The European Greens

The article “Similar but Different?: The European Greens Compared to Other Transnational Party Federations in Europe”, by Thomas M. Dietz, published in Party Politics 2000 6: 199 by Sage Publishing, is in most ways a good article. This article explains how the green parties interact and respond to the European Union integration process. The Greens represent the largest and most organized transnational party family. Since the signing of the Single European Act, the European integration process has had an increasingly noticeable impact. As more and more policy area creep up to the European political level as they are progressively harmonized across the EU. Parties are now faced with a multifaceted political system where they are not only competing for representation and influence in local government and national parliaments, but also the European Parliament. For green parties, EU marked a shift in the key actors shaping domestic environmental policy and regulations from the national to the EU political arena.

Despite EP elections developing a reputation of being second-order to those at the national level, the EP has become progressively more influential in EU decision making over the years and the national parties and their executives are not oblivious to this. In addition, as EP elections can also be used as a measure of voter support in between national elections, these changes have led to a mobilization of new political alternatives among national parties. Consequently, numerous transnational links between parties are formed at the European level and European parties and party federations continue to emerge. This is we can see from Dietz’s Table 2. The degree of transnational green party interaction, 1979-1998.

Today the Greens have developed a relatively hierarchical structure within its executive bureau, much like other groups in the EP. Developing from what Dietz wrote in the article, that

“For most green groups even the founding