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What Role for National Parliaments? European Integration and the Prospects of Parliamentary Democracy 1

2. The debate

The debate on the adequate role of national Parliaments in the European Union is still nascent. It is true that most observers agree in applauding the Treaty of Lisbon and the German Constitutional Court’s judgement for its emphasis on additional parliamentary control mechanisms. There seems to be a broad political consensus that national parliaments should have an important role in European politics and be equipped with the necessary legal and administrative resources. There is, however, hardly any explicit constitutional debate on the exact role of national parliaments in the European political

system that goes beyond a mere “more of the same”. This section is intended to introduce and criticize the two most prominent perspectives on the role of national parliament in European multilevel governance. Both perspectives will be presented in a somehow stylized manner to distinguish the arguments clearly and to lay the ground for a third perspective that combines the strengths of the two approaches without taking on board their deficiencies.

2.1 Supranational Parliamentarism

Supranational parliamentarism starts from the suggestion that the European Parliament (EP) is the legitimate institution for representing the European demos.3 It is the only directly elected European institution und thus in a superior position to connect the European citizens directly to the European policy-making process. For supranationalists, the EP should be treated on at least equal footing to the Council. It would be even more adequate to follow the example of most federal democracies and to make the EP the first legislative chamber and the Council the second. It also follows this line of reasoning to reject the refusal of the Member States to open the intergovernmental Common Foreign and Security Policy as well as home and justice institutions to full parliamentary participation. The more competencies the EP acquires, the more the European citizens will be represented and the higher will be the legitimacy of the EU.

National parliaments have no important role in supranational conceptions of democracy in Europe. Most conceptions follow the logic of a European federal state in which the competences of regional (member state) parliaments are implicitly limited to issues of minor importance. National parliaments should have their legislative and control competences limited to domestic issues and refrain from getting involved in European affairs. The way ahead to a European democracy is via extending the EP’s competences with the ultimate goal of “a full parliamentarisation in a European federation” (Fischer 2000). From an orthodox supranationalist’s perspective, any specifically European activity of national parliaments distorts in the natural division of competencies between the European and national parliaments. European parliamentary involvement is to be conducted by the European parliament and must not be replicated by similar efforts on the part of national parliaments.

Although the supranationalist’s conceptualisation of European parliamentarism has the benefit of simplicity, it is not without deficiencies. The major problem of applying standard concepts of democracy to the EU is that its very structure is built on the principle of difference, and not of equality, among citizens. The principle of degressive proportionality of Art.14 Treaty of Lisbon (ToL) provides that citizens from small states generally have a greater say than citizens from the bigger states. It is true that this critique applies to all

3 The supranational perspective is a stylized concept. It is most closely represented, however, by Fischer (2000), Hix (2008) and Eriksen (2009).

federal states with a chamber in which the states are represented according to the principle of one state one vote. The EU, however, differs from all federal states in that unequal representation is not only a matter of its second legislative chamber but is well institutionalized in both chambers, the European Parliament and the (European) Council.

Difference, and not equality of citizens, is an organizing principle of the EU. Inequality thus not only constitutes a deficit in the organisational structure of the EU but also gives expression to an emphasis on intergovernmental equality, which is alien to the emphasis of democracy on individual equality. The EU thus is not undemocratic by mistake but deliberately violates one of the constituting principles of democracy. It is the price that is paid for the legacy of the European history and the resulting emphasis on protecting the small states against domination by the bigger ones.

It is also a serious hindrance that the EU lacks a number of empirical pre-conditions that make democratic discourses likely. As has been repeatedly said, the European demos is strongly divided along national lines and non-expert cross-border political discourses are hard to find. Extending the EP’s competences would thus amount to a mere formal democratisation that lacks the underlying foundation of a vibrant political discourse. It would mean to empower an institution that is not accepted by the European peoples as the appropriate site for setting the European agenda. It would thus not reduce the democratic deficit of the EU, but risk adding to the already existing alienation between the European citizens and the EU.

2.2 Intergovernmental Parliamentarism

The intergovernmental interpretation of EU parlamentarism is directly opposed to its supranational counterpart. Intergovernmentalism assumes democracy to be a political practice that is closely tied to the nation-state. According to Scharpf (2009: 181), “the EU must be seen and legitimated not as a government of citizens, but as a government of governments”. Only the nation-state has the cultural heritage, the constitutional foundation and the institutional equipment to foster democratic practices. Thus, it is the member states that are the most important institutional sites for providing legitimacy to the EU. The major democratic problems resulting from European integration are the empowerment of national executives, the bypassing of national legislatures and the new opportunities for the governments to influence the domestic agenda (Moravcsik 1994). Europeanisation thus has important effects for the quality of domestic democracy and threatens to distort the balance of power between the executive and the legislative. Most intergovernmentalists would therefore subscribe to the statement that all political competences on the European level are – and must be – of an enumerated quality and closely limited to those areas where the nation-state is functionally deficient and where democratic societies are ready to pool political resources with other member states.

The implications for the role of national parliaments in the EU are straightforward. There is no way of accepting the claim that a supranational Parliament’s competences should be as broad as those of the democratic member states. Only the latter are fully democratically legitimated whereas the formers’ contribution to the EU’s legitimacy is of an only supplementary, if not negligible, nature. From an orthodox inter-governmentalist’s perspective, there can be no such thing as law above the nation-state, or, in our context, European law. Law proper is tied to democracy, and democracy is tied to the state. National parliaments thus may delegate norm-setting competences to intergovernmental bodies or supranational agencies but must at the same time institutionalise proper control mechanisms for safeguarding that those norms do not contradict national constitutional provisions and that the agents do not misuse their discretionary powers. The German Constitutional Court’s ruling expresses such an understanding of the adequate role of national parliaments in Europe. Its green-lighting of the Treaty of Lisbon was made conditional on a previous strengthening of the Bundestag whilst the expansion of the competences of the EP was understood to be largely irrelevant from the point of view of democracy.

The intergovernmental perspective has much strength but is also not without deficiencies.

Democracy in Europe can neither be adequately established at a purely national level nor can it be adapted to the complex interdependence of the European societies by simply adding an intergovernmental layer of governance. The arguments are well known (cf.

Føllesdal and Hix 2006, Eriksen and Fossum 2011): National democracy has external effects on neighbouring states, is thus imposing own rules on foreigners, and is structurally handicapped in terms of input legitimacy. It is, furthermore, too small for coping with many cross-border challenges (environment, migration, security, etc.) and thus lacks output-legitimacy. Simply adding an intergovernmental layer of governance on top of the nation-state implies negative feedback effects on the domestic political setting (see above) and cannot solve the problems of democratic legitimacy either.