Michael Dauderstädt& Britta Joerißen* The European Policy of Left-wing Parties in Post-communist Accession Countries European Integration in the Politics of the Accession Countries In December 2002 the member states of the European Union agreed accession conditions with the candidate countries in Copenhagen; they signed the accession agreement in Athens in April 2003, and on 1 May 2004, 10 more states will enlarge the EU. In most member states enlargement is bound up with hopes that Europe, together with the increase in states, people, and territory, will also acquire more economic and political power. Recently, however, the Iraq war revealed that diversity, also diversity in terms of different inte rests, identity-related attitudes and ideas will not necessarily be entirely beneficial– to the EU or to its decision-making power. The EU did not speak with one voice and lost credibility as a partner of the USA which could be taken seriously, although it had just agreed its first Common Security and Defence Policy. From a party-political standpoint it was indica­tive that among the signatories of the letter from eight European leaders on Iraq there was one – although himself non-party – prime minister of a socialist-led government(Hungary) and one social democratic prime minister(Poland). Transformation and Integration in Party Competi­tion in the Accession Countries With no longer 15 but in future 25 states this diversity will increase – and of the 10 accession countries 8 are East European, which just over a decade ago began in their foreign policy to strive for a“return to Europe” and not least therefore began to adapt to a social, economic, and political system which the European Union defined as one of the most urgent criteria for accession: democracy, the rule of law, a functioning market economy, and the adoption of community rules, standards, and policies, and so on – in short, the acquis communautaire . With that, accession preparations continued the threefold post-communist system transformation from party dictatorship to democracy, from a planned to a market economy, and from the Eastern bloc to the open, global and European economy. Less smooth has been a fourth system transformation, the construction of a nation state, which six of the eight accession countries had to carry out from 1991 or 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union(the three Baltic states), Yugoslavia(Slovenia), and Czechoslovakia(to a lesser extent the Czech Republic, more so Slovakia). This difficult process of adaptation required a social consensus in the post-communist accession countries which had to be maintained in the face of costs and disappointments which were at first disregarded, but later became palpable. The political parties in Eastern Europe, including those on the Left, many of which emerged from the former state socialist parties, had to help to carry this consensus(or to break it). Although the frustrated electorates in Central and Eastern Europe punished and voted out almost every govern­ment after only one term of office, after every transfer of power there were only minor corrections to the pol­icy of reform, system transformation and preparations for accession. In the case of the left-wing parties this was particularly striking, since transformation was ba­sically a liberal project for the introduction of capita l­ism. The left-wing parties too now had to give their view on the“new” values and requirements of the EU, if they had already included them in their programme or – more in the case of parties still committed to communist objectives – had turned against the EU in its current form. 1 The multipartisan conse nsus is also visible in the fact that the applications for membership were filed by governments of both liberal-conservative and left-wing orientation. * Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. 1 See Nick Crook, Michael Dauderstädt, and André Gerrits: S o­cial Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, Amsterdam 2002, p. 22; James Sloam: Policy Transfer and Programmatic Change in Communist Successor Parties in East-Central Europe, University of Birmingham, Institute for German Stud­ies, http://www.igs.bham.ac.uk/research/PolicyTransfer.htm, on: 03.06.2003; Paul Taggart and Aleks Szczerbiak: Partie s, Positions and Europe: Euroscepticism in the EU Candidate States of Central and Eastern Europe, SEI Working Paper No 46, Opposing Europe Research Network, Working Paper No. 2, Brighton 2001, p. 11f.