To be or not to be within the European Community: the party debate and democratic consolidation in Greece

Meanwhile for Philippe Schmitter, consolidation means ‘converting patterns into structures’, with the actors coming ‘to regard the rules and resources of these emergent structures as given, if not desirable’.2 This suggests that the establishment of a new democratic system falls into two phases, with consolidation as the period of habituation to the structures set up during the transition from the previous regime.