Parliament here, parliament there

The core of every representative system is its parliament or legislative assembly. In this context the European Parliament is a strange political creature. On the one hand, it is directly elected and has considerable influence over European Union policy-making. On the other hand, it does not have those powers which national parliaments, such as Britain's and Malta's, have according to their constitution.

Since its inception, the European Parliament attracted the interest of various academics. The need for increased democratic legitimacy within the European institutions had long been felt..

Recently academics like the Oxonian R.S. Katz have argued that solutions to the democratic deficit and, more essentially, governability, will have to consider the roles of both the European Parliament and the national parliaments of the member states.

Malta, as a new member of the EU, should take an active interest in this debate.

Changing role

It is perhaps not generally realised that the Union's procedures for making policy and thus the functions of the European Parliament (EP) vary to a considerable extent according to the policy and competence in question.

European business (i.e. legislation) on some areas, such as the internal market and the common agricultural policy (CAP), are binding on the member states; in other areas, such as education and culture, the Union seeks only to complement national legislation. There are also other areas such as civil law and income tax which are outside the scope of the European Parliament and the other EU institutions.

What's more, in important policy areas such as the Economic and Monetary Union, the Common Foreign and Security Policy and in certain aspects of justice and home affairs the EP understandably hardly plays any role.

Nevertheless, the EP is an important institution. Apart from enjoying the right to dismiss the whole Commission, the MEPs have the right to ask questions to Commissioners and enjoy inter-institutional contacts. The EP is also important in terms of budgetary proposals (the Common Agricultural Policy excluded).

Adding to the complexity, the influence of the European Parliament depends also on the decision-making procedures contemplated in the Consolidated Treaties in relation to the respective policy areas or competences. These decision-making procedures range from the purely consultative to the co-decisional as enshrined in the Maastricht Treaty.

According to a study for the European Parliament (DG-Research) conducted by A. Maurer (1999), it transpired that between the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty (November 1, 1993) and the end of the 1994-99 legislative term, the EP was involved in 379 co-decision procedures, 116 co-operation procedures (a type of procedure which provided the EP with limited ability to veto Commission proposals), 87 assent procedures, 1,113 consultation procedures and 102 budgetary procedures.

In this context, the Amsterdam Treaty, which entered into force in May 1999, considerably expanded the EP's role. It did not only change the relative distribution among these procedures but practically eliminated the co-operation procedure.

The co-decision procedure was also changed by Amsterdam, crystallising instead a kind of new co-decision procedure which reduced the importance of the Commission and increased the list of policy areas governed by this new procedure. The Treaty of Nice made the list even longer.

Although some authors like G. Tsebelis and G. Garrett argued that the co-operation procedure was more favourable to the EP than the Maastricht co-decision procedure, most MEPs and analysts state that "the Maastricht version of the co-decision procedure was a significant step forward for the EP in its institutional power-struggle within the Council over EU legislation." (Kalandrakis, 1999).

Effectively the successive Treaties triggered a development of the European Parliament from a "talking shop" to a policy-shaping assembly with notable legislative powers and with its own internal modes of operation and rules of procedure.

Shaping the future

The role of the European Parliament vis-à-vis that of the national parliaments has often been a focus of debate on the inter-governmental aspects of the EU set-up as opposed to the federal or supra-national facets.

Various articles have been written in the context of strengthening the role of the European Parliament "as the representatives of the peoples" in contrast to the European Council that is said to represent "the States", repeating each time the old issues which I have just mentioned in the preceding paragraph. Others have also spent considerable energy in the (to my mind) useless effort of comparing the EP with national parliaments.

The time is ripe to overcome those issues and look instead at how to use the admittedly uneasy relationship between the EP and national parliaments as an effective tool to increase the opportunities which a Europe-wide experience can give rise to and decrease the economic hardships resulting from the implementation of European business (especially insofar as small and microstates are concerned) for the well-being of the EU itself and the respective member states.

Rather, the main focus should be of reaching the optimum level of inter-relationship between the E{ and the national parliaments to spur domestic MPs to control their government in European matters and to strengthen national parliamentary control of EU legislation according to the needs of the respective states.

Irrespective of party opinions on integration, our House of Representatives, in conjuction with the respective Maltese MEPs (from June 13), must undertake all that is necessary to adapt strategically to European developments with the final aim of subjecting the national government and European business to tighter scrutiny.

The recent attempts to create, in the Constitution for Europe, general links between the European Parliament and national parliaments are a step in the right direction. This way, apart from transcending the traditional distinction between domestic issues and foreign policy in the minds of European politicians, this new modus operandi grants political parties an opportunity to link voters to top-level decision-making.

The relationship of the European Parliament and the national parliaments is not only a study of how to secure effective legislative procedures. Rather, it is essential not only to link MEPs to national parliamentary democracy and thus the voters but also to make sure that - within the parameters of the supreme national interest - local deputies can have the opportunity of scrutinising European business and instill a sense of "localisation" to issues which, otherwise, would seem totally foreign and "made in Brussels", and thus alien to everyday life.

Owen Bonnici, BA, Dip. Not. Pub., is a Labour candidate for the European Parliament and a Labour councillor for Marsascala.

owen@owenbonnici.com