Union for Europe of the Nations–European Alliance

The Union for Europe of the Nations – European Alliance (UEN–EA) is a formerly regionalist-progressive, but now national conservative political group in the European Union's Committee of Regions. It was originally established in 1999 as the European Alliance, with strong influence of the European Free Alliance, but the label was reused from 2004 onwards by the Alliance for Europe of the Nations and similarly aligned parties.

History

The European Free Alliance's member parties aligned with a group of independents and the governing party of the Republic of Ireland, Fianna Fáil, to established the European Alliance group in the 1999–2004 term. The group had clear parallels to the group of the regionalists in the European Parliament, as they needed to ally with non-regionalists in both cases in order to establish a political group which could gain recognition and funding from the official institutions. The EFA member parties were in the minority in the EA group, but the same was true for FF and the independents; each of the three constituent factions required the group to gain committee places and influence in the COR.

The members of EFA in the COR were influential politicians, namely Paul Van Grembergen of SPIRIT (Belgium), the Flemish Minister for Interior, Housing, Civil Service, Foreign Trade and Urban Policy; Keith Brown of the Scottish National Party, a local council leader; Juan José Ibarretxe of the Basque Nationalist Party, who is President of the Basque Country; and Dino Viérin of the Valdostan Union, who is President of the Autonomous Region of the Aosta Valley. These four members of the COR were EFA's contribution to the EA group, which consisted of ten members in total.

Although the European Alliance was a relatively loose grouping of regionalists and non-regionalists, it eventually developed some programmatic coherence as was required by European institutional rules as well as the logical need for group coherence within the COR. The European Alliance decided on eight main principles, which were closely aligned with long-standing EFA policy positions:

EA members were on the one hand committed to

“ actively support and vote for an open Europe of regions and nations and the highest possible standards for environmental protection, workers' health, consumer protection, veterinary rules, social welfare and democratic principles. The members commit themselves to work together to obtain and defend such rights and equality of treatment. At the same time, they acknowledge the full political autonomy of the individual members and groupings. ”

Thus, similar to the previous quasi-regionalist political groups, the EA at the same time agreed on common positions and allowed members to act autonomously, which was another difficult balancing act for the involved parties.

However, this version of the European Alliance ran for only one term; in 2004, the organisation was reconstituted as UEN–EA group and the European Free Alliance – Democratic Party of the Peoples of Europe parties left. Despite EFA-DPPE representation in the COR and the presence of EFA parties in regional parliaments and some governments, the regionalists found themselves institutionally marginalised within the Committee of the Regions.

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 9/11/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.