Menu or Mandate? EU Governance and Party Politics in Poland
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Menu or Mandate? EU Governance and Party Politics in Poland Pengfei Hou1 Received: 21 May 2019 / Accepted: 13 April 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This article examines how the European Union (EU) has impacted party politics in Poland. Before the 2004 accession, party politics in Poland were turbulent. In this period, the EU, as a reference point, helped to create a pro- and anti-EU party cleavage. With this impact admitted, the article turns to the post-accession party politics. Centering on the nationalist Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS), the article attempts to explore the EU’s impact on the PiS by studying the latter’s adaptation preferences. To do so, I employ James N. Rosenau’s political adaptation theory. Central to the article is the argument that since political parties are the protagonists in member states’ domestic politics, the EU can only affect the party politics in Poland indirectly, but not inconsequentially. Without mandate notwithstanding, the EU can create bottom-up pressures through civil society; meanwhile, since EU norms and political parties’ particular interests are not necessarily incompatible, the EU can take the initiatives to make a balance between them through policy innovations. Keywords The EU · Europeanization · Poland · Political party · Adaptation
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s4111 1-020-00147-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Pengfei Hou ph65@st‑andrews.ac.uk 1
School of International Relations, University of St Andrews, Fife, Scotland, UK
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Chinese Political Science Review
1 Introduction After escaping Moscow’s orbit in the late 1980s, Poland has mainly gone through three scenarios; namely, the scenarios of democratization (1989–2001), democratic consolidation (2005–2014)1 and autocratization (2015–present).2 In each scenario, the European Union (EU) serves as a significant if not the sole reference point. Concerning party politics, their nature is characterized by the left–right cleavage in Western Europe. However, such party cleavage is ambiguous in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in general and in Poland in particular (Morlino 2001: 93). In his categorization of CEE’s political parties, Agh (1998) differentiated nationalist parties from the populist strands and labeled them as neo-traditionalist and nationalpopulist parties, respectively. Moreover, Agh believed that nationalist and populist parties are the “twin phenomena” of the “authoritarian renewal” in the early 1990s (1998: 62). That being so, although both nationalist and populist parties are anti-EU in kind, they vary in degree: whereas the nationalist party is moderate, and, hence, center-right, the national-populist party is radical and extreme right. As to pro-EU parties, although Agh did not give such a label, he, however, observed that there slowly emerged the political elites “with a strong European commitment turning against both neo-traditionalism a
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