ABSTRACT
The subject of this book is the relationship between national political parties and the European Union (EU).1 One of the prerequisites for a nation’s membership of the European Union is democracy; one of the characteristic features of West European democracy is party government. The countries that joined the EU in the 1980s, Greece (1981), Portugal and Spain (1986), had each been subject to recent dictatorships. Their return to democracy was not only a prerequisite to EU membership, the opposite was also true: membership of the EU was itself seen as the guarantee of democracy in these Mediterranean states. The entry of these three countries in the 1980s demonstrated that it was not the economies but the polities of the member states which constituted the decisive factor in the European Union’s identity. This remains true in the 1990s: it was the political convergence between the European Union and the applicant states of Norway, Finland, Sweden and Austria, just as much as their economic compatibility, which distinguished them from the politically unstable countries of the former Warsaw Pact. The political parties of all EU members and would-be members are therefore crucially implicated in the politics of Western Europe and the European Union.2
