I partiti politici a livello europeo

The PhD thesis focuses on the European political parties. It aims to explain what European parties concretely are, how do they organize themselves, carry on political projects at the European level and manage the relationship with their national political partners. The starting point of the thesis are the party groups at the European Parliament, which until the first direct elections held in 1979 have been the most dynamic and committed political actors at the European level. The first Chapter fo-cuses on the EP party groups, studying their legal position in the Treaties and EP parliamentary law at first, and then describing their history, analyzing their structural organization and comparing their statutes and rules of procedure. In the second Chapter, the thesis focuses on the European political parties. It starts telling the history of the Interna-tionals of national parties created around the three most important political families (the Christian Democrats, the So-cialists and the Liberals) in the Fifties, then it describes their transformation during the Seventies into “transnational” EC-oriented organizations struggling for the creation of European-based policies; finally it represents the introduction into the Treaties of the «Political Parties at the European level» by the Maastricht process. The Chapter then analyzes the legal and “constitutional” position of the Europarties, their structure, organization and statutes. The third Chapter analyzes the transformation of the Italian political system during the last fifteen years in the light of the most important political processes taking place in the European arena. The Chapter aims to show what kind of rela-tions do exist between the national and the European political systems, and how the two levels are able to influence each other. The findings of the three Chapters lead to the conclusion that the political strategy of the European parties did exercise some influence over the national political parties. But, in spite of their legal and “constitutional” recognition by the Treaties, European political parties still do not play a decisive role in the EU system, essentially because of the almost complete lack of participation by the European citizens-voters and the key role still played by each single national party within them.