Parliamentary Involvement in the EMU Reform Negotiations

An important part of the grand debate about ‘what is wrong with the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and how to fix it’, is about democratic reform. Throughout the Eurocrisis, national parliamentary involvement has been criticized as being too limited and too slow. While the EP was largely kept out of the loop on the high level deal making. This resulted in an intergovernmental process, driven by Eurogroup and European Council initiatives. However, once the focus started to shift from direct crisis management to institutional reform of the economic governance structures, opportunities to influence the proceedings in Brussels became more prominent. The question is: have parliaments been able to make use of these opportunities? This paper has three goals: -1- To compare differences in parliamentary scrutiny procedures of the Eurozone countries. Thereby focussing on the oversight and scrutiny of the EMU reform negotiations (e.g. on the ESM, European Semester, Six-Pack, Two-Pack, Fiscal Compact). To what extent were national parliaments informed about and to what extent could they influence national governments’ positions in these negotiations? -2- To determine whether and to what extent improvements have been made in the parliamentary scrutiny procedures. Now that economic integration is seemingly taking such giant leaps, are parliaments equally able to upgrade their oversight procedures, for instance by means of the subsidiarity control mechanisms or through the COSAC? -3- To assess to what extent national negotiation success is influenced/determined by the degree of (parliamentary) scrutiny at the domestic level. To use Thomas Schelling’s logic: are those whose ‘hands are tied’ by their parliaments, more able to get their positions acknowledged in Brussels? This paper seeks to answer these questions by means of mixed method approach, using comparative (fuzzy set QCA) and process tracing analyses of specific negotiations rounds.