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Transnational Party Europeanization: EPP and Ukrainian parties

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Abstract

The article investigates the Europeanization of party politics by examining the accession of national parties to Europarties as a process of European regional integration. The advanced theoretical framework combines International Relations and Comparative Politics approaches and analyzes the dialectic relationship between the European People’s Party (EPP) and Ukrainian domestic parties based on a systemic analysis of party manifestos and official documents, as well as discourse analysis. The study argues that the EPP has a direct, though weak, influence on aspiring Ukrainian members because of the low incentives, low degree of clarity of membership requirements and context-specific factors. In these circumstances, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung represents an informal channel for the Europeanization of Ukrainian center-right parties. A main finding is that despite the low size of material incentives and the lack of EU membership, both Ukrainian parties and the EPP engage in transnational cooperation following political incentives and ideational arguments.

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Notes

  1. Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

  2. These criteria are relevant both for parties eligible for full EPP membership and for EPP observer members, the latter being the only available option for non-EU member parties.

  3. For regional parties, the criteria were to be applied regionally.

  4. They consisted of eleven titles and transitional provisions and aimed at adapting the legal statute of the EPP to the Regulation (EC) No. 2004/2003 on political parties at the European level and rules regarding their funding (OJ 2003 L 297).

  5. Here I refer to NSNU and RUKH, and not to the application of NU bloc right after the Orange Revolution, in January 2005, as this exceptional case will be discussed later on in this article.

  6. Article X of EPP Internal Regulations (2005).

  7. Phone interview with Galina Fomenchenko, EPP political advisor, 16 November 2009.

  8. Interview with G.Fomenchenko.

  9. Youth Organization of Reforms and Order Party.

  10. The small and numerous political parties (and ideologically diverse) have united around the Orange revolution leader V.Yushchenko and created a new (center-right) electoral bloc – Our Ukraine (NU) before the 2002 parliamentary elections. The other main Orange revolution political force was Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko (BYuT), which from ideological point of view was even more diverse than NU, including both left- and right-leaning parties. NU and BYuT became the winners of the Orange revolution against the electoral fraud from presidential elections of 2003 and defeated V. Yanukovich, a pro-Russian presidential candidate from Party of Regions and an ally of the former president L.Kuchma.

  11. The visit of EPP delegation, headed by Secretary General Antonio-Lopez Isturiz to Kiev in October 2003 to meet NU’s leader V.Yushchenko, marked the beginning of the bilateral relations. (Our Ukraine, 2010).

  12. Phone interview with Nico Lange, KAS director, Ukraine, 22 March 2010.

  13. It is worth stressing that after accepting NU as an observer member, W. Martens made a proposal of cooperation between the EPP and NU in creating a single party based on the NU bloc. As a result, in March 2005, the NSNU party was created.

  14. Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko.

  15. This information was also confirmed by the EPP advisor G.Fomenchenko during the interview.

  16. Batkivshchyna argued the promotion of a ‘new type of social ideology that combines social solidarity with individual freedoms and rights’ (Batkivshchyna, 1999).

  17. Interview with N. Lange.

  18. European Union of Christian Democrats, which in 1999 formally merged with the EPP.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Steven van Hecke, Simon Lightfoot, Benjamin von dem Berge, Geoffrey Pridham, David Hanley, the participants of 2011 EUSA conference, Boston, the USA (panel on ‘Euro-parties: Deepening versus Widening?’) and of the 2011 Workshop ‘Where now for Europarties: reflections post-Lisbon?’, Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Also, the author is grateful for the support of Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University in conducting this research.

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  1. Maastricht University, PO Box 616, Maastricht, 6200 MD, The Netherlands

    Natalia Timuş

  2. Sciences Po, Middle East and Mediterranean Campus, Menton, France

    Natalia Timuş

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Timuş, N. Transnational Party Europeanization: EPP and Ukrainian parties. Acta Polit 49, 51–70 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2013.25

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