ABSTRACT
Political consensus, cooperative federalism and an active role in European integration have been the hallmarks of post-war German politics, and not even the upheavals following the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification have changed this significantly. Yet the political environment of German political parties has been transformed considerably by the fundamental changes in the size and the powers of the European Union (EU) following the end of the Cold War. As a growing proportion of national legislation is now predetermined by the institutions of the EU, we would expect national political parties to feel pressures to adapt their formal structures and internal processes to the growing relevance of the supranational level of governance. Following the questions raised in the introduction to this volume, this chapter will investigate formal and informal changes within German political parties in response to the growing relevance of the EU. We expected that those who are directly involved in the European institutions of governance, such as Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), members of national governments and EU specialists will benefit from processes of organizational adaptation, while those confined to national or sub-national politics are likely to have suffered a loss of influence and power. The analysis covers all relevant German parties including the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Social Democrats (SPD), the Liberals (FDP), the Greens and the post-Communist Left Party, which called itself the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) until the 2005 Bundestag election campaign when it decided to join forces with the pro-welfare protest party WASG (Election Alternative for Jobs and Social Justice) and chose a name which would be less reminiscent of its Communist past.2
