FOREWORD
Ladies and gentlemen,
A few months before the next European elections and at a time when the prospect of a further enlargement of the European Union calls for a reform of its institutional functioning, the present publication of the proceedings of the symposium on the role of national parliaments in the European Union, held on 6 December 2021 at the French Senate, can make a useful contribution to the debates that are about to begin.
It was on the eve of the first half of 2022, during which France assumed the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, and in the midst of the Conference on the Future of Europe - held from 9 May 2021 to 9 May 2022 - that the French Senate's Committee on European affairs organised this symposium in order to take stock, essentially from an academic perspective, of the growing importance of national parliaments in European integration. Since the early 1990s, national parliaments have been given a growing role in the European Union, while at the same time the democratic deficit has seemed to widen as the Union's competences have been extended by successive crises - the euro zone in 2010, the migratory crisis in 2015, the pandemic in 2021, and the aggression of Ukraine in 2022. Over the last few decades, decisions have been taken to keep national parliaments better informed about European legislative activity, to encourage interparliamentary cooperation, to entrust them with monitoring the principle of subsidiarity, and to allow them direct political dialogue with the European institutions. Thirty years after the introduction of these various mechanisms, the symposium provided an opportunity to take stock of these tools, to study the development of interparliamentary cooperation and to analyse, from a comparative perspective, the prerogatives enjoyed by national parliaments vis-à-vis their governments. It also shed light on the current debate on reconciling constitutional identity and membership of the European Union, which is gaining momentum and serves as a reminder that national parliaments are the cornerstones of the European edifice.
Convinced by this symposium that a better involvement of national parliaments in the European institutional game can contribute to making the European Union more democratic, the French Senate's European affairs Committee has extended its approach by launching a working group on this subject, within the Conference of Parliamentary Committees for Union Affairs of Parliaments of the European Union (COSAC), in which three of its members participate, as well as three members of the French National Assembly, with their counterparts from the 26 other national parliaments of the Union and six members of the European Parliament. I had the honour of leading the work of this group in the first half of 2022, under the French Presidency, and the satisfaction of achieving in June 2022 the adoption, by consensus between the parliamentary members of the working group, of a report[1] containing innovative proposals likely to strengthen the role of national parliaments in the European Union. Some of these proposals do not require a revision of the Treaties and could therefore be implemented by a simple decision of the institutions concerned, which is what I keep calling for.
These proceedings of the symposium of 6 December 2021 also show that the national parliaments are in very different positions with regard to their executive and that obtaining greater recognition of their European role is not a challenge of the same scale for all of them. I would therefore make a parallel plea for the role of the national parliament in European matters to be enhanced within our own country and for its role in scrutinising the government's European action to be consolidated. This point also deserves to be debated in the coming months, which will be crucial for the democratic life of Europe.
Jean-François Rapin
Chair of the European affairs committee of the French Senate