National Parliaments and the European Union

Résumé du document

In November 2009, European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek said that the Lisbon Treaty will improve the European Union's democratic functioning, for national parliaments and citizens alike, noting that it will increase contacts between the European Parliament and the national parliaments, and the Question Hour with the Commission and online streaming of the Committee meetings should bring their activities closer to the citizens. In fact, all these propositions were not included into the Treaty of Lisbon but some of them were. Thus, the relationship between national parliaments and the institutions of the European Union are closer than it was before. The institutional history of the European Union is complex and ambiguous. Indeed, after the edification of the ECSC, the national parliaments play used to play a major role notably designating the deputies of the first Assembly. Nevertheless, their prerogatives decreased in benefit of other institutions when the European Union was completely built with the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992.

Extraits

[...] Thus, the national parliaments had to obey to supranational institutions in terms of legislation and the strong resistance to this could be sanctioned by the Court. So, these two events marginalized the powers of the national parliaments. The attempt of the COSAC The national parliaments to respond to this reduction of its powers created in 1989 by the initiative of Laurent Fabius the COSAC (Conference of Community and European Affairs Committees of Parliaments of the European Union). This conference of Members of the European Parliament and national members of parliament who are drawn from parliamentary committees responsible for European Union affairs met twice a year in the member state that hold the rotating EU presidency. [...]

[...] We saw that an asymmetry between the national parliaments and the other institutions of the European Union (especially the European Parliament) widened concretely in 1979 and the direct election of the MPs but also more deeply with the Single European Act in 1986 and the Treaty of Maastricht ad Amsterdam. We will see in a second part that after the rejection of the European Constitution in 2005 a “prise de conscience” occurred within the political corpses and that the necessity of including more efficiently the national parliaments appeared as a central question. This central question was concluded in the Treaty of Lisbon. [...]

[...] Nevertheless, since the rejection of the European Constitution that we do not afraid to call turning point” brings the necessity to integrate the NPs at the heart of the EU. In this essay, the rebirthing of the national parliaments is truly to start after the debacle of 2005, if it is true that some prerogatives were given to the national parliaments, they are too piecemeal to be considered as a real movement of change. Thus pause the new history of the EP: more powers to the national parliaments and mostly more consideration for the democratic representants of the Union. [...]

[...] In addition, these exchanges were underlined in a declaration on the role of national parliaments in the European Union. In this declaration which was appended to the Maastricht Treaty[4], the national governments were called to transmit to their national parliaments all the Commission propositions in good time for a possible examination. The declaration also recommended that exchanges between the European Parliament and the national parliaments have to be increased to permit a better “involvement in the Community process”[5]. What is in a way paradoxical is that at the same time the Treaty recognizes in its article 3B the principle of subsidiarity that is to say that the decisions taken by the European Union have to be closer to the citizens, that is to say that the good scale has to be chosen too. [...]

[...] II- The rebirth of the national parliaments within the European framework 1. A turning point: the rejection of the European Constitution in 2005 and the impact of the Treaty of Lisbon on the powers of national parliaments “Treaty of Lisbon opens EU door to national parliaments”[6] The “period of reflection” following the debacle of the European Constitution Firstly, what is important to underline is the veritable choc that followed the rejection of the European Constitution in 2005 by France and the Netherlands. [...]