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Catholicism and nationalism: changing nature of party politics

This interesting and useful volume in Routledge’s Extremism and Democracy series links at least three themes: changes in nationalism in the context of both supranational and subnational challenges to Europe’s nation-states, the role of religious institutions before, during and after episodes of democratic transition, and the religious factor in the shaping of party systems. It does so by comparing developments in Spain and Poland, two most-similar cases in terms of the historic strength of Roman Catholicism and its link with formation and defence of national identity which have, despite these similarities, followed very different trajectories from the 1930s to the present time. Seen from outside without the benefit of too much information, the different trajectories might appear to be unsurprising and easy to explain: Franco’s victory in the Spanish civil war which led to the country’s virtual isolation on Europe’s south-western periphery compared to central-European Fabbrini then goes on to examine the parliamentary union perspective on integration and rightly points out that there will always be a limit to the extent to which the EP would be able to provide political direction to EU policy-making, the more so because the European Council has only increased the extent to which it provides political direction to the European Commission’s legislative initiatives. In the final part of the book, Fabbrini demonstrates how the EU could be conceived of as a ‘compound democracy’ very much along the lines of the union of states that both the USA and Switzerland as federal systems have organised into. Based on this logic, he presents far-reaching proposals to get the EU aligned with this model: a federalised fiscal capacity, the election of the European Council president – albeit in an indirect way in order to avoid a dominance of the votes of citizens from larger EU member states ‒ and the further empowerment of the EP by making it a co-legislator in all policy areas, as well as giving MEPs the right to initiate legislation. While it is certainly true that these measures would turn the EU into a compound union, it is precisely its federal nature that makes it highly unlikely that such measures would find enough support. In the absence of a European demos, it might be better to refrain from trying to prescribe a unique solution to the EU’s institutional puzzle. Fabbrini’s analysis is thorough and systematic, but the people who would be in charge of following his advice most likely prefer to still treat the EU’s institutional set-up as a game of Lego: a highly flexible set of building blocks that can be endlessly rebuilt and reorganised to get the desired result.