Eastern Europe’, in Lewis and Mansfeldová (eds.), The European Union and Party Politics, pp.231–50 (p.245).