Introduction

In the first week of June 2009 the citizens of the 27 EU member states headed to the polls to elect their representatives for the European Parliament. Although the BBC heralded the event as the ‘biggest transnational election in history’, the majority of the almost 400 million eligible voters stayed home. With only 43% of them going to the polls the election continued a trend of declining turnout ever since members for the EP were directly elected for the first time in 1979.

According to the Financial Times, those who did go to the polls ‘clearly opted for the safety of the right, because of the global economic downturn’. Many of the centre-right parties won seats or lost only a little, whilst many of Europe's social democratic parties suffered heavy losses. In the UK the Labour Party came in only third with a mere 15%. In Hungary the MSZP – the Hungarian socialist party – was almost halved and only gained 17% of the votes, a vote share similar to that of the Dutch labour party (the PvdA). The elections showed a strong performance of nationalistic, Eurosceptic parties, like the Dutch Freedom Party, the Hungarian Jobbik Party and UK's Independence Party, each of them gaining more than 10% of the votes.

Introduction

In the early hours of 17 December 2005, after long and complex negotiations, the European Council agreed to the EU's Financial Perspectives for the period 2007–13. The Financial Perspectives lay down the size of the EU budget for each year as well as the contribution of each member state and the distribution across major spending categories. This forms the framework within which annual budgets are adopted.

Finding a compromise had been a difficult process because the Financial Perspectives had to reconcile a number of highly diverging interests. To begin with, the EU faced the financial consequences of the 2004 enlargement with ten new member states, which put increasing pressure on the EU budget. Moreover, following the ambition set out in the Lisbon Strategy that the EU should become the most competitive economy in the world, the European Commission wanted to step up spending on research and development and other policies that stimulated economic growth.

At the same time, the room for manoeuvre in devising a budgetary deal was extremely limited. To begin with, the six largest net contributors to the EU budget (Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK) demanded that the EU budget should be capped at 1% of European Gross National Income (GNI), which implied a reduction from spending in the period 2000–6. Moreover, during negotiations in 2002, spending on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) had been fixed for the period until 2013.

The Nordic countries stand out as a region defined by the common history of its five constituents. While Finland was an integral part of Sweden for several hundred years, Norway and Iceland (together with some other north Atlantic islands) were crucial components of the early modern Danish composite state. The five countries were affected differently by twentieth-century warfare, but there still remains a tangible Nordic culture and Nordic cooperation is facilitated by the linguistic proximity of the three Scandinavian languages, even if English is increasingly used in inter-Nordic exchanges. Other defining characteristics of the Nordic countries are high degrees of secularisation, strong civil societies, gender equality and a political culture of consensus rather than confrontation. Finally, and perhaps most recognised amongst outsiders, the Nordic countries display strong and well-developed welfare states. One of the leading scholars in welfare state research, the Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen, has identified the social democratic welfare state found in Scandinavia as one of three ideal type welfare regimes.

At the heart of the welfare state discussion is the relationship between the state and its citizens. What sort of responsibility does the state have for the well-being of its citizens, and when should the state refrain from ‘interfering’ in the private sphere? Who are the citizens upon whom the state bestows welfare and rights: everybody, or just the grown-ups, or just adult men as heads of families?

The family is one of the social structures more resistant to abrupt changes, but in the second half of the twentieth century the European family underwent many important transformations. It is not difficult to identify common trends across many countries in relation to family changes: an increase in the divorce rate, an increase in the number of unipersonal households, the decreasing weight of the polynuclear family and the appearance of new forms of cohabitation. Spain is not alien to these shifts, but the metamorphosis of the Spanish family happened, in comparison to other European countries, very late and very quickly, in parallel with a delayed but accelerated period of industrialisation and economic growth.

The centrality of the family in Spanish life has shown tremendous resilience. The definition of what constitutes a family has evolved, and in the last decade we have witnessed the emergence of two conflicting family models. One, ideologically emanating from the Catholic church or even the standard definitions provided by the United Nations, would consider the family as a unit structured around a married heterosexual couple. The other model, a more liberal approach, departs from an egalitarian view of relationships in the private sphere, and accepts same-sex relationships and less conventional household structures. There is still, in spite of these different approaches, a common view of what essentially constitutes a family: a study of different family associations, of both traditional and liberal views, has identified a common definition of a family as a unit that shares a life project, involves relationships of reciprocity and mutual help and is oriented towards happiness.

In March 2008, the government of Romano Prodi, which for two years had been dependent upon a fragile coalition of centre-left parties, fell from power. New national elections in the spring resulted in Silvio Berlusconi's third term in office, this time with a very comfortable parliamentary majority. The crisis of Prodi's government was thus an important turning point in Italian politics and its dynamics are of considerable relevance to the themes of this chapter. The politician principally responsible for the crisis was a local power broker and Catholic politician, Clemente Mastella, a corpulent but energetic figure with darting eyes and a certain natural cunning. Mastella can with safety be called an archetypical figure of the European south. His party, strongly rooted in one southern region only, Campania, had polled just 1.4 per cent of the national vote. However, this had been sufficient, thanks to the system of proportional representation in operation at the time, to give him power of veto over Prodi's unwieldy coalition government. Indeed, so important was Mastella to Prodi that he was nothing less than minister of justice.

The crisis had broken in January 2008, when various of Mastella's closest political collaborators were arrested and accused of distorting normal administrative practice by means of corruption, extortion and intimidation. His wife, Sandra Lonardo Mastella, whose political career Mastella had assiduously cultivated, was placed under house arrest. The details of the accusations evoke long-standing practices in the Italian state.

What stands between families and states? The conventional answer of modern political theory is civil society: the sphere of voluntary associations and relationships that provides individuals with a means of escape from both the confines of family life and the rigours of state politics. This can be either a descriptive or a normative claim. One of the distinguishing features of modern societies is the sheer scale and variety of civil associations for which they allow, whether in economic life, cultural life, communications, religion, sport or education. That is an observable fact, but it is also often held to be one of the major benefits of modern existence, and hence something to be celebrated and cultivated. We need civil society in order to avoid being trapped in the binary, pre-modern world of household and polis, in which the opportunities for human expression and experimentation are more limited.

Modern civil society is valuable because it helps to take us away from purely private concerns. It offers a route out from family life through to the wider perspectives of social and political justice. In Susan Moller Okin's terms, quoted by Paul Ginsborg in his chapter in this book, we need ‘a continuum of just associations’ in order to ‘enlarge [our] sympathies’. But civil society is also valuable because it can provide some respite from the relentless pressures of public life, organised by and for the state.

In his programmatic essay of 1995 Paul Ginsborg sets out a choice to be made by those studying the modern European family and its relationship to politics. The choice, he argued, is between a dichotomous model descending from Aristotle and a tripartite model deriving from Hegel. The Aristotelian model revolves around a set of binary divisions between oikos and polis, between household and political sphere, a set of distinctions that derive ultimately from Aristotle's dualistic description of man as a ‘political animal’, both political and animal, that is. This dualism, Ginsborg argues, is too simple to capture the complex position of the family in modernity. Instead, he prefers a Hegelian tripartite scheme, which distinguishes between family, civil society and state. The state is constituted by law, the family by a bond of love. The economy, relegated by Aristotle to the household, is assigned by Hegel to a third sphere of civil society. Ginsborg does not rest here. In keeping with modern usage he makes a further distinction. Whereas in Hegel the economy and associational life are intermingled in the sphere of civil society, Ginsborg removes the economy to its own sphere and defines civil society essentially as what Habermas has taught us to call the ‘public sphere’. As Ginsborg makes clear, what is at stake in these differing models are fundamental conceptions of the social order.

Introduction

In March 2009 David Cameron, the leader of the British Conservative Party, announced that the Conservatives would form a new political group in the European Parliament after the EP elections of June that year. In doing so, the Conservatives would break away from the Christian Democrat European People's Party (EPP), with which it had been allied in the EP for almost two decades.

The relationship between the Conservatives and the EPP had always been strained, as the Conservatives were much more Eurosceptical than the (traditionally strongly pro-EU) ‘continental’ conservative and Christian democratic parties assembled in the EPP. Before joining the EPP group, the Conservatives had cooperated with like-minded parties in the ‘European Democrats’ (ED) group. When the British Conservatives decided to join the EPP political group in 1992, they only did so as an ‘associated party’. In 1999, this associated status was made more visible by adding ‘ED’ to the name of the EPP group in Parliament. Still, the British Conservatives continued to disagree with the EPP ‘party line’ on many important issues and frequently threatened to withdraw from the EPP-ED group altogether to form their own political group.

Cameron's decision to set up a new political group attracted a lot of criticism within his own party. Several Conservative Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) voiced their discontent with the move, fearing that the Conservatives would lose influence in the EP.

Introduction

Smoking may not be the first thing you come up with when thinking about the issues the European Union deals with. Yet, over the past two decades, the EU has built up a considerable amount of legislation relating to smoking and tobacco products. When you buy a pack of cigarettes (for educational purposes only, of course!), you can see EU policies at work. For instance, the EU has adopted Directives on the maximum levels of tar and nicotine in cigarettes. The price you pay for the pack of cigarettes largely consists of excise duties that governments levy; an EU Directive lays down the minimum amounts of these excise duties. You will probably also notice the large texts on the pack, warning you of the health risks of smoking. Not only have EU Directives made these warning texts mandatory throughout the EU, but they also specify how large they should be and what texts can be used. Finally, tobacco advertising has been banned both on television and in newspapers and magazines.

At the same time, the EU's role in this field is largely confined to adopting legislation and setting standards. The actual implementation of the policies is left to member state governments. Likewise, although the EU is very active in the field of regulatory policy (promulgating norms and standards), it is much less involved in distributive policies (financing facilities) and redistributive policies (affecting the distribution of income and wealth).

Introduction

When the crisis on the financial markets hit Europe in late 2008, this was generally seen as a grave test for the European Union. Would it be able to respond in the face of crisis? Would member state governments be able to overcome their longstanding differences of opinion on economic and financial policy in finding new solutions? And would the EU's institutional framework of budgetary and free-trade rules be able to withstand the flurry of national support measures and calls for economic protectionism that occurred throughout the member states? The situation became even more serious when the Euro itself came under attack from financial markets after fears had arisen that Greece, and possibly a number of other member states, would be forced to default on their (fast-rising) government debts.

As it turned out, the financial crisis proved a tremendous impetus for European cooperation. Even though member state governments took an unprecedented number of far-reaching measures (nationalizing banks, letting government debt rise in order to stimulate their economies), the lapse into protectionism and unilateralism did not occur. Instead, in most cases member state governments closely consulted on the steps to take and tried to find solutions that would keep up existing EU rules while taking account of the special circumstances.

One of the key features of Dutch society before and for two decades after the Second World War was its division into zuilen, religious or ideological groupings or ‘pillars’, a phenomenon known in Dutch as verzuiling, translated variously as ‘socio-political compartmentalisation’ or, more literally, ‘pillarisation’. What did pillarisation actually involve? Dutch society was sharply divided along religious and political lines, splitting the population into four ‘pillars’: Roman Catholics, Protestants, Socialists and Liberals. Each of these groups lived in a world that was largely separate from the others. What did those worlds consist of?

To begin with, they consisted of religious denominations and political parties. People belonging to the Catholic grouping virtually all voted for the Catholic People's Party. The Protestants voted for Protestant parties. The two non-denominational groups, the Socialists and the Liberals, also had their own political representatives and parties. But the phenomenon of ‘pillarisation’ went much further than religious or political affiliation. The trade union movement, for example, was also divided into Catholic, Protestant and general (Socialist) unions, and the same applied to organisations of employers and farmers. The press and other media, including radio and later television, were also divided largely along socio-political and religious lines. The education system was – and in a certain sense still is – a textbook example of compartmentalisation. It was not only primary schools that were strictly divided into religious and other ideological categories, but so were secondary schools and even tertiary educational institutions.

Why yet another textbook on EU politics? And why in a series on comparative politics? For us, the answers to these two questions are closely linked. Having taught EU politics for several years, both of us grew increasingly dissatisfied with the introductory texts on EU politics available on the market. Our dissatisfaction stemmed from two facts. First, existing textbooks on EU politics tend to be too descriptive for our liking. Vast parts of those texts are devoted to discussing the details of the EU's institutional set-up or the intricacies of EU decision-making procedures. By contrast, we are more interested in the political processes that take place within the EU. Knowledge of the EU's institutions and procedures is necessary in order to study those processes fruitfully, but our objective in teaching EU politics is to give students an understanding of how politics in the EU works, not of the EU's institutions and procedures per se. Second, most textbooks still look at the EU as a ‘one-of-a-kind’ system or, as it is commonly put in the EU studies literature, as an organization ‘sui generis’. The focus on the EU's uniqueness makes it difficult for students to relate their understanding of EU politics to what they know about other political systems. We believe that, increasingly, the EU can best be studied from a comparative politics perspective, and that this should form the leading premise of a textbook on EU politics.