Energy diplomacy under scrutiny: parliamentary control of intergovernmental agreements with third‐country suppliers

Abstract

Research on legislative‒executive relations in foreign affairs has generally assumed that parliaments are more active in ‘intermestic’ affairs than in traditional foreign policy issues. This paper revisits this assumption by examining whether parliaments in European countries scrutinise crucial decisions on a typical intermestic domain: external energy policy and, more specifically, intergovernmental agreements (IGAs) on energy. Contrary to the expectation, the study finds high variation in the level of parliamentary scrutiny across and within countries. To account for this variation, the paper focuses on the role of issue framing, particularly the impact of securitising and/or depoliticising moves by members of parliament and government. The paper argues that, in contrast to traditional foreign policy matters, securitisation attempts in areas with a strong economic component are likely to increase politicisation and hence also parliamentary engagement. Conversely, parliamentary disengagement is likely to come from the opposite dynamics: successful depoliticisation of governmental responsibilities.

Keywords:

• Parliamentary control
• energy
• external relations
• securitisation
• depoliticisation
• framing

Energy policy is a typical area lying at the crossroads between domestic and foreign policy. Particularly for countries that are highly dependent on hydrocarbon imports, energy policy is often a delicate balancing act where economic, environmental, and social goals need to be regularly weighed against political-strategic implications. Energy policy has therefore long been seen as an ‘intermestic’ area (Manning 1977). Referring to the US context, Manning (1977: 308) singled out the 1973 oil crisis as the clearest illustration of the new vulnerabilities associated with growing economic interdependency, and of how the conduct of foreign economic policy could dislocate whole economies and ways of life back home. His main claim was therefore that the growing entwinement of international and domestic policies in areas like energy required stronger coordination between the executive and the legislature and, more specifically, a greater role for Congress.

In the European context, the challenge posed by energy policy is no smaller. The European Union is the world’s biggest importer of primary energy and its portfolio of suppliers is relatively undiversified: Russia is the origin of more than one-third of its oil and gas imports. The choice of suppliers and supply routes via pipelines, particularly for natural gas, is therefore of crucial political relevance because this infrastructure can tie producer, consumer, and transit countries into a relation of (inter)dependency for several decades. International pipelines also have a direct bearing on the economies of the countries involved, given the size of the investment (often involving public finances) and the fact that pipelines are frequently linked to long-term supply contracts. At the same time, major energy infrastructure projects are inevitably accompanied by negative environmental and social externalities, in terms of direct impact on the territory and, more generally, for locking in further hydrocarbon consumption as part of the national energy mix. Therefore, in line with the abovementioned observation by Manning (1977) and further research on the US Congress (Raunio and Wagner 2016), we should expect foreign policy decisions having high economic and societal impact to be subjected to higher levels of parliamentary scrutiny compared to traditional areas of foreign policy.

However, as this paper discusses, the expectation of growing legislative‒executive interaction in intermestic affairs is not clearly met in the area of foreign energy policy. There is a rather large variation in the way EU member states handle international energy agreements and the degree to which parliaments scrutinise them. Procedures vary from open parliamentary debate and ratification of formal intergovernmental agreements (IGAs) on energy, to the treatment of these agreements as classified information to be dealt with exclusively by government. To explain this variation, this study focuses particularly on re-examining the external threats hypothesis advanced in the introduction to this collection, which, based on securitisation theory, postulates that ‘governments can seek to avoid legislative constraints through framing issues as security threats’ (Raunio and Wagner 2016). Contrary to this expectation, the paper contends that, unlike traditional areas of foreign policy, attempts at securitisation in areas with a strong economic component are likely to trigger greater politicisation and hence also a more active role by parliaments. At the same time, it argues that a crucial source of executive dominance is to be found in the reverse process – the use of depoliticisation tactics, a phenomenon that has been increasingly relevant in studies of political delegation.

To assess the plausibility of these propositions, the paper examines four countries that recently approved energy agreements for the construction of major gas pipelines: Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, and Italy. The bilateral agreements examined relate to two gas pipeline projects from Russia – the South Stream (via the Black Sea) and the Nord Stream (via the Baltic Sea) – that were adopted between 2005 and 2008. In a context of growing energy security concerns and tensions with Russia, both projects were highly controversial given that they would allow bypassing current transit countries in Central and Eastern Europe and impair alternative projects such as the Nabucco pipeline, the diversification project officially favoured by the EU. However, despite this common context, the degree of parliamentary scrutiny of the respective projects in each country differed substantially. More specifically, the cases selected are representative of four different patterns of parliamentary involvement characterised by different combinations of powers and engagement in the scrutiny of energy agreements.

The paper is structured as follows. The first section provides an overview of parliaments’ involvement in the approval of recent energy IGAs, further spelling out the puzzle of the high variation across (and within) EU member states. The second section sets out the theoretical discussion. The empirical analysis unfolds in the third and fourth sections: the third section examines two cases of parliaments that were highly pro-active in scrutinising the IGAs despite their different formal powers (Bulgaria and Hungary) and the fourth section goes into cases of parliaments that, regardless of their powers, were content with delegating the decision to the government (Italy and Germany). The last section summarises the main findings and reflects on the implications of this research for broader debates on transparency in foreign economic relations.

The patchwork of parliamentary involvement in energy IGAs

In the context of the liberalisation of the electricity and gas markets in the EU, energy relations in Europe are often portrayed as ‘a matter for private companies rather than government command’ (Youngs 2011: 51). However, even in liberal societies, the economic and strategic importance of international energy infrastructure projects and long-term supply contracts usually requires a great deal of state involvement in the form of legal measures, economic support, or political flanking (Van der Linde 2007). This support is often formalised in an IGA, setting conditions such as the ownership of the infrastructure, general terms of supply, or the tax regime to be applied. This lays down the basis for the specific commercial contracts between companies. According to the European Commission, there are currently 124 energy IGAs in place between EU member states and third countries.¹ Yet energy infrastructure agreements may also take a less formal character ‒ for example non-binding documents such as memoranda of understanding (MoU) between the concerned governments and/or companies.

Regardless of their legal form, energy agreements are often a disputed area between the legislature and the executive. Also in the United States decisions in this area continue to be a tug-of-war between Congress and the president. For example, in February 2015 President Obama used his third presidential veto to block a bill by Congress approving the construction of the controversial Keystone oil pipeline from Canada, arguing that ‘this act of Congress conflicts with established executive branch procedures and cuts short thorough consideration of issues that could bear on our national interest’ (White House 2015). In Europe, the conclusion of energy agreements is also generally the prerogative of the executive. Although the constitutional orders of most European countries foresee the involvement of the legislature in the ratification of international agreements, the degree to which parliaments actually hold and use these powers to scrutinise energy agreements varies considerably. As shown in Table 1, the absence of parliamentary ratification is not uncommon. What is more, the procedures followed by the same country are not always consistent across pipeline projects (see e.g. Italy, Hungary or Turkey). To properly capture this variation, therefore, it is necessary to conceptualise parliamentary involvement in a more elaborate manner than just presence/absence of ratification.

Table 1. Adoption procedure of energy agreements for recent completed and projected gas pipelines to Europe.

Origin	Pipeline project	Country	Formal IGA	Parliamentary ratification
Russia	Nord Stream (completed 2011)	Germany	No	No
	Nord Stream 2	Germany	No	No
	South Stream	Austria	Yes (24.04.2010)	Yes (30.11/17.12.2010 – low/high chambers)
		Bulgaria	Yes (18.01.2008)	Yes (25.07.2008)
		Croatia	Yes (02.03.2010)	No
		Greece	Yes (29.04.2008)	Yes (02.09.2008)
		Hungary	Yes (28.02.2008)	No
		Italy	No	No
		FYROM	Yes (23.07.2013)	Yes (26.09.2013)
		Serbia	Yes (25.01.2008)	Yes (09.09.2008)
		Slovenia	Yes (14.11.2009)	Yes (04.03.2010)
		Turkey	Yes (06.08.2009)	No
Caspian region	Interconnector Turkey‒Italy‒Greece (ITGI) (only ITG section completed 2007)	Greece	Yes (IGI: 04.11.2005, ITGI: 26.07.2007)	Yes (IGI: 27.02.2006; ITGI: 07.02.2008)
		Italy	Yes (IGI: 04.11.2005, ITGI: 26.07.2007)	Yes (IGI:19.07/16.10.2007 – low/high chambers)No (ITGI)
		Turkey	Yes (ITGI: 26.07.2007)	No
	Nabucco	Austria	Yes (13.07.2009)	Yes (10/18.12.2009 –low/high chambers)
		Bulgaria	Yes (13.07.2009)	Yes (03.02.2010)
		Hungary	Yes (13.07.2009)	Yes (19.10.2009)
		Romania	Yes (13.07.2009)	Yes (16.02.2010)
		Turkey	Yes (13.07.2009)	Yes (04.03.2010)
	Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP)	Albania	Yes (13.02.2013)	Yes (05.12.2013)
		Greece	Yes (13.02.2013)	Yes (09.04.2013)
		Italy	Yes (13.02.2013)	Yes (17.10/5.12.2013 – high/low chambers)
Northern Africa	Green Stream (completed 2004)	Italy	No	No
	Galsi	Italy	Yes (14.11.2007)	No
	MedGaz (completed 2011)	Spain	No	No

Source: own compilation.

The literature on the role of parliaments in EU affairs and foreign policy more generally has often observed that parliaments’ formal powers do not always correlate with the degree to which they actually engage in scrutinising the executive (Herranz-Surrallés 2014; Huff 2015; Peters et al. 2014). Studies analysing parliamentary involvement have thus often distinguished between parliaments’ capacity and motivation (Auel and Christiansen 2015) or between authority, ability and attitude (Born and Hänggi 2005). Building on these categories, this paper distinguishes between parliaments’ powers and engagement in the scrutiny of international energy agreements. Parliaments can be categorised as having high powers when they are competent to approve energy IGAs at least ex post via ratification, and low powers when these agreements are usually dealt with exclusively by the government. In turn, parliaments displaying high engagement are those where parliamentarians make use of the instruments at their disposal (e.g. ratification prerogative, debates, questions, hearings or special committees) to obtain detailed information and justification on the planned energy projects, and sometimes even claim further rights to influence the decision-making process; and low engagement when parliamentarians acquiesce to having no formal role in decisions on big energy infrastructural projects or do not use their prerogatives consistently. Combining these two dimensions, we can distinguish at least four patterns of parliamentary involvement. The remainder of the section illustrates these patterns with examples from Table 1, including the case studies that will be addressed in the empirical section.

The first pattern includes parliaments that enjoy high powers and display high engagement. Some parliaments of the countries involved in the South Stream project are good examples of this category. For instance, the Slovenian parliament stands out for having been involved not only ex post via its ratification powers, but also ex ante in the approval of the government’s negotiation mandate (Government of Slovenia 2009). Particularly representative of this pattern is also Bulgaria. Parliamentary engagement there was high both before the ratification (July 2008), when opposition parties were very active in denouncing the government for the lack of information and consultation of parliament; and afterwards, when South Stream IGA even became one of the reasons for a motion of censure on the government in June 2014 (Euractiv 2014).

The second pattern consists of parliaments that enjoy high powers but display a relatively low engagement in the actual scrutiny of IGAs. Several cases in Table 1 pertain to this category: for example the Austrian parliament, which ratified the IGAs for the South Stream and the Nabucco (two projects considered by many as incompatible) with little parliamentary involvement beyond the ratification debate. Another particularly interesting case is the Italian parliament’s role in the South Stream, given that the pipeline there was dealt with under much lower levels of scrutiny than other recent pipeline projects involving Italy. For example, the projected IGI or Trans Adriatic Pipelines (TAPs) were preceded by IGAs later ratified by the two chambers of parliament. Conversely, for the South Stream, the government did not sign an IGA and the project was hardly discussed in parliament despite the fact that the initial plan envisaged Italy as a main destination of Russian supplies and that the Italian company Eni (in which the state holds a majority share) would initially own 50 per cent of the pipeline’s joint venture with the Russian state-owned company Gazprom.

The third pattern is that of parliaments which, despite holding low powers, exhibit high engagement. This combination is less common but not improbable. A clear case belonging to this category is the parliament of Hungary, which was denied the right of ratification of the South Stream IGA on grounds that the agreement was not dealing with issues under the scope of the National Assembly as specified in the Hungarian Constitution. However, the parliament remained very active in questioning the government about this IGA, with the result that in a later project, the Nabucco pipeline, it obtained the right of ratification and even played a role of active parliamentary diplomacy to promote the project externally.

Finally, the fourth pattern encompasses cases of both low powers and low engagement. In this category, we find the many cases where energy agreements do not normally take the form of an IGA, but rather soft law instruments or even informal agreements, which are not made public. For example, for the Medgaz pipeline transporting Algerian gas to Spain, finalised in 2012, there was no formal IGA reported beyond an expression of political support by the Spanish government and the later authorisation issued by the Spanish energy regulatory authority. This pipeline was hardly mentioned in parliament despite the fact that Spanish‒Algerian energy relations have often been tainted by political disputes. Also representative of this category is the case of Germany, where the Nord Stream pipeline was given the political go-ahead by the German government in September 2005 without the involvement of parliament.

The brief overview presented above leads us to the question of what explains these varying levels of parliamentary engagement. The following section focuses particularly on discussing the external threats hypothesis advanced in the introduction to this collection, which establishes a negative relation between (the framing of) security threats and parliamentary control (Raunio and Wagner 2016). This hypothesis is particularly germane given the high levels of external energy dependency in the countries examined (Table 2). Those four countries depend on external supplies for more than 80 per cent of the gas they consume and have Russia as the main supplier. Moreover, since 2004 the tense relations between Russia and Ukraine have affected the reliability of a key gas supply route for the four countries, thus making the direct subsea pipelines from Russia (Nord Stream and South Stream) both a potentially relevant solution to improve their security of supply and a new source of vulnerability. At the same time, dependency indicators seem to challenge the external threats hypothesis, given that the countries facing relatively higher vulnerability due to lower diversification (Bulgaria and Hungary) are also the ones where parliaments have played a more active role. To explain this, the next section argues that we need to re-examine the link between the framing of security challenges and legislative‒executive relations to factor in issue-specific conditions.

Table 2. Overview of the case studies.

	High powers	Low powers
High engagement	BULGARIA – South Stream	HUNGARY – South Stream
	‒ Agreement: IGA (January 2008)	‒ Agreement: IGA (February 2008)
	‒ Ratification by parliament: Yes (July 2008)	‒ Ratification by parliament: No, despite parliament’s request
	‒ Gas dependency: 15% energy mix (92% from Russia)	‒ Gas dependency: 40% energy mix (60% from Russia)
Low engagement	ITALY – South Stream	GERMANY – Nord Stream
	‒ Agreement: No IGA. MoU between Eni and Gazprom (November 2007)	‒ Agreement: No IGA. MoU between E.ON/BASF and Gazprom (September 2005)
	‒ Ratification by parliament: No, despite ratification of other IGAs	‒ Ratification by parliament: No
	‒ Gas dependency: 39% energy mix (27% from Russia)	‒ Gas dependency: 22% energy mix (36% from Russia)

Source: Gas dependency data correspond to 2007 (European Commission 2010).

Issue framing and parliamentary (dis)engagement in economic diplomacy

Literature on parliaments’ role in foreign policy has often observed a negative correlation between security and democracy: in the presence of external threats, a parliament may accept a greater level of governmental discretion (Raunio and Wagner 2016). This observation is in line with securitisation theory in international relations, which posits that when governing elites can claim the presence of an existential threat they will be empowered ‘to handle it with extraordinary means, to break the normal political rules of the game’ (Wæver 1997: 48). In other words, labelling issues as security matters may lead to centralisation of power and marginalisation of political and public debate (Hayes 2012). Securitisation dynamics can certainly be found in areas other than traditional military sectors – for example, societal issues with a high internal‒external component, such as migration (Huysmans 2000) or climate change (Trombetta 2011). However, as recognised by securitisation scholars, the probability and consequences of securitisation vary significantly across sectors. Of the different sectors discussed in Buzan et al. (1998), the economic sector was seen as the most elusive to securitisation dynamics. This specificity needs thus to be taken into account when discussing the link between securitisation and parliamentary engagement. In particular, this section argues that in the economic sector, greater executive discretion may come less from securitisation than from the reverse process of depoliticisation.

A relevant particularity of the economic sector for securitisation theory is that the very idea of economic security ‘is exceedingly controversial and politicised’ (Buzan et al. 1998: 95). From a state-centric perspective, economic security is concerned with ‘access to the resources, finance and markets necessary to sustain acceptable levels of welfare and state power’ (Buzan et al. 1998: 8). However, from a liberal standpoint, economic crises, defaults, and disappearance of firms are part and parcel of the self-regulating dynamics of markets; hence economic security is mostly related to the maintenance of the rules of market capitalism rather than the protection of particular collectivities. Securitisation of economic affairs in the mercantilist sense (access to resources) may therefore be uncommon in market-liberal societies, or only possible when linked to other sectors (political, military, or environmental security). Just like economic security, energy security has very different meanings depending on whether it is linked to the political, economic, or environmental realm (Ciută 2010). This multidimensionality also increases the chances of failed securitisation, because of the multiplicity of possible threats and referent objects (Natorski and Herranz-Surrallés 2008).

Given the specificities of the economic sector, securitising moves may also have different effects compared with military or political sectors. In the view of proponents of securitisation theory, ‘security should be seen as negative, as a failure to deal with normal politics’ (Buzan et al. 1998: 29). However, other schools of critical security studies have embraced a more open-ended view on the effects of securitisation (Browning and McDonald 2013). For example, in areas like climate change, security framing has been regarded more positively as a factor of mobilisation for much-needed measures that would not have been taken otherwise (Floyd 2011). We may argue, therefore, that in the economic sector, securitising moves are also likely to end up in high politicisation, which – contrary to securitisation – is associated with greater public attention and demands for control and transparency by national parliaments (Zürn 2014). According to Zürn (2014: 61), the effect of politicisation of international affairs may precisely be a shift ‘from delegation to participation’. In the same line of argument, in a study on the evolution of energy policy in the UK, Kuzemko (2014) argues that the recent comeback of security narratives triggered a public and political debate that made possible the repoliticisation of an area that had been widely delegated to market operators and independent regulators since the 1980s.

This brings us to the point that a more effective way for government to gain further discretion in foreign economic affairs is precisely through a reverse process, depoliticisation, understood as ‘the effective demotion of issues previously subject to formal political scrutiny, deliberation and accountability to [the] public yet non-governmental sphere’ (Hay 2007: 91). The term ‘depoliticisation’ has been used to designate the new forms of management, relying on extensive delegation of executive powers to specialised agencies and/or to the market, that have proliferated since the 1980s (Burnham 2001). Depoliticisation can hence be seen as ‘an approach to statecraft [that] seeks to lower public expectations of government power and influence, offloading some responsibility for policy direction and success, as well as decreasing accountability and shielding the government from consequences of unpopular policies’ (Flinders and Buller 2006: 68). For this reason, the phenomenon of depoliticisation through the process of ‘agencification’ and outsourcing of executive activities to private actors has also been related to decreasing levels of parliamentary accountability (MacCarthaigh 2007) and, more generally, to popular disaffection and disengagement (Hay 2007).

Energy is one such sector where formalised principal‒agent relations are commonly established via state-owned (or public‒private) corporations and regulatory agencies designed to provide more efficient and politically independent decisions in the day-to-day management of energy affairs. However, as argued by Flinders and Buller (2006: 55), ‘powers and responsibilities delegated by politicians are always retrievable’. Despite the formal delegation to public entities or to the market, ministers may still remain in the driving seat via the power of appointment as well as through many informal and indirect channels of influence. Depoliticisation tactics thus ‘involve the construction of a new “reality” in which the role of national politicians is presented as having been, to some extent, eviscerated by external forces or broad societal factors’ (Flinders and Buller 2006: 66).

In sum, two propositions emerge from this discussion about the role of framing in triggering/limiting parliamentary engagement in intermestic issues like foreign energy policy. On the one hand, given that attempts to securitise an economic domain may lead to politicisation, (i) securitising rhetoric is more likely to be employed by parliamentarians willing to reclaim their powers than by autonomy-seeking governments. On the other hand, given that economic issues offer greater chances of delegation of responsibilities to public bodies and private actors, (ii) autonomy-seeking governments are likely to use depoliticisation tactics to elude control by parliament. The next sections examine the plausibility of these propositions in the four case studies. The analysis is based on a qualitative examination of the securitising/depoliticising moves by parliamentarians and members of government in all public parliamentary activity related to the selected infrastructure projects.²

Securitising and depoliticising moves are here mostly analysed through their discursive expressions. Basic components of securitising discourse are the definition of an existential threat to a valued referent object, and the devising of exceptional measures to avert the threat (Buzan et al. 1998: 21ff.). Framing energy in terms of a security threat will typically entail the use of the lexicon of conflict, i.e. ‘references to weapons, battles, attack, fear, ransom, blackmail, dominance, superpowers, victims and losers’ (Ciută 2010: 130). It also implies a state-centric definition of the referent object, in terms of national security and state sovereignty, and the support for instruments of ‘energy diplomacy’, which emphasise the need for political intervention in the conduct of external energy relations (Herranz-Surrallés 2015).

Depoliticisation is harder to identify, as it often builds on omissions and silence. However, as a strategy designed to ‘convince key actors that the state is, to some extent, disengaged from the process of policymaking’ (Burnham 2001: 145), depoliticisation can also be identified in the government’s claims of non-involvement, its attempts to shift responsibility for decisions onto non-governmental actors, and efforts to downplay or even conceal its political intervention. In the energy domain, depoliticisation will typically entail the framing of energy as a normal commodity to be dealt with by companies and regulatory agencies on the basis of ‘objective’ economic and technical criteria. The actual success of securitising and depoliticising moves will very much depend on contextual factors, including socio-cultural conditions and material facts (on the relevance of context in securitisation, see e.g. Balzacq 2011: 11–15). However, the focus of the analysis that follows is not so much to explain the success or failure of securitising/depoliticising attempts, but rather to examine how political actors mobilise certain frames to influence the dynamics of legislative‒executive relations.

The South Stream IGAs in Bulgaria and Hungary: parliamentary engagement through securitising moves?

Bulgaria and Hungary were the first EU countries to sign an IGA with Russia for the South Stream. While in Bulgaria the text was considered an international agreement, which under the Bulgarian constitution requires parliamentary ratification, in Hungary the government considered that the agreement was intergovernmental by nature, not an interstate contract, and hence not subject to parliamentary ratification. Despite this difference, the South Stream IGAs were hotly debated in both parliaments because of disagreements not only about substance, but also about the relations between the legislature and executive.

In Bulgaria, the government informed parliament of the IGA on 25 January 2008, one week after its signing. Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev (Socialist Party) presented some technical details, the expected timeline, and investment decisions on the project, and highlighted the economic benefits of the new infrastructure for Bulgaria and the EU. Several opposition MPs rejected this technocratic-economic framing and criticised the government for informing the parliament and society about a crucial decision for the national interest only post factum. In the words of an independent MP, ‘you reduce this Parliament to the role of a notary, to act just as a witness of a transaction’ (Kapon in: National Assembly of the Republic of Bulgaria 2008a). One of the opposition MPs (Kostov, Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria (DSB)) even proposed that the parliament should give a mandate to the government to renegotiate the IGA. However, the prime minister insisted that the parliament would later have the full right of ratification and dismissed criticisms of lack of ex ante consultation, appealing to executive prerogatives: ‘I would like to ask for which negotiations government has ever received a detailed mandate. That is why there is separation of powers – executive and legislative’ (National Assembly of the Republic of Bulgaria 2008a).

In Hungary, opposition parties asked the government to submit the IGA to the parliament for ratification a few days before its signature. To that aim, 84 MPs requested an extraordinary debate related to the ‘Reporting Obligations on the Government’s Planned Construction of the South Stream’s Section in Hungary’. This was justified on grounds that the agreement would have a ‘massive impact’ and ‘overriding significance with regard to the foreign relations of the Republic of Hungary’.³ The request was declined for formal reasons related to the rules of procedure, but instead the parliament organised a joint meeting between the committees of Economy, Foreign Affairs, and European Integration, with the presence of the three ministers concerned. At this meeting, just one day before the expected signing of the IGA, Zsolt Nemeth, a leading opposition politician from Fidesz, asked the government not to ratify the IGA without the parliament’s consent. However, the act of signing took place as planned, during a visit of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány (Socialist Party), to Moscow, without consulting the parliament and without consideration of ex post ratification. To make things worse, the government introduced a 10-year confidentiality clause from the moment of its signing. The opposition strongly reacted to this announcement. Viktor Orban, leader of Fidesz, stated that ‘the government is conducting a coup d’état against the Hungarian Parliament and against its own people’ (Origo.hu, 28 February 2008).

Throughout the process, parties claiming further scrutiny rights in the IGAs made extensive use of securitising rhetoric. For example, in the plenary debates prior to ratification of the IGA in Bulgaria (National Assembly of the Republic of Bulgaria 2008b, 2008c), the South Stream was framed as a threat using explicit conflict language, for instance characterising the pipelines as ‘part of the Kremlin invasion in South-eastern Europe’ or ‘a geopolitical project that bypasses countries willing to join the European and North Atlantic space like Ukraine and Moldova’. Gazprom’s 51 per cent ownership of the Bulgarian pipeline section of South Stream was criticised for giving Russia control over Bulgaria’s continental shelf in the Black Sea and over the Bulgarian economy. This would lead to ‘absence of sovereignty’ and keep Bulgarians as ‘hostages of the monopoly prices of Gazprom’. The debates in committee on 9 July 2008 are also indicative of the relevance of security framing. In the Energy Committee, where discussions focused on the economic aspects of the project, MPs recommended ratification with only one vote against. Conversely, the Foreign Affairs Committee was more divided (11 votes in favour, 6 against, 2 abstentions), thus suggesting that MPs challenging the IGA chose to frame it as a matter of foreign and security policy. The securitising tone was maintained during the ratification debate when opposition MPs requested a repetition of the vote and later the adjournment of the second reading until after the summer to allow more time to assess the consequences of an agreement that was ‘a serious risk to the national security of Bulgaria’ (National Assembly of the Republic of Bulgaria 2008d). However, a majority of the parliament voted for moving directly to the second reading, which was won by 138 votes ‘for’, 52 ‘against’, and 4 abstentions.

In Hungary, after having been side-lined in the South Stream IGA, efforts in parliament concentrated on gaining some influence on external energy affairs through the debates on another pipeline project, the Nabucco. The parliament set up an Ad Hoc Committee for the Nabucco Pipeline (active between September 2008 and May 2010) with a very broad mandate: ‘promoting the security of energy supply for Hungary, hold systematic reviews on the procedures and relevant factors related to energy security, and thereby state remarks and proposals on issues related to the subject’ (Hungarian National Assembly 2009). The committee even conducted an intensive task of parliamentary diplomacy to promote the project. The choice of interlocutors shows again that this involvement was framed as a matter of foreign and security policy. For example, in the United States, the head of the committee (János Kóka, an MP from a minority government party) held meetings with the US vice president, the secretary of state, senators from the Committee on Foreign Relations, and the White House’s National Security Council. Building on this security framing, the parliament used the memorandum on the activities of the ad hoc Nabucco committee to pre-emptively assert its right to ratify the Nabucco IGA by establishing that ‘the expected national ratification of the interstate agreement is a substantive condition for the implementation of the Nabucco project’ (Hungarian National Assembly 2009).

The Nord Stream and South Stream IGAs in Germany and Italy: parliamentary disengagement through depoliticisation?

Germany and Italy were key countries in the Nord Stream and South Stream pipeline projects: they would be the final destination of the pipelines and German and Italian companies would be the main partners of Gazprom in the new joint ventures. Even so, no formal IGA was signed and parliaments played a very low-profile role.

The sponsorship of the new pipelines by the German and Italian governments was enacted in a very similar fashion: a formal ceremony of signature of an MoU between the CEOs of Gazprom and the concerned companies in Germany (E.ON and BASF) and Italy (Eni), in the presence of the top leaders of the respective governments (Vladimir Putin, Gerhard Schröder, and Romano Prodi). The very absence of an IGA can be interpreted as a depoliticising move, particularly in Italy, where national legislation requires the conclusion of an agreement in case of subsea gas pipelines coming from non-EU member states (Law 273 of 12 December 2002, art. 30). In view of the initial uncertainty over the South Stream route, it could be argued that an IGA was not legally required until a pipeline to Italy was guaranteed. However, given the 50 per cent ownership of Eni in the South Stream project and the initial discussions of Italy as the pipeline’s destination, the absence of an IGA still looks like an anomaly, particularly considering that all other South Stream partners concluded one (Table 1).

Also, in both cases the signing of the MoUs went almost unnoticed in parliament. In the Bundestag, the only reference was made by Chancellor Schröder when he announced the agreement between ‘a Russian company on the one hand and two German companies on the other’ one day before its signature (Deutscher Bundestag 2005a: 17504). Prior to this, the only occasion when the pipeline project was mentioned by the government was in reply to a written parliamentary question by a liberal MP, who asked about press information reporting that Germany’s support for a new gas pipeline from Russia was antagonising Poland and Ukraine. In its answer, the government confirmed that Gazprom was conducting talks with four West European gas companies (among them the German Ruhrgas and Wintershall) but that this was a ‘private commercial agreement between companies, to be taken with regard to the business interests of the partners. The German government is not involved’ (Deutscher Bundestag 2000: 3). In Italy, it was the Minister for Economic Development Pierluigi Bersani who mentioned the South Stream, almost in passing, in the Senate (Senato della Repubblica 2007).

Back in Germany, the Bundestag only became more active in December 2005 when it was made public that the outgoing Chancellor Schröder had accepted a position as head of the shareholders’ committee of Nord Stream AG. This was the subject of several parliamentary debates among accusations of immorality, conflict of interest, and even plain corruption (Bundestag 2005b, 2006a). The Free Democratic Party also presented an interpellation on the even more controversial decision of the outgoing government to give a state guarantee of €1 billion to Nord Stream AG in case Gazprom should default on its payments on a loan (Bundestag 2006b). Externally, the Nord Stream project also caused a stir in some EU member states, particularly the Baltic States and Poland, countries that could lose their transit roles with the new pipeline and hence become more exposed to hypothetical supply cuts from Russia. In Poland, for example, the project was dubbed ‘the new Ribbentrop‒Molotov pact’, in reference to the Soviet‒German pact of 1939 (Tarnogórski 2006). However, the domestic political scandal and external criticism surrounding the Nord Stream did not translate into greater parliamentary scrutiny. The only critical interpellations were made by the Green Party, which enquired of the government whether it was planning to continue supporting the project in view of the mounting external opposition and growing environmental concerns. In its replies, the government mentioned several times that the Nord Stream was a ‘private economic project’; that any decisions on the planning and continuation of the pipeline ‘pertain to the companies that take part in the project’; and that ‘the government of Germany is not involved’ (Deutscher Bundestag 2006c, 2006d).

Parliamentary engagement in Italy increased slightly only after the January 2009 gas crisis, when opposition MPs raised some doubts about the partnership of Eni with Gazprom in the South Stream at a moment when the EU was trying to diversify gas supplies away from Russia (Camera dei Deputati 2009). The new Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who continued his predecessor’s sponsorship of the South Stream, attending the key intergovernmental conferences of the project, also drew criticism for acting as the ‘spokesman’ of Putin and Gazprom, and even accusations of personal enrichment through this cooperation (Senato della Repubblica 2010). Berlusconi defended himself by framing his involvement in the South Stream as a standard matter of commercial diplomacy: ‘In Russia, as indeed in other countries, I adopted, as an entrepreneur working in politics, the role of an agent that looks after the interests of Italian companies, first of all those of which we are owners, like Eni’ (Senato della Repubblica 2010). The generalised acceptance of this economic framing, however, contrasts with parliamentary involvement in a later project, the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), where the presence of an IGA signed in 2012 and corresponding parliamentary ratification favoured a higher level of scrutiny. The agreement did not trigger debates on legislative‒executive relations, but the loud opposition of one party (Five Star Movement, M5S) to TAP motivated an extensive debate. The ratification procedure allowed the opposition to use several instruments, such as public hearings with experts and associations from local communities, and several debates in committee and plenary in both houses of the parliament.

In Germany, the on-going debate on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline also points towards stronger parliamentary involvement. Although the government has continued to give evasive responses that the project is the sole responsibility of the companies (Deutscher Bundestag 2016a: 5), opposition parties (the Greens and Die Linke) have started to openly criticise this economic framing and depoliticising tactics. For example, in a parliamentary inquiry of the Greens, the government was asked to give an account of a meeting between the Minister of Economy and Energy Sigmar Gabriel and President Putin where the German minister reportedly said that ‘what’s most important is that the competence remains under German authorities’ in order to avoid ‘opportunities for external meddling’ and ‘political interference’, in allusion to the opposition of the EU institutions and other member states to Nord Stream 2 (Deutscher Bundestag 2015: 4). In a later parliamentary motion, the Greens even started using some securitising rhetoric, referring to the problem of security of supply and the need for European solidarity and trust in a context of rising tensions with Russia, to request an end to the ‘unilateral action by the government’ on the Nord Stream 2 (Deutscher Bundestag 2016b: 4).

Conclusion

This paper investigated the role of parliaments in the approval of energy IGAs, arguing that the commonly held expectation of higher parliamentary scrutiny in areas having a direct domestic impact does not hold entirely true for energy policy. Despite the fact that energy is in many regards a typical intermestic affair, both the formal procedures for approving bilateral energy agreements and the level of parliamentary scrutiny in this domain vary greatly across EU member states. By revisiting one of the propositions put forward by Raunio and Wagner (2016) regarding the relation between security threats and parliamentary involvement, the study argued that the framing of the issue (in particular securitising and depoliticising moves) can help to account for the observed variation in legislative‒executive relations.

In line with the first proposition on securitisation advanced in this paper, the examined cases of high parliamentary engagement (Bulgaria and Hungary) correspond to those where the opposition consistently framed the South Stream IGAs as a matter of foreign and security policy despite efforts by governments to present them as economic agreements. Although comfortable parliamentary majorities enabled the executives to proceed with a high degree of autonomy, the opposition’s assertiveness obliged the governments to provide more detailed information and publicly justify their course of action. Therefore, reversing the commonly assumed link between securitisation and executive dominance, these cases show that, in the economic sector, security framing may facilitate rather than obstruct parliamentary control.

Following the second proposition on depoliticisation, the cases of low parliamentary engagement (Italy and Germany) correspond to those where parliament accepted the depoliticising tactics of the government. Despite the high involvement of the German and Italian governments in the inception of the Nord Stream and South Stream pipelines, both governments successfully presented the decision on these projects as the result of private commercial agreements, thus eluding any responsibility for them. Institutionally, this was facilitated by the absence of an IGA formalising the political commitment to the pipeline projects. The different level of parliamentary engagement in the South Stream and the TAP in Italy shows the relevance of the requirement for an IGA and parliamentary ratification as a mechanism that can mitigate depoliticising dynamics.

The appropriateness and possibility of success of either securitising or depoliticising moves may certainly rest on broader material and socio-political conditions not specifically addressed in this paper. For example, despite the fact that all four countries examined here share a medium-to-high dependency on Russian gas, the use of securitising rhetoric may be a more effective strategy in Bulgaria and Hungary, given these countries’ smaller economies and lower level of diversification, and hence higher risk of falling hostage to the pressures of a powerful external supplier. Foreign policy traditions and past experience may also influence the framing of external energy deals and their parliamentary scrutiny. In Germany, for example, the depoliticisation of external energy relations may resonate with the primary role that energy played in the Ostpolitik during the Cold War, when the Federal Republic of Germany favoured the construction of the Brotherhood pipeline from the Soviet Union even if that meant defying the sanctions imposed by the US. Last but not least, the dominant mode of economic management can also play a role in the sense that the government’s evasion of responsibility may be more difficult in countries where the energy sector is largely state owned (e.g. Bulgaria) rather than privatised (e.g. Germany), although the cases of Italy and Hungary are less clear-cut. In sum, framing is certainly embedded in, yet not fully reducible to, broader material, institutional, and ideational structures. Further research could help lead to a better understanding of this interaction.

Other alternative factors highlighted in the introduction to this collection are party ideology and trust in government (Raunio and Wagner 2016). While the former does not provide direct explanatory power in our cases (all governments were centre-left coalitions during the time of approval of the energy agreements analysed), the latter merits further attention. Greater parliamentary involvement in the debates over the IGAs in Bulgaria and Hungary certainly correlates with higher levels of preference divergence between the government and the opposition. However, distrust vis-à-vis the government’s handling of energy agreements with Russia was also present in the cases of low parliamentary involvement, particularly in Germany where the personal engagement of the outgoing chancellor in the Nord Stream project developed into a significant political scandal. Therefore, in the cases examined, lack of trust between parliament and government appears as a necessary but not sufficient condition to explain greater parliamentary involvement.

The findings of this study can also be placed in the broader context of the emerging EU external energy policy. Bilateral energy IGAs between member states and third countries were recently targeted by the Commission for their lack of transparency, as well as their numerous violations of the rules of the internal energy market and the principle of solidarity vis-à-vis other member states. After tough negotiations, a new Information Exchange Mechanism on energy IGAs was introduced in 2012 (Decision 994/2012/EU), which obliges member states to give notice of the agreements to the Commission and other member states. However, the effectiveness of the mechanism is limited given that information is submitted only ex post (thereby making any change very difficult) and also because of member states’ growing reliance on non-binding agreements that are not covered by the mechanism.⁴ Again, therefore, informal agreements allow governments to elude responsibility and transparency requirements. The variation in decision-making procedures and levels of public scrutiny of energy agreements across the EU member states sheds further light on the difficulty of a common approach to EU external energy relations; but above all it suggests that further reflection is needed on the limits of executive dominance and confidentiality in matters of economic diplomacy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Anna Herranz-Surrallés is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, Maastricht University. Her research interests include EU external energy relations and global energy governance, the practices of legitimation and parliamentary control of foreign and security policies, and discursive approaches to international politics. Her work can be found in journals such as Journal of European Public Policy, West European Politics, Journal of Common Market Studies, Mediterranean Politics, and Cooperation & Conflict [[email protected]]

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Research Stimulation and Valorisation Fund (RSF) of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS) of Maastricht University in the data collection for this study. I am grateful to Valentina Stoeva, Janos Kárpáti, and Enrico Nadbath for their research assistance in some of the cases examined in this paper (Bulgaria, Hungary, and Italy, respectively). Any errors in interpretation of the data are, of course, mine alone. For useful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper my thanks go also to the guest editors of this collection and the participants in the workshop ‘Legislative‒Executive Relations in Foreign Policy’ (21‒22 May 2015, Amsterdam), the members of the Politics and Culture in Europe (PCE) research group at FASoS and of the UACES Collaborative Research Network on EU Energy Policy, and, last but not least, two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. This number includes also IGAs related to broad cooperation objectives rather than specific infrastructure projects or supply contracts. Interview, European Commission, Brussels, 9 October 2015.

2. The study is also based on personal background talks with support staff members of the Committee of Foreign Affairs of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (July 2015), one interview at the European Commission (October 2015), and written communication with the secretariats of the Hungarian National Assembly and the Italian Chamber of Deputies and Senate.

3. Letter written by Tibor Navracsics, leader of the Fidesz parliamentary group, addressed to Katalin Szili, president of the parliament, 26 February 2008.

4. Interview, European Commission, Brussels, 9 October 2015.