Transnational Party Federations in Europe: Coordinating Action between Institutional Incarnations

Political party federations at European Union (EU) level, also called Europarties, were created in the run up of the first European Parliament elections in 1979. Since then, the Europarties have developed remarkably in terms of organization and membership. This process was favoured by the regulatory framework – Maastricht Treaty included a party article stating that 'political parties at European level are important as a factor for integration within the Union' (TEU, Maastricht Treaty, 1992). Indeed, the role of Europarties is steadily on the rise with increasingly more say granted to the European Parliament in decision making. This is accompanied by increased scholarly interest as well, however while much attention is paid to EP Groupings and organizational structures of Europarties, much less is known about the how Europarties are framing the policies and coordinating their groupings at various European Institutions, such as the European Parliament, Council of Europe, Committee of the Regions, or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The paper seeks to address theoretical shortcoming in Europarties scholarly literature by analysing the cooperation and coordination process of three major Europarties – European People's Party (EPP), Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe (ALDE) and Party of European Socialists (PES) with their representations/groupings in European Institutions. More specifically, it will describe the formal and informal channels of such coordination aimed at enacting and communicating agreed policy positions at the political fora, but also while engaging them in respective policy development process. The decisions for our research focuses mainly on the EU’s Eastern policy, specifically related to the Eastern Partnership region and the Western Balkans. It is apparent that Europarties prioritize the processes taking place within the European Parliament given the latter’s increasingly more important role both in terms of legislation and of political authority. However, it is interesting to observe that the coordination with actions within other European institutions demonstrate very modest degree of formalized/institutionalized process of coordination, while informal channels of influence and exchange of opinions play much greater role. Another important point is the significant influence that the Europarty partner/sister parties from the EaP or Western Balkan region may play sometimes disproportionate role in forming respective decisions, this role the bigger the less formalized and more personalized is the decision-making process. In addition, due to certain diversity of the worldviews and geopolitical orientations between the member parties of respective Europarties, this may result in significant inconsistency of actions of their institutional representations. In order to study and test the above-mentioned trends, we analyse both the political documents and policy-related discourse, and on the other hand – in-depth interviews (including confidentially expressed opinions) of relevant participants and stakeholders. We rely on the process tracing method applied to carefully selected cases, and comparative analysis of the chosen Europarties’ conduct, looking for both differences and similarities in their action, and paying special attention to the role of informality in the processes in question, and of other factors affecting the coordination process.