Economic instability, migration and asylum issues, re-emergence of nationalist movements across Europe have challenged the course of European integration. This prompted Europe's identity crisis and raised such important questions as: what is the European Union (EU) and what should it be? But there is a little agreement between European elites on what the EU is and what their countries’ roles in it should be (Schmidt, 2009). Every state developed a particular notion of Europe based on its historical experiences and geopolitical concerns that forms different sense of identity as member-states of the EU (Schmidt, 2009; Malmborg and Strath, 2002). These identities shape different visions regarding European integration and produce specific discourses on Europe. The paper introduced here focuses on the particularities of the political parties’ discourse on Europe in post-communist countries by analysing the Lithuanian case. The Lithuanian case remains under-explored and it is usually associated with an image of long-established support for European integration as getting back to Europe from which it was cut off in 1940 was directly related with the restoration of historical justice (Miniotaite, 2003). However, since the reestablishment of Lithuanian independence the meaning of ‘Europe’ has been the subject to change and we know little about what kind of ‘Europe’ national parties wanted and how their preferences were developed. Therefore, the main aim of this paper is to locate stances of Lithuanian political parties on the issue of European integration, as well as to depict changes of party attitudes over the two decades (1992–2012). The questions which this paper seeks to answer are: how much ‘Europe’ actually figures into parties’ national election manifestos and what parties says about the nature of the European polity and the policy objectives to be implemented by the EU. On the basis of Habermas’s (1993) typology of pragmatic, identity and value-related arguments, this paper shows that, although in principle there is a support to the European integration, political parties follow the logic of instrumental rationality containing strategic actions and specific domestic interest implementation in the united Europe. In this way, the issue of European integration serves as the justification to reach a specific party goal or its potential to meet particular interests in domestic politics. The paper argues that parties’ preferences on European integration might be influenced by the spatial positioning of a party along the political spectrum and its position towards the government as well as by state‘s national location (Marks, Ray & Wilson 2002). Using the quantitative content analysis as the main method, this paper traces the evolution of the European ideas in the discourse of Lithuanian parliamentary parties over time, thus giving a better understanding of how European integration actually works in the domestic arena.
