Brussels plays the name game

Civitas, 24 June 2009

This week saw the parties of the newly elected European Parliament (EP) scrambling to formalise alliances that will allow them to access EU-funds and other benefits afforded to official parties in the EP, writes Luke Clark.

The Party of European Socialists (PES) group will alter its configuration and adopt a new name; the ‘Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament’. While the group’s new name will raise a smile with anyone who remembers Monty Python’s Judean Peoples’ Front, the humour will most likely be lost in Brussels. The Party’s new name will be easily integrated into the lexicon of doublespeak which has become a trademark of the EU; EIDHR, GAERC, ENP, RELEX, REACH, Frontex, Ecofin, COREPER, COREPER II [!] etc.

The Socialist renaming is one example of self-naming to have occurred this week. Another is the formation of the new centre-right group in the EP, led by the UK Conservatives along with the Czech Civic Democrat and the Polish Law and Justice (PiS) parties. They will call themselves the European Conservative and Reformist party, a name whose abbreviation (ECR) will also slip nicely into the euro-jargon vernacular.

In the flurry of name calling and labelling that has gone on since the EP elections as pundits have speculated on the membership of the Conservatives’ new grouping, it can be easy to forget the more important question of why these groups are splintering and renaming?

In the case of the Socialists, the name change is relatively straightforward; the Italian Democratic Party has agreed to join the Socialist group but was uneasy sitting under the  ‘Socialist’ banner. As for the ECR, the Tories and their allies have broken away from the main centre-right grouping of the EP, the European Peoples Party (EPP), to create another centre-right grouping. The decision has been met with disapproval by Ken Clarke, Nicholas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, to name a few. So why have the UK Conservatives caused such a fuss? Tory MEP Geoffrey Van Orden says that the new Conservative grouping will be a “voice … in opposition to the federalist ambition of the European Union”. This is in contrast to the one of the EPP’s main political goals; “the finality of the European integration process, which means a federal European Union,” according to Adéla Kadlecová of the Czech Civic Democrats. This would appear a perfectly reasonable motivation, resulting from the fact that political division in the EP does not run along a Pro vs. Anti-integration line. Rather, the EP reflects a left/right divide.

The Socialists tend to portray themselves as defending ‘social Europe’ against a free-market, ‘big business’ right. Meanwhile, the right sees itself as promoting prosperity and employment against a left that would regulate European business into the ground. In this context, a reduced EPP, hostile to the ECR, could be even more susceptible to enacting the knee-jerk, post-financial-crisis regulation that the Conservatives seek to defend against. However, Conservative MEP Geoffrey Van Orden gave assurances that “there will be no alliance at all between us [the ECR & EPP]. But this is not a reason why we should not work closely together.”

The split from the EPP may be a signal to European leaders that David Cameron and William Hague are serious about changing the balance of power in the EU. It is also possible that the Tories’ decision had more to do with domestic considerations than European ones. If Tories reposition themselves as more firmly Euro-sceptic, it may serve to undermine support for UKIP or it could also be used as a move to rally the party’s traditional right behind Mr. Cameron.

Whatever the combination of motives and strategy that has led to the formation of the European Conservative and Reformist group, it will be interesting to see whether this latest EU acronym will be able to stand out from the crowd of EU abbreviations and whether the new grouping can punch above its weight to alter debate in the EP.