The Impact of the MEPs' Socialisation on the Institutional Evolution of the European Parliament, 1952-1979

The European Parliament (EP) is today one of the most powerful actors at EU level. However, it was intended to be merely a consultative assembly at the founding of the European Communities in the 1950s. This paper argues that the swift evolution of the EP into a co-legislator cannot be understood without taking into consideration the socialisation of the early Members of the EP (MEPs), and the ideas underlying their Community-level activism. This paper looks at the institutional evolution of the EP prior to its first direct elections in 1979, and analyses what drove a number of national parliamentarians to invest considerable time and effort far beyond Treaty provisions in an institution which promised no significant political impact, no career improvement, and no acknowledgement by voters. The paper studies in a historical-sociological institutionalist analysis to what extent the MEPs’ socialisation shaped their behaviour, and with what effect. The analysis takes into consideration the various fora in which the delegates got engaged both prior to and after entering the EP, including national parliaments and parties, other Community institutions and international organisations. The paper shows that the MEPs shaped the EP according to their ideas of a fully-fledged supranational parliament, deriving from their intra- and extra-parliamentary experience. The analysis puts a special focus on the role of norm entrepreneurs (as defined by Finnemore & Sikkink 1998), i.e. a small group of MEPs who learned to use the political tools available to them, their multi-level contacts and their increasing knowledge of procedures and policies at Community level in order to pursue their political and institutional aims. Through the study of inter-related processes of influencing and being influenced, the paper maps the sociological basis for the EP’s institutional evolution in a time where it was far from clear what role the EP would turn out to play in Community politics. This uncertainty was based notably on the significantly varying perceptions among members of the Community institutions and member-state governments as to what powers and tasks the EP should have, ranging from a mere control body to a fully-fledged supranational parliament. The analysis is based on 27 interviews with former MEPs from all EP party groups and member states prior to 1979, and with officials who worked in the EP at the time, plus a corpus of ca. 3,500 EP documents, such as resolutions, reports, parliamentary questions and minutes of debates. The interviews provide information on the MEPs’ socialisation prior to and during their EP mandates, and the shared ideas that drove the delegates in their activism at Community level based on their socialisation. The EP documents offer some insight into how the MEPs’ socialisation and polity ideas affected their behaviour, and what impact this had on the institutional evolution of the EP. Thus, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the EP’s gradual empowerment at a time when the Treaties did not grant the EP a noteworthy – and certainly not a parliamentary – role in Community policy-making procedures.