Conflictual Integration: Political Parties, National Parliaments and Competing Visions of the European Union

Abstract

This panel explores the still under-researched role of national parliaments in the process of European integration, focussing mainly on political parties, parliamentary party groups and their influence on the crucial questions connected to EU-related decision making processes. Competing visions of the final form of the European Union are a matter of discussion not only on the supranational level (among the representatives of individual member states), but also and with ever stronger political accent on the national level in parliaments, parliamentary party groups and parties outside the parliament. On one hand, domestic political arenas co-stimulate the dynamic of the European integration; on the other hand, they also have to absorb this dynamic as a possible source of a new conflict. Both inter-party (i.e. within government coalition, government vs. opposition, among parties in opposition) and intra-party (e.g. dissenting MPs, party splitting, conflict between party leadership and members) conflicts are frequent and become ever more important with recent shift in the perception of the European integration from rather technical process to primarily political issue. In this panel, papers dedicated to the analyses of various facets of these problems will be included.

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