EU Membership or Secularisation? Political Parties beyond the Process of European Integration in the Post-Communist Region

This paper examines the role of religion in the domestic debates on EU membership in the post-Communist region. As stressed in the literature, comparative research on the involvement of religious actors across societies is quite infrequent. Anna Grzymala-Busse (2012) suggests that the role of religion itself is fundamental to examine identity, the state and institutional actors in comparative political studies. This is critical in the post-Communist region where the repression of the Churches from the Communist regime froze affiliations, but especially in Poland did not halt people’s beliefs. Recent comparative studies (Ben-Nun Bloom, and Arkan 2012a, 2012b, 2013) underline that religiosity has an ambivalent political attitude and cannot be understood as one-facet phenomenon. Different components of religious attitudes can combine with different attitudes towards democracy and opposing views. This analysis suggests that the process of EU integration can trigger traditional values, when this is perceived as a threat to national values. This process can be compared to the experience of the Church in Western European countries after World War II. Carolyn Warner (2000) explained how the Roman Catholic Church could behave as an interest group, seeking to pursue a strategy and an alliance through political parties in order to establish its authority on the social and political debate. EU membership is likely to become a contested issue at the domestic level and the process of EU integration can be perceived as a threat, and become a turning point. This analysis explores how the Eurosceptic narrative developed and addresses the question whether a similar alliance and narrative can realise in comparative perspective.