Thinking critically about academic independence and the EPP

12 August 2025

I wanted to write this blog to put down some of the thinking that I make passing mention of in my newest article, on the adoption of the concept of the ‘social market economy’ in the first political programme of the European People’s Party (available open access), but did not really dig into fully.

In the literature review/historiography section of the article I mention how there has been a spate of publications on the EPP in recent years and link this not just to the availability of archival sources but also due to direct work from the EPP in funding research and in members of the EPP organs in publishing about it.

Scholarship on the EPP and transnational institutions of the centre-right and Christian democracy, their formation and ideas has developed significantly in recent years. This is in part due to the opening of archival holdings, but also due to research funding from the institutions themselves and active scholarship from current and former members.

In the article this is discussed in the context of what I suggest is an overemphasis on the institution of the EPP in accounts of the transnational Christian democratic political network (local and regional party organisations as well as alternative organisations at the supranational and international levels). Because scholars are committed to writing about the EPP, they can lose sight of the forest through the trees. I stand by that claim and it is one of the key claims of the article.

In this article I argue that this weakness arises because the works approach the ideational history of the EPP through an institutional history of the EPP.

What I didn’t mention in the article are concerns about how this funding and scholarship might bias or negatively impact the shape of the scholarship about the EPP. As I noted in my article about the relationship between the Peterhouse and LSE Right and the British New Right, interpolating Ben Jackson’s comments about scholarship on the neoliberal think tanks, issues can arise when you allow actors from a political development to determine the narratives within which the development is studied.

Just as many earlier histories of neoliberalism in Britain have been criticised for ‘repeat[ing] the naïve, idealist account of victory in the battle of ideas that has been narrated by neo-liberals themselves’, we can note here the self-narration of New Right social thought and conservatism by scholars from and deferential to the Salisbury Review and Peterhouse Conservatives.

I want to be careful and precise here, because when questions of publication, access and funding are involved there is scope to comment about impropriety, and that is not what I want to do. To be absolutely clear, publications by actors involved with the EPP make important contributions to the scholarship on the EPP, European integration and Christian democracy, and I cite many of them approvingly in the article. Likewise, the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies (the EPP’s in-house think tank) and funding from the EPP group for scholarship on the EPP and Christian democracy have led to a lot of really important and great scholarship on those topics in recent years.

While my interactions with the EPP and the Wilfried Marten Centre have been minimal, I certainly have engaged with parties and political foundations in my research. I have interviewed politicians and foundation staff, parties and para-party institutions have been gatekeepers that granted me access to archives including private papers, and I published a book review in a journal under the aegis of the FES. In that work I think I have always been treated quite fairly as a scholar. That is basically the nature of academic research on parties.

I obviously have a personal interest in wanting to have access to these archives and personnel, as well as potential new research networks and resources, in the future, but I do want to honestly stress that for the most part they have been good for the scholarship I am discussing. This is not meant as a hit piece.

However, I do sometimes wonder about how the close relationship between scholarship and politicians in this nexus can impact scholarship. And I want to talk about one recent publication in particular, that I found very disappointing.

However, I first need to return to my article and the claims it advances. I frame the article in part as a response to scholarship that presents the shift of the EPP towards neoliberalism as an inevitable development. This argument might frame the EPP as a centre-right party and thus essentially conservative and of the right. Here looking for collaborations with conservatives against socialists is a foregone conclusion. Against this narrative, I emphasise the Christian democratic character of the political network the early EPP operated within, with ideas and discourse from this network shaping the way the EPP understood itself and shaping its decisions. I argue that the adoption of the social market economy was distinctly Christian democratic and its engagements with the wider centre-right as contingent (again, please do read the article).

As the article was out for review, a fairly lengthy process in this case, a book came out published by the Wilfried Martens Centre and overlapping on some of this territory. That edited volume is Christian Democracy, Conservatism and the Challenge of the Extremes (Welle and Otavio Reho (eds.), 2025). It’s a fairly significant volume and includes contributions from fairly senior politicians (David Willetts, Manfred Weber, Mikuláš Dzurinda, and Klaus Welle may be most recognisable) as well as academics, many of whose work I really like (Tim Bale, Martin Conway, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti and Wolfram Kaiser have all made noticeable contributions to my own thinking). It is well worth reading the biographies of the contributors, which I think speaks to the political/academic nexus I am discussing. The inclusion of the academics and the tone of their contributions clearly positions the text as engaged with academic scholarship and serious analysis, rather than party political propaganda.

The volume is framed around the question of where the EPP fits in relationship to conservatism and populism. Here there is discussion of the EPP as a Christian democratic group, how that ideology shapes its thinking, and the political history of the institution. I don’t think the contributions are especially ground-breaking but it’s all generally fine, and I cite it in the article.

One of the elephants in the room is Fidesz and democratic backsliding, as Fidesz was for a long time a member of the EPP, while it was actively leading democratic backsliding in Hungary. And this is my bone of contention with the volume.

The volume overwhelming presents a narrative that frames the EPP as a bastion of liberal democracy and opponent of Fidesz and its backsliding. Here we see celebration of Fidesz being pressured out of the group in 2020 as a demonstration of the strong red lines of the EPP and an explanation that Fidesz and its illiberal policies were incompatible with the strong principles of Christian democracy and the EPP.

Frankly, while I don’t know the editorial process for the volume, I don’t think this narrative could be published in any serious peer reviewed academic outlet. It is either deliberately misleading or wilfully blind. The EPP and its members turned a blind eye to the actions of Fidesz and Orban and not just resisted but actively pushed back against organising in Hungary and the institutions of the European Union to act against it. The scholarship has identified cynical party self-interest, maintaining the EPP as the dominant player in the European Parliament, as a driver of this protection. Please read the section on Hungary in R. Daniel Kelemen’s 2017 article on ‘Europe’s Other Democratic Deficit’ to get a sense of this.

In the interest of party loyalty and of maintaining their majority in the European Parliament, most EPP politicians have been willing to tolerate Orbán’s violations of democratic values (De la Baume 2015; Kirchik 2013; Peter 2013). While some members of the EPP have favoured action against the Orbán government (Kirchik 2013), the majority of EPP members and the party leadership have repeatedly undermined the efforts of EU institutions to censure the Orbán regime.

As the citations indicate, there is an established literature on this topic, it isn’t just Kelemen.

And yet this is entirely omitted in the edited volume. It’s not acknowledged and challenged with a counter-argument, but rather is entirely missing. Instead, a underinformed reader might believe that the EPP acted to censure Orban immediately at the first instance of backsliding.

Again, I don’t want to accuse anyone of impropriety or any form of censure-worthy academic misconduct. I don’t think the volume is stuffed with lies, but I do that think that its noticeable blind spots are concerning. I can’t help but think that these blind spots are related to the volume being edited by actors directly linked to the EPP, based on a conference held by the EPP’s political centre, funded by the EPP, and contributions from senior politicians in the EPP. I can’t say why the academics involved chose to avoid difficult topics that might clash with the EPP’s triumphalist narrative, but it doesn’t feel great.

One of the things I have tried to develop in my published articles, both this most recent one on the EPP and my others on the Conservative Party, is how political parties and ideologies are characterised by pluralism and contestation. An honest and accurate history of Christian democracy as an ideology or a political network including the EPP can incorporate significant contestation and pluralism. My article notes that the 1970s had distinctively Christian democratic ideas but that these were articulated by actors who ranged from the left to the centre to the right, and included far right elements.

It’s entirely reconcilable to see this Christian democracy as a factor in the 1970s, in the early 2000s as actors decided to protect Fidesz to achieve their political aims (and the distance between Fidesz and other illiberal currents in the EPP should not be overstated), and in the 2020s when the EPP aims to distance itself from Fidesz. These are all compatible. Christian democracy is multifaceted and complicated. It is shame that this was not done within the volume.

To draw this blog together I want to identify two dynamics that play a part in this particular situation and could fairly straightforwardly be addressed. These point to the specifics of this case but I think have some generalisable insight.

The first is about scholarly credibility. It is important is that good scholarship should be open and honest with this messy history and willing to research and talk about it. Given the important work that the EPP and the Wilfried Martens Centre has published and funded, I would hope that they would not shy away from difficult history and conversations. Indeed, actively engaging with illiberal currents in the historical and contemporary EPP would be very helpful for an institution genuinely interested in itself and how it can contribute to deepening democracy in Europe and addressing the radical and extreme right and left. As such, I would hope that these groups can simply be better in their future publications.

That’s something of an individualising solution and I do have some apprehensions about saying that a political institution should be limited in its ability to advance the political narratives it wants (the obvious exceptions aren’t really relevant here). As such, I want to note the structural factor in this all.

One of the dynamics that shapes this whole interaction between academics and political institutions is state of academic funding. While there are undoubtedly academics motivated by their political agendas, indeed we all are to some extent, they are also professionally compelled to seek external grant capture and build closer networks with external institutions and politics. This is only intensified by cuts to public funding for research with what remains even more tightly linked to impact and collaboration, These dynamics give political institutions, like the EPP/ Wilfried Martens Centre a much greater power than they would have in a more plural funding environment. My real concern here is less that we are seeing capture by bad actors (which is a whole other conversation) but rather that the contexts produce perverse incentives. If the professional incentives compel scholars to tailor their research to funder/external organisation interests, the impacts of funder interests, legitimate as they may be, can (and I would suggest do) distort academic production. This issue is, of course, a much bigger problem in contemporary higher education but we should be aware of it and its manifestations.