Article 50 and the Self-Empowerment of the European Parliament in the Brexit Process

Article 50 provides the basic rules for the processes of exiting the European Union. Like almost any other treaty provision, article 50 contains a significant degree of ambiguity. This offers actors room for interpreting and re-defining the rules of the game within the existing provisions. The notion of incomplete contract captures best this situation: power-maximizing actors use the unavoidable interpretative gaps in intergovernmental agreements in order to expand their powers. Previous research has shown that the European Parliament behaves as such a power-maximizer and the case of article 50 shows how, starting with a limited role, the EP has expanded it to become a salient player during Brexit negotiations. The EP has combined synergistically three instrumental resources to exploit the “incomplete contract/treaty ambiguity” in article 50 to its own advantage. Firstly, it has capitalized internal cohesion among main party groups to promote a single and unified stance and move very quickly on the early stages of the process when the procedures were defined. Secondly, the EP has exploited the very large leverage that voting on the final withdrawal agreement gives to it and it has signaled its willingness to transform this vote into a factual veto. Thirdly, the EP has exploited skillfully the strategic objectives of both the Commission and the Council to render its role functional to those.