A match made in heaven? explaining patterns of cooperation between the Commission and the European Parliament

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Commission saw the European Parliament (EP) as an immature and irresponsible actor lacking appropriate competence on international trade matters. Why then did the Commission become an ardent advocate for extending the EP’s role in trade during the European Convention resulting in a significant increase in the EP’s trade powers? Three potential explanations are investigated: that the Commission saw the EP as a strategic ally, that it wanted to avoid interinstitutional conflict, and that it sought to make EU policy more legitimate. All contribute in accounting for the Commission’s support, but the latter in particular sheds light on both the timing and the form of its change in position. It is suggested that the Commission will emphasise systematic cooperation with the EP when there is external normative pressure, but the article also underscores the extensive pragmatic relations between the EP and the Commission.

Keywords:

• European Parliament
• European Commission
• EU external trade policy
• interinstitutional relations

Acknowledgements

A previous version of this article was presented at the EUSA conference in March 2015 and the UACES conference in September 2015, and I would like to thank the participants on those panels. In particular, I am grateful for the constructive and insightful feedback from Åse Gornitzka, Gabriel Siles-Brügge and three anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The interviews were conducted in Brussels as well as over the telephone, in the period from 2011 to 2015.

2. The EP’s argument for assent was that the WTO established a new institutional framework (European Parliament 1995).

3. The EP’s use of its new powers after the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty also demonstrates how the EP has an agenda of its own. For instance, it forced the Commission to strengthen the safeguard clause in the South Korea FTA (Elsig and Dupont 2012), and in 2012 it rejected the ACTA-agreement.

4. Case C-22/70.

5. It is for instance argued that the South Korea FTA would have required parliamentary assent even without the Lisbon Treaty in place because it establishes bodies with decision-making powers (Lasik and Brown 2013, 30).

6. His successor, Peter Mandelson, is described as being critical to the EP’s role in trade (EP#3). Nevertheless, at his EP-hearing, Mandelson pledged to follow the practice of Lamy in his relations with the EP, even if he had gone ‘considerably beyond what (…) was legally required to do’ (Answers to questionnaire, 2004, 6).