Abstract
The activity of the Europarties in promoting party development in post-Communist Europe has been viewed as their most impressive achievement to date. This article sets out and applies a comparative framework for analysing this activity, looking at both the general scope for party-building in new democracies and their actual record in Central and Eastern Europe. It concludes that the Europarties enjoyed exceptional scope there, benefitting from the EU’s general leverage over accession states and that their effects were not really marginal but nevertheless rather specific and could not be easily summarised as systemic.
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Notes
This was consistent with the Commission’s self-identity as a bureaucratic institution which did not meddle with (controversial) party affairs in national politics – despite the growing identification of individual Commissioners with their respective Europarties. Heads of EU delegations interviewed by the author in several CEE countries which joined in 2004 and 2007 admitted their staff collected press and documentary material on the parties but that they themselves made a point of keeping distant from those parties with an extremist reputation, such as at official receptions.
It has become the standard practice for 80–90 per cent of prime ministers from member parties to attend the EPP’s executive meetings (Pridham, 2008a).
The international secretaries of two of the three Slovak parties in the EPP interviewed in March 2004 in Bratislava said they spent 60 per cent and 80 per cent of their time on EPP business. The international secretary of the Hungarian party in Romania, the UDMR, said he spent each weekday at least 1 hour on TPC, including regular calls with EPP officials in Brussels, and in that week was working on his party’s representation in and on the draft agenda of the upcoming EPP congress (Pridham, 2005c).
These four conditions are examined in rather more detail in Pridham (2011).
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Pridham, G. Comparative perspectives on transnational party-building in new democracies: The case of Central and Eastern Europe. Acta Polit 49, 30–50 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2013.24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2013.24