Brexit Under Scrutiny? National Parliaments in Austria and Germany in the Brexit Negotiations

Negotiations on a withdrawal of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU) are underway. National parliaments, next to the European Parliament, will most likely have to ratify a future UK-EU agreement in case it will be mixed. Yet, scholarly work has so far focused on the European Parliament or the UK parliament. At the same time, research on national parliaments in the negotiation of EU international agreements is only in the making. This is although national parliaments have already started sounding out possible forms of coordination among themselves and with the European Parliament in the case of Brexit. The German Bundestag even declared its view of having a right to participate in negotiations. This paper seeks to remedy this lack of attention to national parliaments in the Brexit negotiations, and it focuses on parliaments in two EU member states: Austria and Germany. To what extent, how, and why so have these parliaments been involved in the Brexit negotiations? While both parliaments are considered relatively strong, Brexit’s saliency in these two countries differs. As saliency of a policy issue is considered a major explanatory factor for why national parliaments engage more in EU affairs, the expectation is that the German Bundestag, given Brexit’s high salience in this country, is more active and involved than the Austrian parliament. This paper will trace activities of these parliaments and examine to what extent this expectation holds in the negotiation of Brexit.