Lots of research has been conducted on the politicization of the EU political system. Yet this research has been concerned almost exclusively with matters of ‘domestic’ EU governance, chiefly socioeconomic issues, and with the clear-cut question of how a Left-Right axis of competition interacts with an Integration axis. Much less has been said about the degree and directions of ideological contestation of EU foreign policy. This is a difficult test for the politicization thesis because foreign policy in general hardly lends itself to neat analyses of Left-Right outputs, because the EU institutions most characterized by ideological competition (e.g. European Parliament) have few powers in EU foreign policy, and because member-states still hold powerful sway over foreign policy issues. However, in national arenas foreign policy issues are structured by party competition as much as socioeconomic ones, so the question of ideological contestation of EU foreign policy issues deserves to be posed. In this paper I intend to examine the patterns of contestation and interaction between European political families (Europarties and EP Groups) over key EU foreign policy issues (transatlantic relations, EU-Russia relations, NATO, the pace of EU institutional buildup of CFSP and CSDP etc.). Much like research on socioeconomic matters, I will particularly examine the interplay between ideology and integration as structuring axes of CFSP preferences. Beyond this, I will assess institutional aspects of the relationship between party affiliation and CFSP, examining Europarty coordination and aggregation mechanisms in the EP and the Council on EU foreign policy issues. The issues of the ideological competition on foreign policy and the institutional practices that underpin it are important parts of broader theoretical questions about the future of party democracy on a European level, as well as about popular legitimacy and accountability in world politics.
