(Page 2 of 25) - National Parliaments in the European Union: The Benefits of Integration authored by Oliver, Michael. and Duina, Francesco.

observe that the EU has produced laws on topics considered beyond the traditional remit
of NP. We then argue that national legislators, along with government officials, have
used the EU’s intervention to justify the production of new domestic laws in those areas
that not only incorporate but also build upon EU law. As more issue areas become subject
to legislative control, the reach of NP as has expanded. In the case of policy transfer, the
EU has facilitated communication and data sharing across member states. The resulting
knowledge has helped legislators and government officials design more effective
legislative frameworks. This has confirmed NP as viable regulatory institutions.

We offer a set of empirical case studies to support our claims. For precedent setting,

we examine the introduction of antitrust legislation in the EU and its repercussions in
Italy and the Netherlands. In the case of policy transfer, we turn to the Open Method of
Coordination (OMC) and its application to employment and social inclusion. In the
discussion section, we consider the implications of our findings for the enlargement
process. Have the NP of the future member states benefited from participation in the
European project? We then wonder whether the findings have relevance for other
regional integration efforts, such as South America’s Mercosur.

II The Current View: The Struggle of NP in the EU
Over the years, scholars have developed a ‘deparliamentarization’ thesis to describe the
fate of NP in the EU. The thesis argues that ‘national parliaments suffer from a lack of
authoritative power over transnational policymaking’ (Schmidt, 1999: 25). The general
course of European integration, which sets the broad objectives of EU law, is largely
dictated by decisions made in the European Council, a body composed of the heads of
state. EU law is in turn the product of the EU Commission, the European Parliament and
the Council of Ministers. The first two bodies are supranational in nature. The third is
composed of members of national executive branches.

National legislators have thus had no significant participation in EU affairs. The

primary function of NP has been to transpose EU directives into national law and to
ensure consistency between ongoing national and EU law. This, scholars argue, has
deprived NP of their right to deliberate and has effectively turned NP into administrative
extensions of the EU (Duina, 2003). Noting the presence of heads of state and national
ministers in the European Council and the Council of Ministers, scholars then argue that
NP have lost ground to the benefit of the executive branch. Schmidt (1999: 25) observed
that transnational policymaking ‘is generally the domain of national executives’. Weiler
and his colleagues in turn proposed that ‘EU governance results in a net empowerment of
the executive branch of states’ (Weiler, Haltern, and Mayer, 1995: 7).

Some scholars have recently criticized the deparliamentarization thesis. The issue,

however, has been the extent to which the EU has undermined the authority of NP, rather
than any questions about the direction of the EU’s impact on NP. These critics have
argued that the presumed freedom of national executives operating in Brussels and other
transnational premises may have been overstated: that, in other words, NP exert some
control over European legislative processes and may hence not be fully passive in
accepting EU intrusions. They point out, first, that the Maastricht Treaty included two
declarations on NP. Declaration 13 asserts that ‘it is important to encourage greater
involvement of national Parliaments in the activities of the European Union’. This should
be achieved though information sharing, collaboration with the European Parliament and