Varying Degrees of Cooperativeness Among EU Parliaments Related to Article 13 TSCG

This paper will analyse inter-parliamentary cooperation between national parliaments and the European Parliament (EP) in the area of Economic and Financial Governance (EFG), where the creation of a new inter-parliamentary conference has shown that some EU parliaments are more cooperative than others. Article 13 TSCG and the Inter-parliamentary conference on EFG established on that basis would allow for the EP and national parliaments to work together, to discuss, exchange information and even exercise control. However, the relationship between the two parliamentary levels is (still) characterised by conflict, rather than cooperation (Neunreither 2005), as the first meetings of that conference in 2013 and 2014 show. The EP sees a mixed parliamentary body as “ineffective and illegitimate” (European Parliament 2012) and national parliaments cannot agree either: while some only want to give an advisory role to that conference, others would like it to be a body for joint scrutiny. In this policy area, just like in CFSP/CSDP, a conflict of “overlapping authority claims” (Herranz-Surrales 2014) can be observed. Some studies on these different preferences exist (Cooper 2014, Kreilinger 2013), but they do not analyse the behaviour of different actors within parliaments. In this paper, the EP and four national parliaments (Denmark, France, Germany, Italy) will be compared and their behaviour towards inter-parliamentary cooperation in EFG both inside and outside the arena of that conference (agenda-setting, participation in ad-hoc meetings and inter-parliamentary conferences, written contributions and amendments with respect to the draft Rules of Procedure) will be analysed in order to examine which parliamentary actors take the initiative and/or participate in activities related to this inter-parliamentary conference. This will allow to classify different parliamentary actors (and parliaments) as inward-looking, passively cooperative or actively networking and thus provide a basis for a better understanding of inter-parliamentary cooperation even beyond that conference and beyond EFG.