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ABSTRACT
In May 2012 national parliaments of the European Union (EU) issued their first yellow card under the Early Warning Mechanism of the Treaty of Lisbon. A sufficient number of them raised objections to a legislative proposal – the Monti II Regulation regarding the right to strike – that the Commission was required to review the proposal, which it subsequently withdrew. This outcome was, demonstrably, not a coincidence but the product of extensive interparliamentary co-ordination, enabled by the initiative of one determined parliament (Denmark's Folketing), the opportunity provided by a well-timed interparliamentary meeting, and the network of national parliament representatives in Brussels. A dynamic political process was set in motion in which a number of parliaments joined the effort to obtain a yellow card by, in effect, ‘voting against' Monti II before the eight-week deadline. The episode shows that, despite claims to the contrary, national parliaments have the capacity and willingness to use their new powers to exercise a collective influence in EU affairs.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to warmly thank the following people for their comments on previous drafts: all the participants in the (always-rigorous) ARENA Tuesday Seminar at the University of Oslo, Katrin Auel, Richard Bellamy, Mai'a Cross, Ben Crum, Pieter De Wilde, Erik Oddvar Eriksen, John Erik Fossum, Tina Freyburg, Sandra Kröger, Christopher Lord, Johannes Pollak, Tapio Raunio, Julie Smith, a number of anonymous parliamentary officials, and three JEPP referees. The research was undertaken as part of the EuroTrans project, funded by the Norwegian Research Council, and based at ARENA, Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo.
Notes
1 For this article, 31 officials from the parliaments of 17 EU member states – including national parliament representatives (NPRs) from 15 parliamentary chambers, the permanent member of the COSAC Secretariat, and the IPEX information officer – as well as one European Parliament official and one Commission official, answered questions on background between October 2012 and June 2013. Long interviews in Brussels (26–29 November 2012, 3–7 June 2013), as well as by telephone and email, were supplemented by short interviews on the margins of plenary COSAC meetings in Nicosia (14–16 October 2012) and Dublin (23–25 June 2013). Two NPRs also shared their contemporaneous notes with the author. A number of officials read and gave comments on an earlier draft of this article. In addition, five national members of parliament (MPs), including the Danish and Latvian European Affairs Committee (EAC) chairs, answered questions on the record. The author warmly thanks all interviewees.
The finding that there was extensive co-ordination among national parliaments in the case of Monti II was also amply confirmed in the COSAC biannual report (COSAC [2013a: 26–34]; for details, see the various answers to Question 4.8 in COSAC [2013b]).
2 A second yellow card was reached in October 2013, in response to the proposal to create a European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO) (European Commission Citation2013). As of mid-2014, there had not yet been an ‘orange card,' which requires a majority of votes under the EWM.
3 The EWM could also be effective in the absence of a yellow card, either by deterring the Commission from proposing subsidiarity-violating legislation in the first place (De Wilde Citation2012), or by giving NPs influence in the ensuing legislative process (Cooper Citation2013b). However, neither of these circumstances is relevant in the case of Monti II: the Commission was not deterred from proposing it, but also withdrew it before it entered the normal EU legislative process.
4 The threshold became 19 votes after the accession of Croatia on 1 July 2013.
5 Eurpean Commission (Citation2010); see also Cooper (Citation2013b).
6 (European Commission Citation2011a).
7 (European Commission Citation2011b).
8 Although the Spanish and Irish parliaments are bicameral, they have joint scrutiny systems, and so are counted as unicameral for the purpose of this calculation. These figures are drawn from the Commission's annual reports on relations with national parliaments, available at http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/secretariat_general/relations/relations_other/npo/index_en.htm (accessed 10 March 2015).
9 IPEX does have internal forums in which NPs can privately exchange information about parliamentary scrutiny. However, they are not used (Interviews with NP officials.) See also criticism of IPEX from Czech, Dutch, and Italian parliaments in COSAC (2013b: 73, 116, 238). All ROs and documents related to the scrutiny of Monti II cited in this article can be accessed from the dedicated page on the IPEX website, available at http://www.ipex.eu/IPEXL-WEB/dossier/document/COM20120130.do (accessed 10 March 2015).
10 Interview with Eva Kjer Hansen, Danish EAC Chair.
11 Interview with Zanda Kalniņa-Lukaševica, Latvian EAC chair; interviews with NP officials. See also COSAC (Citation2013b: 269).
12 Interviews with NP officials. NPs have reported that the network of National Parliament Representatives and their regular Monday Morning Meeting (NPRs/MMM) was the most important network/method of information exchange for the scrutiny of Monti II (COSAC Citation2013a: 31).
13 Where committee and plenary were both involved, the day of the committee meeting is treated here as the date when the political decision to adopt an RO was made, in chambers where (a) the decision on Monti II was made by consensus, and/or (b) a committee decision whether or not to adopt an RO is rarely or never overturned by the plenary.
14 For a comparison of the Nordic parliaments' approaches to the EU, the EWM and Monti II, see Cooper (Citation2014).
15 According to interviews, the action of the Belgian chamber came as a complete surprise to the other NPRs in Brussels. Ironically, they were better informed about events in Lisbon, Riga and Valletta than about the plans for a last-minute RO being prepared just across town in the Belgian parliament.
16 From the point of view of each chamber, its vote is cast at the moment when the RO is formally approved according to its own internal rules. Yet, for it to be fully official, and known to the wider world, it must be transmitted by parliamentary officials to the Commission and uploaded to IPEX. In fact, six ROs were uploaded to IPEX in the final 24 hours. While the Tweede Kamer was the final vote in the EWM, it was not the last RO to come in – that was the UK House of Commons. The IPEX information officer was in the office until midnight that night to see that the last ROs came in before the deadline (Interviews with NP officials.)
17 Interviews with NP officials.
18 See Cooper (Citation2014). At the first ‘Article 13′ Conference in Vilnius in October 2013, the author observed representatives from the Tweede Kamer lobbying other parliaments to pass ROs against the EPPO proposal, with the explicit aim of achieving a second yellow card.
19 For examples of how the Danish Folketing has long acted as a political entrepreneur of interparliamentary co-operation, see Cooper (Citation2015: 108–11).
20 The total numbers of ROs in each of the first four years of the EWM were 36 (2010), 65 (2011), 71 (2012) and 88 (2013).
21 However, in Spain the government may have influenced the decision not to pass an RO. There, an opposition Socialist MP, Ramón Jáuregui, drafted an RO objecting to Monti II, but it was voted down in the EAC by the right-leaning parties of government (Interview with NP official.)
22 Letter to NPs from Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič, Brussels, 12 September 2012.
23 Interview with Commission official.
24 Available at http://www.socialistsanddemocrats.eu/newsroom/monti-ii-dropped-–-sd-meps-will-keep-fighting-social-rights#1 (accessed 10 March 2015).
25 Available at http://www.greens-efa.eu/right-to-strike-7988.html (accessed 10 March 2015).
26 Available at http://www.eppgroup.eu/press-release/EPP-Group-welcomes-the-withdrawal-of-Monti-II (accessed 10 March 2015).
27 Available at http://ecrgroup.eu/news/ecr-welcomes-first-victory-for-subsidiarity-yellow-card-rule/ (accessed 10 March 2015).
28 Interview with Commission official.
29 In Isoglucose, the European Court of Justice ruled that the Council must await the opinion of the EP before adopting legislation under the ‘consultation' procedure. In fact, a closer (but less famous) historical analogue to the first yellow card was the Benzene Directive (1988), which was the first legislative proposal to fail partly owing to the opposition of the EP which, under the ‘co-operation' procedure, had influence over legislation but not an outright veto (Corbett et al. Citation2011: 258–64). On the analogy between the ‘co-operation' procedure and the EWM, see Cooper (Citation2012: 448–9).
Additional information
Ian Cooper is affiliated Research Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge.