| Review of: | The European Union and Party Politics in Central and Eastern Europe edited by P.G. Lewis, Z. Mansfeldová |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Tereza Novotna |
| Reviewed in: | Journal of Common Market Studies |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 45, Issue 03, Pages 745-769 |
Book Reviews
In January 2007 with the entry of Bulgaria and Romania to the European Union, we witnessed the completion of the eastern enlargement of the EU. Lewis and Mansfeldová's edited volume elaborates on a specific aspect of the accession process: the impact of the integration on central and eastern European (CEE) national party systems throughout the enlargement period and within the first two years after the accession until 2006. The book combines two branches of political science: comparative politics (in its focus on party systems) and 'Europeanization' theory (which is a bit too briefly defined as a top-down EU's impingement on national processes, p. 7).
Lewis asks in his introductory chapter the main research question: did the EU reinforce the existing fragmentation of CEE party systems or did it contribute to their consolidation (p. 3)? As a sort of research sub-inquiry, though not directly stated, is the emergence of Eurosceptic political parties in CEE in recent years. As we might currently observe, populist political parties and leaders with somewhat anti-European views and rhetoric are on the rise. Therefore, Lewis's prediction that 'while there may well be considerable scope for anti-EU activity in party systems overall, there are no strong prospects of it taking root in parties close to the political centre or in those with reasonable chances of taking part in government' (p. 13) has, with Czech President Klaus, the Polish ruling Kaczyński twin brothers and the Slovak nationalist government, already been proven wrong.
The book consists of ten chapters on new Member States and two chapters on what were, at the time of writing, acceding countries, organized according to a common framework. Each chapter outlines a national party system with references to individual parties, including their overall political programmes and attitudes towards the EU. The chapters then evaluate national referendums on the accession to the EU and elections to the European Parliament (EP) in 2004. In conclusion, the authors assess the EU's influence on a national party system and mark out alignments between the CEE and European parties in the EP. The common framework provides a good structure particularly for readers who are not too familiar with political conditions in the CEE countries. Nevertheless, the authors sometimes tend to overuse abbreviations of political parties in domestic languages (e.g. in the Polish and Latvian chapters) or do not clearly specify the political leanings of national parties (e.g. the Slovenian chapter), which makes the text difficult to follow. It would also be very helpful if the concluding chapter included a chart summarizing, for instance, all eurosceptic/populist parties or, at least, showed overall turnouts and voting results of referendums and the EP elections. The editors could have been more careful in interchanging the word 'Slovak' for 'Slovakian' (pp. 233, 235) whose latter version is nowadays no longer regularly used.
So far, the Europeanization literature produced one major hypothesis pertaining to the EU's influence on (West European) party systems (Mair): the EU has a very low direct impact on both the format (number of parties) and mechanics (polarization) of party systems. However, there has not yet been a similar analysis regarding the CEE party systems. The reviewed book fills this gap (besides, with analogous findings), which presents its major contribution to the contemporary political science literature.