Abstract
While the European Parliament (EP) elections, the EP political groupings, and the transnational party federations (the so-called Europarties), have attracted great attention in political research, cross-national investigation of the influence exerted by the EU on national parties was, up until the recent debt crisis, a surprisingly neglected topic. This is even truer of the impact of European integration on the internal workings of national parties. Isabelle Hertner’s book Centre-Left Parties and the European Union is situated precisely within this growing, but still under-studied, research area. It addresses the impact of the EU on the power balance and the democracy dynamics within three important centre-left parties: the French Socialist Party (PS), the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the British Labour Party.
Does European integration contribute to, or even accelerate, the erosion of intra-party democracy? This is the central research question of the book. All the other questions flow from, and lead to, this central one. Who within the three parties decides, or is involved in the formulation of each party’s EU policy? Who selects the candidates for the EP elections and the other EU specialists in parliament and inside the party bureaucracy? And finally, which level(s) and which face(s) of the party organization have been empowered as a consequence of European integration, and who has lost out in the process – and what does this tell us about the state of intra-party democracy? (pp. 3, 87). The study covers the period from 2000 to the referendum on Brexit, a time during which all three parties had been both in government (when a party is in government it has been observed to possess increased leadership autonomy in European matters) and in opposition.
Chapters 2, 3 and 4 set the stage for the detailed presentation of the empirical findings that follows in chapters 5, 6 and 7. Central – throughout the book – is the distinction between party on the ground, party in central office and party in public office. Chapter 2 traces the history and, above all, the organizational structure of the three parties (but also of the Party of European Socialists) following the above three-fold distinction. Chapter 3, an important one, maps the distinct historical paths – and the policy positions shifts – of the three parties in relation to European integration. On the basis of the Manifesto Project Data, Isabelle Hertner shows that the pro-European stance of the three parties peaked in the mid-late 1990s, a period during which all three were in government simultaneously. It was the period of social democracy’s ‘magical return’ to power. Chapter 4 examines the mechanics of delegation of power in formulating European policy and selecting EU specialists within the three parties, in accordance with the principal-agent framework.
What exactly is happening in these three centre-left parties? This key research question is investigated in the next three chapters. Without flaunting of methodology, without formal hypotheses testing, but based on a wealth of empirical data, Hertner provides convincing answers to this question. Some of the study’s findings deserve to be emphasized.
It is worth noting that the party on the ground, more than one would expect, discusses European themes at both the local and the regional level, though this happens less within the Labour Party. Despite the fact that all three parties provide for democratic and inclusive selection procedures, the role of ordinary members in the selection of candidates for EP elections remains limited. In the Labour Party, the trade unions play an important role in selecting MEP candidates while in the SPD the regional party boards also exert great influence. In the PS the factionalized national party leadership often ignores the preferences of the constituencies. Moreover the party on the ground does not particularly influence the EU positions and EU strategy of the leadership. In practice, irrespective of what is provided for in the statutes, in all three parties the party’s rank-and-file has ‘delegated’ European policy to the party in central office and in public office, without much ex ante or ex post control (p. 117). Grassroots members, to a different extent in each party, albeit not passive spectators, are ‘cheerleaders rather than players’, as Hertner aptly puts it (Chapter 5).
Formulation of long-term policy on the EU is the province of the central bureaucracy (party in central office) of the three parties, but with significant differentiation between them. The leadership of the SPD and the PS accord a non-negligible role to EU specialists, whether they come from the parliamentary group (of the national parliament) or whether they are European parliamentarians, whereas in the Labour Party EU policy expertise is confined to a tight circle around the party leader. At the same time, the former two parties, which participate actively in the Party of European Socialists, have ‘delegated some of their policy-making power’ to it. In contrast, the Labour Party, which has traditionally had a problematic relationship with the PES, when it has not functioned as a troublemaker within it, has reserved exclusively for itself (that is, for its leadership) the privilege of shaping European policy. Hertner’s findings are consistent with those of recent studies focused on the role of the PES enriching, from a national party perspective, their conclusions (Chapter 6).
Chapter 7 deals with the party in public office (parliament and/or government, i.e. politicians in elected office, such as MPs, government ministers etc.) When the party is in power, the government formulates and exercises European policy and MPs ‘tend to leave EU policies to their government’. In general, on account of the party’s more decentralized structures, SPD MPs in the Bundestag exert greater influence over the shaping of the party’s European policy but also over the selection of EU specialists. This is less true of the PS parliamentary group, whose influence is traditionally weaker. The parliamentary group of the Labour Party has equally little influence over European issues, despite the fact that historically the Parliamentary Labour Party has had, and continues to have, a prominent position in the distribution of power within British labourism. The picture of internal power dynamics is unquestionably complex and differs from party to party. Nevertheless, overall, European integration functions as a factor weakening intra-party democracy. Among the many democratic deficits that are a concomitant of Europe’s multi-level governance, Hertner’s findings bring to the fore and highlight a key type of democratic deficit: the intra-party democratic deficit.
Isabelle Hertner provides a very solid comparative study. The choice of cases is absolutely pertinent and the symmetry of the comparison lends structural cohesion to the text. The rich empirical documentation (internal party documents, a series of 66 semi-structured interviews conducted with EU specialists, an e-mail questionnaire), the intimate familiarity with the literature and systematic linkage of theory with the empirical facts are the great strengths of the book. Over-use of a terminology derived from the idiolect of political science and European Studies and excessive repetition can, however, be tiring for the reader. They are the book’s most significant weaknesses.
This study of intra-party processes goes beyond the surface. It enriches the findings of the (few) previous studies and makes it possible to draw a detailed picture of how the EU acts upon the game of democracy and power within the big parties of government. Hertner’s contribution fully retains its research value even after the recent historic weakening of the PS and the vote in favour of Brexit. The book is also very useful for understanding present day social democracy per se, and not just the difficult relationship between the latter and the EU.
The findings of Hertner’s study are part of a perennial and always relevant theme that has been central to the theory of parties since the time of Roberto Michels: how power is distributed inside those democratic entities called parties, and ultimately how democratic these democratic organizations truly are. The EU, understood as an independent variable, contributes to a certain diversification of the party elite structure, rendering the leading group, if only marginally, less oligarchical, because of the emergence of EU specialists. At the same time, and most importantly, it reinforces the party leadership in both central and public office and further undermines the influence of the party’s rank and file. In consequence, the emaciation of intra-party democracy tends to become an integral part of the Europeanization of national parties. This important and timely book makes a lucid, subtle and pessimistic contribution to a better understanding of the party phenomenon in the era of Europeanization.