National Parliamentary Scrutiny of CSDP Operations: Formality in Action

While the European Union is now involved in civilian and military peacekeeping operations under its Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), the scrutiny, and particularly parliamentary scrutiny of this policy area has evolved more slowly. While the European Parliament has gained some oversight powers in this area over time, it is with national parliaments that the scrutiny of the policy resides. However, the legal norms and procedures for the scrutiny of such operations vary in each member state, leading to a patchwork of parliamentary scrutiny of CSDP operations. The question thus arise as to whether and how national parliaments use the existing procedures to scrutinize CSDP operations, and whether parliaments have supplemented these with informal scrutiny procedures to complete and complement the powers of each member state. Using the EUFOR RD Congo and EUFOR Chad/RCA operations, this paper elaborates on how parliamentary scrutiny of such operations functions in Europe’s “big three” military actors the UK, France and Germany. It finds that at present national parliaments focus their attention on CSDP operations with a national contribution, and largely limit their scrutiny to the formal procedures. While the Lisbon Treaty has not introduced any major changes relative to parliamentary scrutiny in this policy area, the more recent EU Training Mission in Mali will be used to illustrate the continuity of parliamentary scrutiny procedures and practice under the new treaty regime.