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The Importance of Shared Ideas and Common Ideology in the Evolution of the European Parliament, 1952-1979

Integration
Political Sociology
Political Ideology
Activism
European Parliament

Abstract

The European Parliament (EP) is today one of the most powerful actors at EU level. However, it was not intended to be more than a consultative assembly at the founding of the European Communities in the 1950s. This paper argues that the swift evolution of the EP into a co-legislator cannot be understood without taking into consideration the ideas and the common ideological ground of the early Members of the EP (MEPs). This paper looks at the institutional evolution of the EP prior to its first direct elections in 1979, and analyses what drove a number of national parliamentarians to invest considerable time and effort far beyond Treaty provisions into an institution which promised no significant political impact, no career improvement, and no acknowledgement by voters. The paper demonstrates in an ideational and sociological analysis that prior to 1979, neither the national background nor party affiliation of the majority of MEPs had an as significant impact on their behaviour as their shared ideas of European integration. The paper tests this amongst others by examining changes within the EP’s inner heterogeneity, such as the entry of British and Danish Euro-sceptics as well as Communist MEPs in the 1970s. The analysis is based on 25 interviews with former MEPs from all EP party groups and member states prior to 1979, plus a corpus of ca. 3,500 EP documents, such as resolutions, reports, parliamentary questions and minutes of debates. While the interviews provide information about the ideas that drove the early MEPs, the documents offer some insight into how these ideas affected the MEPs’ behaviour, and to what different institutional results conflicting ideologies on the one hand and shared ideas on the other could lead. Thus, this paper contributes to the discussion what role ideologies played in the early years of European integration