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Inter-parliamentary cooperation and its challenges: The case of Economic and Financial Governance
(2015)
The provision of Article 13 TSCG to create an Interparliamentary Conference was the starting point for long discussions after which national parliaments and the European Parliament eventually reached a compromise. This article pursues a two-fold objective: It first examines the different phases of interparliamentary negotiations from 2012 to 2015. On the basis of a distinction between three competing models for interparliamentary cooperation, the article shows that the two models of EP-led scrutiny and creating a collective parliamentary counterweight did not prevail: Parliaments agreed that the new Interparliamentary Conference on Stability, Economic Coordination and Governance (SECG) would follow the ‘standard’ interparliamentary conference (COSAC model). In terms of national parliaments’ actual participation, the lowest common denominator compromise has not changed the numbers of participating MPs: Attendance records are stable over time, the size of national delegations continues to vary and participating MPs are still twice as likely to be members of Budget or Finance committees than to be members of European affairs committees.
How exactly are national parliaments involved in the European Semester? The stronger coordination of fiscal and economic policies in the European Union (EU) in reaction to the sovereign debt crisis has forced national parliaments to adapt their procedures. This article examines how the European Semester is scrutinised and what factors have driven parliamentary activities in the French National Assembly, the German Bundestag, the Irish Dáil and the Portuguese Assembleia between 2012 and 2017. Particularly noteworthy is that legal provisions for a parliamentary debate on the Stability Programme can be ignored in France, that the German Bundestag is much less active in the European Semester than in EU affairs or in the budget process and that the weakness of Ireland’s parliament in the annual budget procedure affects its role in the European Semester. This article therefore suggests defining minimum standards for parliamentary involvement and strengthening interparliamentary cooperation.
The Treaty of Lisbon strengthened the role of national parliaments in the EU legislative process by creating the Early Warning System. This procedure offers them the possibility to send reasoned opinions to the European Commission if they have subsidiarity concerns about a legislative proposal. Since 2009 the necessary threshold (i.e. one third of the total number of votes) has only been reached three times. The most recent of these 'yellow cards' was triggered by the Commission's proposal to revise the Posted Workers Directive, an event that allows us to shed some light on how national parliaments use this mechanism and how the European Commission has reacted. The subsidiarity concerns were rejected by the Commission and the legislative process continues despite deep divisions between old and new Member States over the controversial policy issue of revising the Posted Workers Directive.
Nationale Parlamente
(2018)
Nationale Parlamente
(2017)
This dissertation provides a comprehensive account of the role of national parliaments in Europe’s post-crisis economic governance. It examines national parliaments in the European Semester, in relation to the European Stability Mechanism and the Interparliamentary Conference on Stability, Economic Coordination and Governance and challenges the view that the Euro crisis has only reduced the influence of national parliaments.
The analysis moves beyond prerogatives and institutional capacities to
actual parliamentary involvement. Scrutinising the different stages of the European Semester remains a challenge for many national parliaments that have been marginalised by this multilevel coordination and surveillance process. In case of the third rescue package for Greece, the overall involvement by national parliaments exceeded what legal provisions would have demanded. But both economic governance domains suffer from asymmetries between those national parliaments that are willing and able to become actually involved and those that are not. One possible remedy against these asymmetries would be to involve national parliaments into economic governance collectively. The provision of Article 13 TSCG and the Interparliamentary Conference established on this basis, however, fall short of collective involvement or joint scrutiny and the experience of negotiating the institutional design of the new Conference even suggests that any kind of joint parliamentary body for the Euro area would be very difficult to realise.
As a general overhaul of the Economic and Monetary Union seems indispensable to make the common currency weather-proof, a more symmetric involvement of national parliaments is necessary to strengthen the legitimacy that they supply. In the European Semester this could be achieved via minimum standards for parliamentary involvement, but the tangled web of procedures for ESM rescue packages is likely to persist and interparliamentary cooperation can only be developed incrementally.