Greece

This chapter examines the attitudes of Greek political parties towards the EU, as presented in their manifestos for the last four European Parliament elections. The 15-year period framed by the Euro-elections of 1994–2009 constitutes a discrete phase of the Greek European debate. By this point, Greece’s relationship to European integration was no longer a source of polarisation, as it had been prior to the country’s European Community accession in 1981. At that time, the parties of the right, centre and eurocommunist left had supported membership while the socialists and orthodox communists had adopted a hard eurosceptic line, entailing opposition both to integration as a matter of principle and to Greek participation in the process. In the country’s first European Parliament election, held ten months after EC entry, the socialists and communists together won 52 per cent of votes and seats. However, the climate changed rapidly over the following decade. Domestically, Community membership became an accepted part of the environment within which Greek parties had to operate while externally, the Gorbachev period of perestroika in the Soviet Union inaugurated the cataclysmic shifts in the international system which culminated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.