Willy Beauvallet

MEPs: Towards a Specialization of European Political Work?

The degree of Europeanization of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) is a central bone of contention between inter-governmentalists and supra-nationalists in European Studies (Schimmelfeinnig and Rittberger, 2006). 1 The debate dates back to the normative arguments put forward by neo-functionalist theorists who claimed that the direct election of MEPs would produce a body of professionals dedicated to the promotion of the Community and its parliament (Haas, 1958; Cotta, 1984). From this perspective, European socialization, through membership in the institution, is perceived as a process of loyalty transfer from the national level to the European level. Other studies contest the evolutionist perspectives implied by spill-over theories. They underline the permanence of national ties and the ineffectiveness of spill-over in structural terms (no emergence of a European public or political space), ideological terms (no significant conversions to Europe) or sociological terms (no identifiable European political class). These scholars emphasize the pre-eminence of nationally centered political careers and the heterogeneity of national processes of selecting representatives (Reif and Schmitt, 1980) and of practices of representation (Navarro, 2009), as well as the lack of interest from representatives who are mostly nationally minded — as measured by their high resignation rates (Bryder, 1998).