Abstract. The members of the European Parliament are elected in nationally organized and domestically oriented polls; however, in the Strasbourg Assembly they form transnational Party Groups or Europarties. The Rules of Procedure require such formations for the functioning of the Assembly, but Party Groups are much more than procedure requisites. They assemble elected representatives of national parties which share a consistent similarity in political ideologies and strategies. Party integration is a decisive development in the unification process of the Western European countries and it is expected to come from the Party Groups experience. The paper analyses such an issue by examining roll‐call votes. Data include a systematic sample of votes cast during the first and second elected Parliament. The research looks into two fundamental items: (a) Party Group cohesion (an index of agreement is used to measure it); (b) voting line‐ups of Party Groups. The aim is to point out the most important political cleavages and issues of the Community political system.

No abstract

Fulvio Attinà examines the concept of "regional security partnership" both theoretically and in the context of Euro-Mediterranean region-building. He argues that this partnership is an intermediate venture on the road to the possible appearance of a Euro-Mediterranean security community. By discussing the difficulties of negotiating a security partnership in the framework of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, Attinà highlights the security culture divide on both sides of Mediterranean. The differences in the security culture between European and Arab states have deepened in recent years in view of regional and global developments, constituting a major obstacle to the implementation of a security partnership. Attinà argues, however, that the interaction between the two shores of the Mediterranean in coping with globalization-driven problems may prevail over the factors that have led to a deepening of the security culture divide in recent years. According to the second interpretation, instead, the Partnership's goal is to build a zone of prosperity, stability and peace 1 and no room for deliberate construction of unequal relations between the partners. To achieve this goal, the European Union institutions and governments act to lead the Med-partners to respect norms and practices needed to achieve economic growth, political stability and peaceful conflict resolution. In this perspective, the Barcelona Process is, at the same time, a gap-reducing process between the societies and states of the two shores of the Mediterranean, an inclusion process of the Med-partners in the neo-liberal global system (Tovias, in this volume), and a mutual socialization process of all the partner countries to the same practices, as largely discussed in the Adler and Crawford's introductory chapter in this volume) 2 . Fulvio Attinà, University of Catania1 As spoken out in the Barcelona Declaration. The need for revising the perspective on regional cooperation is forwarded by scientists that maintain that regional cooperation occurs in the contemporary world when governments recognize that negotiation to set up policy coordination is important to cope with the problems shared by the states of a geographical area (see, for example, Coleman and Underhill, 1998;Vayrinen, 2003). This interpretation largely relies on the conviction that, irrespective of culture distance and institution difference, global trends cause dangerous effects to the countries of an area in as different fields as environment for the problem of pollution, demography for the problem of migration, and public security for the problem of organized crime and illegal trade. Because geographical proximity reinforces interconnection between contemporary societies and states, one country's action and inaction regarding trans-border problems directly affect

No abstract

No abstract