DRAFT:
v.2.0
There can be little doubt that the development of the European Union has had a
tremendous impact on the national political life of its member states. The flourishing field of
“Europeanization” literature clearly examines and demonstrates this impact in a wide range of
spheres. This paper seeks to ask a different question, or rather to reverse the question to a certain
extent to ask whether, or to what extent, political changes in the national sphere affect the
European political arena. Although some aspects of this relationship are quite clear (for example
changes in national leadership have had profound effects on EU integration broadly) others
remain less studied and far less obvious.
This paper seeks to examine the potential effects of domestic political change on
European level institutions more closely through an analysis of the behaviour of Italian Members
of the European Parliament (MEPs) before and after the reforms and political upheavals that
rocked Italy during the1990s. The dramatic transformation of the Italian political scene and, in
particular, the political party system unquestionably reshaped the national Italian political
landscape, but did these changes have any impact at the supranational level? This paper traces
the shifts in the behaviour and roles of Italian MEPs within the European Parliament before and
after the dramatic transformation of the national party system that took place during the 1990s.
While the immediate subject of the paper is the potential changes in the behaviour and
roles of Italian MEPs and the influence of domestic political reforms on supranational actors, the
broader subject addressed is the extent to which “Europeanization” is a one-way street or a
recursive relationship between “Europe” and the member states. This question takes on increased
relevance in light of the future enlargement of the EU to at least ten (if not eventually 13 or
more) new member states. The domestic politics of the newly democratic countries of Eastern
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The most obvious recent examples being the switch from Conservative John Major to Labour’s Tony Blair in the
UK and the shift from the Center-right coalition led for so long by Helmut Kohl to the red-green (center-left)
coalition led by Gerhard Schroeder and Joshka Fischer in Germany.
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Convention