“The European Parliament”: On the politics of naming

The history of the ‘European Parliament’ can also be discussed from the perspective of politics of naming. What was called ‘European Parliament’, when, by whom and which was the political point of using this expression. Who were refusing to use that expression, when and with which purpose? Which kind of epithets, either derogative or appreciative, were connected to that expression. The common story of the EU scholars is that the European Parliamentary Assembly (EPA), founded by the Rome Treaty and starting its sittings in 1960, began in 1963 to call itself European Parliament, although the European Community officially accepted this term only after the first direct elections to the Parliament in 1979. However, prime minister Margaret Thatcher spoke on the ‘European Assembly’ as ‘different from our Parliament’ still in 1985. Conversely, in Dutch and German the EPA was called from its beginning European Parliament, also by the EEC Commission President Walter Hallstein. Indeed, some members of both the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community spoke of their assembly as the first European Parliament in September 1952, and several members of the Ad-hoc Assembly, which drafted the Constitution for the European Political Community in 1953, called in the debates the proposed bicameral Parliament as the European Parliament. The dispute concerned, whether it was possible to transfer a parliamentary democracy to a supranational European level. In the final section I shall discuss the more general topics of politics of naming. By which criterion an assembly is judged to be a parliament? Which types of shifts in power shares justify naming it a parliament? I shall connect this example to a wider rhetorical perspective in Quentin Skinner’s discussion of naming as one alternative for projecting a conceptual change.