| Review of: | Die nationalen Parlamente und ihre Europa-Gremien. Legitimationsgarant der EU? by C.A. Janowski |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Wolfram Kaiser |
| Reviewed in: | Journal of Common Market Studies |
| Date accepted online: | 28/03/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 45, Issue 1, Pages 211-229 |
Book Reviews
The EU's institutional deepening and expansion into new policy areas have increasingly marginalized national parliaments in European policy-making. Their limited ability to scrutinize executive policy-making on EU matters, let alone substantially influence it, in turn undermines the parliamentary and popular legitimacy of Member State policy-making in Brussels. Recognizing the possible consequences for the democratic legitimacy of the EU more generally, the Member States in the subsidiarity protocol of the Constitutional Treaty have invested national parliaments with a guardian function concerning the respect in EU legislation for the principle of subsidiarity. Beyond this general provision, however, it will be left to national parliaments to develop suitable institutional mechanisms for controlling and influencing governmental policy-making even if the Constitutional Treaty is ratified eventually.
In her book, Cordula Janowski analyses the strategies of national parliaments for scrutinizing EU policy-making in a comparative perspective for the old EU of 15 Member States. In the first two chapters, she discusses the significance of national parliaments for the EU's traditional dual legitimation model involving the European Parliament and national parliaments. The third chapter discusses comprehensively the institutional mechanisms developed by national parliaments in the form of specialized committees dealing with EU legislation. Janowski's findings confirm that the parliaments of the three Nordic Member States - Denmark, Sweden and Finland - have institutionally weak, but politically strong committees, having adopted the original formula of the Danish Folketing, while Germany and Austria have institutionally strong, but politically less influential committees. In contrast, Westminster and southern European national parliaments on the whole still treat European policy-making as a sub-field of foreign policy with extensive executive discretion. Based on a number of semi-structured interviews with parliamentarians and policy-makers, Janowski then studies the actual functioning of the institutional mechanisms in practice in four case studies, but only with reference to the German Bundestag and the Austrian Nationalrat.
Although limited to the pre-enlargement EU, this book is an excellent up-to-date comparative introduction to national parliaments and their institutional mechanisms for the scrutiny of EU legislation. Unfortunately, the more innovative analysis of the practical application of these mechanisms, and its implications for the contribution of national parliaments to the democratic legitimacy of EU policy-making, is limited to only two countries. Nonetheless, the findings of this book are a healthy reminder that the EU's democratic legitimacy may continue to hinge in part on stronger national parliamentary control. The European Commission's lofty conception of deliberative participatory democracy through a mobilization of civil society actors cannot easily compensate for the continued lack of parliamentary input into EU policy-making at national level.