Accountability and Transparency in a Multilevel Polity: European Commissioners in National Parliaments - Ben Crum Alvaro Oleart et al.
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Accountability and Transparency in a Multilevel Polity: European Commissioners in National Parliaments Ben Crum Alvaro Oleart et al.
DISCLAIMER This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research & Innovation programme under Grant Agreement no. 770142. The information in this deliverable reflects only the authors’ views and the European Union is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein. DISSEMINATION LEVEL Public www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 2 of 58
Project: RECONNECT – Reconciling Europe with its Citizens through Democracy and Rule of Law
GA: 770142
Horizon 2020: H2020-SC6-CULT-COOP-2017-two-stage
Funding Scheme: Collaboration Project
Accountability and Transparency
in a Multilevel Polity:
European Commissioners in National
Parliaments
Work Package 6 – Deliverable 3
Due date: 31.12.2020
Submission date: 22.12.2020
Lead beneficiary: VU Amsterdam
Authors: Ben Crum and Alvaro Oleart
With contributions by Raquel Vega Rubio, Kolja Raube, Julien
Navarro, Felix von Nostitz, Alessandro Nato, Luca Bartolucci,
Len Art Kriebel, and Julie Smith
www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 3 of 58Contents
1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 5
2. Theory: Executive accountability across levels of government........................................................ 7
3. Measuring the accountability relationship between the Commission and national parliaments .. 10
Methodology and case selection ....................................................................................................... 11
4. Hosting EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström (2014-19): variations between national
parliaments ............................................................................................................................................ 13
4.1 Formal set-up: the prevalence of national routines..................................................................... 13
4.2 Logic of interaction: more information than accountability ........................................................ 17
4.3 Public communication: Little connection between the parliamentary intervention and the public
sphere ................................................................................................................................................ 18
5. Discussion: from briefings to hearings ........................................................................................... 19
6. Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 21
Literature ............................................................................................................................................... 23
Appendix 1: Checklist: European Commissioners in National Parliaments ........................................ 27
Appendix 2: Case studies Visits Commissioner Malmström................................................................... 30
Belgium: Commissioner Malmström’s Visit to the Belgian Parliament, 20 September 2016, by Raquel
Vega Rubio and Kolja Raube .............................................................................................................. 30
France: Cecilia Malmström's visits to the French parliament, by Julien Navarro ............................... 34
Germany: Cecilia Malmström's visits to the Meeting with the Economic Affairs and Energy
Committees of the German Parliament, by Felix von Nostitz ............................................................ 37
Italy: Cecilia Malmström's visits to the Italian parliament, by Alessandro Nato and Luca Bartolucci 40
The Netherlands: Visits of the European Commission to the Tweede Kamer (Lower House of the Dutch
Parliament), by Ben Crum and Len Art Kriebel ................................................................................... 43
Spain: EU Trade Commissioner Malmström in the Spanish Parliament and Senate: Transparency yes,
accountability no, by Alvaro Oleart .................................................................................................... 46
United Kingdom: Commissioner Malmström visits London (February, 25, 2016), by Julie Smith ...... 53
Appendix 3: General patterns of parliamentary visits in the Juncker Commission ................................ 57
www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 4 of 581. Introduction The relationship between European Union (EU) governance and accountability is a complicated one. While the EU holds executive competences in a range of policy areas, there is no European government. Instead, the EU’s executive powers are organized along both a supranational (the Commission and various EU agencies) and intergovernmental (the Council) lines. This fragmentation of EU executive powers raises questions about how political responsibility is discharged and fed back to the citizens. In democratic systems, the main forums in which democratic accountability usually takes place are parliaments: they are the arenas in which political executives are brought to justify their decisions and they enjoy a particularly visible role in the public sphere. In the EU, this way of focussing democratic accountability in parliaments runs into two complications. The first is that, in the EU, there are two channels of democratic representation and authorization (Article 10(2) Treaty on European Union, TEU): EU citizens are both represented directly in the European Parliament as well as indirectly through their respective national parliaments that authorize and scrutinize their national governments that control most of EU decision-making. The second complication is that there is no integrated EU public sphere. Instead, public spheres in the EU remain fragmented along national lines (Koopmans and Statham 2010) and there is only a weak sense of European identity (Checkel and Katzenstein, 2009). As a consequence of this fragmentation, the public visibility of whatever accountability takes place in the European Parliament is bound to remain low. In contrast, the visibility of national parliaments in national public spheres remains high. While there has been a growing body of literature on accountability in the EU (most notably Bovens, Curtin, and ‘t Hart, 2010), most of it has tended to focus on the EU institutions. However, the 2009 Treaty of Lisbon clearly recognized that national parliaments – and the second, indirect channel of EU democratic accountability that runs through them – are indispensable for the democratic legitimacy of the EU. The Treaty of Lisbon incorporated, as it were, national parliaments in the EU polity, giving full recognition of the role national parliaments play in providing democratic legitimacy for EU decision-making (Raunio, 2011). Most importantly, the treaty established that EU institutions (like the Commission) could engage directly with national parliaments, thus bypassing the gatekeeping function that national governments had traditionally played in this regard (Cooper, 2017). This direct relation became most concrete in the obligation on the European Commission to directly communicate its documents to national parliaments rather than to leave it at the discretion of national governments to forward them (TEU, Protocol 1). This process further entrenched the multi- level governance character of the EU (Hooghe and Marks, 2001), a polity that is highly reliant on the national politics and politicization of EU affairs in its member states (Hooghe and Marks, 2009; Hutter and Grande, 2014). Over the last decade since the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, the importance of national parliaments in EU affairs has been reinforced further as the EU faced a series of crisis that required it to rely on more intergovernmental methods (Bickerton et al., 2015). Most notably, in the euro crisis, the EU’s response was above all driven by national governments (Crum, 2013a). While the European Parliament played a rather marginal role, the euro crisis clearly reverberated in national parliaments (Closa and Maatsch, 2014; Auel and Höing, 2015; Wonka, 2016; Jančić, 2016). Also the subsequent crises that hit the EU (the migration crisis, www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 5 of 58
Brexit, corona) put member governments at the centre of decision-making and gave national
parliaments – generally more so than the European Parliament – the main sites for democratic
accountability.
In terms of accountability, it is striking that the European Commission has increased its
investment to maintain direct relations with national parliaments, in complement to the
interactions they have with their governments. In recent years, these visits are reported in its
‘Annual reports on relations with national parliaments’.1 Thus, we know that Commissioners
paid national parliaments ‘more than 200’ visits in 2015 (including roadshows on investments,
the role of parliaments and trade). In 2016, the total number of visits amounted to ‘almost 180’,
going up in 2017 to 215 visits and going down to ‘only’ 140 visits in 2018. We expect the new
Commission to engage even more directly with the national parliaments of Europe, given that
in-coming Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pledged the following when she sought
to win over a majority of the European Parliament to endorse her nomination:
all members of the College will visit every Member State in the first half of their
mandate. They should not only get to know the capitals, but also visit the regions in
which the people of Europe live and work (European Commission, 2019).
The corona-crisis may have put a damper on this ambition. Still, the widespread pick-up of
online meetings has actually eased the direct interaction between parliaments and the
European Commission.
In the Commission visits to national parliaments, we thus see the emergence of an innovative
form of accountability of EU decision-making. It is innovative because of its cross-level
character, in which a supranational executive institution like the Commission interacts directly,
and often publicly, before national parliaments, thus excluding the government from this
interaction (Auel, 2007). Moreover, by visiting national parliaments, the Commission gets
access to the heart of national public spheres and may thus increase the visibility of its decisions
(cf. Auel and Raunio, 2015).2
Against this background, this paper explores the following questions:
To what extent do Commission visits to national parliaments serve as a forum for
accountability and contribute to the transparency of EU decision-making? And how does
this practice vary across parliaments?
By examining these questions, we hope to get a better understanding of the role that national
parliaments play in holding the European Commission to account, and in serving as a platform
in which the Commission can communicate and justify its policies back to national electorates
(Tans et al., 2007). Thus, this paper approaches the questions of accountability and
transparency in a distinctively inter-institutional way that reaches across the multiple levels of
government – national and supranational – that characterize the European Union (Benz, 2013;
1
See the European Commission’s page ‘Relations with national parliaments’ available online:
https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-making-process/adopting-eu-law/relations-national-
parliaments_en#cooperationbetweenthecommissionandnationalparliaments (accessed 11 May 2020).
2
For complementary insights in accountability and transparency in the European Union, see the forthcoming
Special Issue of edited by RECONNECT associates Camille Kelbel, Axel Marx, and Julien Navarro (forthcoming).
www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 6 of 58Crum, 2016; Crum, 2020). Furthermore, to the extent that we find significant variations in the ways that parliaments organize Commission visits and the responses and public exposure they get, we hope to be able to identify good practices that parliaments may want to adopt from each other. The examination in this working paper is of an exploratory character. On the one hand, it is very much concerned with finding the appropriate conceptualisation of the nature of the relationship between national parliaments and the Commission. Can this relationship indeed be understood as an accountability relationship? What kind of variation do we find across national parliaments? And how can we interpret this variation? For this purpose, the working paper starts with a theoretical reflection on whether and to what extent the relationship between national parliaments and the European Commission can be conceived of as an accountability relationship. On that basis, the relationship is then operationalised in a set of normative expectations about the way such a relationship would be structured and the duties that it would involve. The examination in this working paper is also exploratory because we are unable to cover all national parliaments in the EU. We have decided to look only at Lower Houses of parliament. Moreover, our sample is limited to the national parliaments of the countries from which we have collaborators in RECONNECT WP6, which are: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK. For each of these seven countries, we have undertaken a qualitative case study of a visit of one selected Commissioner – Commissioner Cecilia Malmström for trade – from the Juncker Commission. These case studies help us to provide a first picture of how the accountability of European Commissioners in national parliaments is organized, how we can conceptualize this, and the range of dimensions on which these interactions may vary. In line with these considerations, the paper starts with a theoretical reflection on how we can understand the relationship between national parliaments and the European Commission. In Section 3, we use this conceptualisation to come to a preliminary operationalisation of the interactions and the possible dimensions of variation involved. Section 4 presents the main findings of the comparative analysis – with full case studies in Appendix 2 – which are then discussed in Section 5 before coming to a conclusion in Section 6. 2. Theory: Executive accountability across levels of government Accountability essentially involves a relation in which an actor has to justify its decisions and actions to a forum (Harlow, 2002). In that generic sense, accountability can take many forms; it can take place between peers, within a firm or any other organisation. However, in the context of democratic government, accountability comes with a more specific set of requirements. Here accountability is essential to the process in which the democratic people at large come to delegate executive decisions to a small set of governors. These governors have to earn their right to govern time and again by demonstrating that the decisions they make serve the interests of the people and can be justified to them (Bovens, 2007). Thus, democratic accountability is inherently a public and transparent process in which the governors have to be able and willing to publicly reconstruct the information and range of considerations that have led them to adopt the decisions that they have adopted (Crum and Curtin, 2015). www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 7 of 58
At the same time, democratic accountability can usually be seen as embedded in a chain of accountability, connecting the democratic people through their elected representatives in parliament to the members of the executive (Strøm, 2000). While power is delegated from the people to the parliament and from the parliament to the cabinet, accountability is due from the cabinet to the parliament and from the parliament to the people. This chain is effective because principals further down the chain of accountability command mechanisms by which they can monitor and sanction the agents they have delegated power to. Thus, parliamentarians can be subject to questions and shifts in public opinion. Ultimately, however, they operate under the threat of deselection at the next election. Similarly, in parliamentary systems, parliament also ultimately holds the power to vote the executive out of power, and this ultimate power can be leveraged to secure a whole lot of others, like the power to question, to summon the executive to parliament, and to petition the executive. As a multilevel parliamentary field (Crum and Fossum, 2009; Crum, 2018), the organisation of democratic accountability in the EU fundamentally deviates from accountability in national parliamentary systems in two respects. One is that there is no European government that holds ultimate executive power. Instead, ultimate executive power is mostly retained by national governments, which only delegate it under strict conditions to executive agents at the supranational level. While the European Commission is the most prominent executive agent at the European level, its executive powers are constrained. The Commission cannot determine the scope of its own powers (the member states retain Kompetenz-Kompetenz); is tasked by the EU treaties to serve the overarching interest of the EU devoid of any ideological preferences; many of its decisions remain closely monitored by committees appointed for that purpose by the member states (comitology); and its actual (financial) resources and implementation capacity are extremely limited. In the end, most of the actual EU implementation capacity resides with the member states, or even at lower (regional and local) governmental levels. The second respect in which the organisation of accountability in the EU deviates from the national template is the fact that it does not operate under one but under two chains of accountability (see Article 10 TEU). On the one hand, most essential decisions in the EU remain controlled by the member states who each are accountable to the national parliaments and, through them, to their national people. On the other hand, an increasing number of EU decisions are subject to the control of the European Parliament the members of which are directly elected in each member state. Typically, the two chains come together again in the way that the election of the members of the European Commission is controlled by the two institutions – the governments in the Council and the European Parliament – jointly: the governments in the European Council nominate the President of the Commission, after which the candidate needs to be formally elected by an absolute majority in the European Parliament. The President-elect then coordinates with the governments the composition of the college of commissioners, which again is subject to the approval of a (simple) majority of the European Parliament. Looking at the relations between the Commission and national parliaments in this light, one can think of them as simply skipping the intermediate step of the national governments along the ‘national’ chain of accountability. From this perspective, any direct contact may be considered superfluous as long as the chain of accountability connecting the national parliaments and the European Commission through the national governments operates www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 8 of 58
flawlessly. However, this understanding is deficient since it fails to recognize that the Commission is not exclusively under the control of the member states (Crum, 2013b). For one, the Commission’s mandate transcends – as it is – the will of the member states as it is supposed to serve the general interest of the Union (Article 17 TEU). For another, the member states are not the only principal of the Commission, it also has to heed the will of the European Parliament. For both reasons, the position that the Commission adopts may well escape the will of the member governments. The visits of Commissioners to national parliaments thus speak to a need of national parliaments to directly engage with EU executives and not to have that relation fully mediated by their governments. This also reflects the recognition of national parliaments as integral actors of the political system of the European Union, and as one of its sources of democratic legitimacy (Tans et al., 2007). Closer engagement of national parliaments in EU affairs is seen by many as a key means to increase the democratic legitimacy of EU decision-making, because national parliaments generally command a claim to legitimacy and visibility at the national level that no European institution can meet, not even the European Parliament. Indeed, visiting national parliaments can offer European Commissioners a platform for visibility that they are hard put to find in Brussels. From the perspective of transparency, it is not so much that Commissioners bring information to national parliaments that would not be available otherwise. There is no shortage of information in this respect. However, speaking to national parliaments allows them to disclose the key issues at stake and to address those points of contention that may run into specific, national sensitivities. In turn, also for national parliaments, meeting with European Commissioners offers an opportunity to ‘take the lead in firing up domestic discourses on European affairs’ (Tans, 2007: 247). As empirical research has shown, too often national debates on EU affairs suffer from an ‘opposition deficit’ because of the dominance of national executives (Rauh and De Wilde, 2018). However, as a European Commissioner faces the national parliament as a relative outsider that does not speak for the national government but for the EU as a whole, government parties may feel less urge to contain the debate and the scope for politicisation, both along the ideological left-right dimension as well as along national-supranational lines, may increase. Hence, for the European Commission, visiting national parliaments can serve as a way to bring its power closer to the people at large and to increase its visibility, connecting EU affairs with national political debates. The recognition of the essential role of national parliaments in the legitimation of the EU (Cooper, 2012) can be taken to imply certain normative expectations as regards to the appropriate behaviour of Commissioners. At a minimum, this recognition validates the role of national parliaments as accountability forums for the European Commission, as arenas where they can be invited to provide a public justification for their political actions. Thus, one would expect Commissioners to be under an informal obligation to be responsive to any concerns that national parliaments may raise and to address those in public. Yet, at the same time, Commissioners are under no formal obligations to national parliaments in their bilateral encounters. The only effective powers that national parliaments hold against the European Commission are by virtue of the early warning mechanism, and even that only becomes effective if they operate collectively. It is exactly this ambivalence – between, on the one hand, the normative expectations that can be attached to the position of national www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 9 of 58
parliaments in the EU and, on the other hand, the absence of any formal powers of national parliaments over the Commission and the diversity among them – that we aim to explore. 3. Measuring the accountability relationship between the Commission and national parliaments Importantly, then, there are no general EU rules to structure the interaction between national parliaments and the Commission. As a consequence, when the Commission visits the national parliaments, it is up to the national parliament involved to determine the status and structure of the interaction – even if obviously some inter-institutional coordination takes place on the program ahead of each visit. Previous research has stressed that national parliaments’ strength and activity in EU affairs differs (Pollak and Slominski, 2003; Wessels et al., 2013; Auel et al., 2015; Kreilinger, 2015), and that the strength of formal powers is a key variable that influences the extent of contestation over EU affairs (Maatsch, 2017). As our objective is to identify the variation among national parliaments in the extent to which they use Commission visits as a forum for accountability, we can theorize the range of variation of this relationship on a scale. On the one extreme of this scale, national parliaments treat the visit of a Commissioner no different from any private visitor, like for instance a lobbyist. This would mean that the visit takes place in a small scale, informal setting, behind closed doors and that parliamentarians consider the visit mostly for their personal information purposes and take little interest to publicize it in the public sphere. On the other extreme, if a national parliament sees its relationship with the Commission as a genuine accountability relationship, one expects their interactions to be incorporated in the rules and practices of procedure that parliaments employ to hold executives to account and to be subject to the same transparency principles that they apply there. In these cases, the visit would include a public debate in a highly visible parliamentary setting, in which parliamentarians do not merely receive information but also use the occasion to communicate their demands to the Commission. This extreme of the scale would imply not only a greater parliamentary scrutiny, but also a greater media coverage, and possibly a greater political contestation, which in consequence would expand the political arena beyond the national level (Bouza and Oleart, 2018), connecting the political debates across countries. We propose to map the ways in which Commission visits to national parliaments take place along three broad dimensions: institutional, behavioural and communicative. The institutional dimension refers to the formal features of the meeting. These concern first of all the question whether parliament and commissioner meet in private or in public. A related dimension is whether the meeting is treated as a more or less diplomatic event, and thus left to the foreign policy or EU affairs committee, or whether it is actually chaired by a policy committee on the topic at hand. Indeed, in general, we are interested whether the meeting is framed in symmetrical terms as a meeting of two institutional actors that exchange information and views, or whether there is a more asymmetrical element to the meeting which recognizes the executive role of the Commissioner and in which she or he is subject to scrutiny. This, one would also expect to be reflected in the way the agenda of the meeting is structured and, in particular, whether it leaves space for a structured questioning of the commissioner or rather only involves a presentation by her or him or an open exchange of views. www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 10 of 58
From the institutional features we move to the behavioural characteristics of the actual interactions. Essentially, we are looking here for indicators that demonstrate that national parliamentarians jump upon the Commission visit to mobilize their positions and to secure concessions, as opposed to a visit that remains a polite exchange that mostly serves as a platform for the Commission to communicate its preferred message without being challenged. This can be gleaned by analysing the logic of the exchange and identifying the actors that actually drive its agenda. It can also be seen from the extent to which parliamentarians really get to raise their concerns and from the extent to which political division lines become visible in the debates. A final set of indicators of the extent to which the Commission visits actually become some form of accountability can be derived from their external visibility. As democratic accountability serves a public function, it would be well-served by being communicated outside of the parliament. This can be done through formal press releases, but also by social media communication or media appearances. Ideally, Commission visits would also enter the domestic political debate through the mainstream media, including news outlets, television or radio, in such a way that the ‘opposition deficit’ is overcome. All in all, the choices that parliaments make in these regards can be considered indicative of the extent to which they conceive of their relationship with the Commission as an accountability relationship in the context of the EU. Furthermore, the various practices of parliaments that we encounter along these dimensions can in principle be subject to processes of mutual learning, exchange and isomorphism. Hence, on the basis of our findings we seek to identify best practices that increase the effectiveness of the visits along the accountability dimension. Methodology and case selection To get an initial sense of the form that visits of European Commissioners to national parliaments take and the range of variation that we find among them, we analyse the visits of one Commissioner in the 2014-2019 Juncker Commission to the Lower Houses of Parliament in seven EU member states. We opted for Commissioner Cecilia Malmström who held the trade portfolio in the Juncker Commission. Paying a total of 33 visits to national parliaments over the five years of her mandate and covering 23 of the 28 member states, Malmström was among the more active Commissioners in the Juncker Commission. Malmström had a particular interest in courting the national parliaments as she was negotiating major trade agreements with the US (TTIP) and Canada (CETA) that would ultimately need to be ratified by them. The prominence of these dossiers also ensures a considerable degree of commonality in the substance of the visits, although these trade dossiers were considerably more salient for the public in some member states than in others (Oleart, 2020). Thus, we expect Commissioner Malmström’s visits to national parliaments to be a most likely case for arousing engagement among national parliaments and their constituencies and thus to offer considerable evidence and insight in the way in which the EU’s multi-level mechanisms of accountability and transparency operate. To get in-depth accounts of the visits in each country with the necessary access to local sources, we relied on the partners associated to RECONNECT Work Package (WP) 6. This strategy allowed us to collect seven in-depth country studies for Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, The www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 11 of 58
Netherlands, Spain and the UK (see Table 1; full case studies in Appendix 2). In all cases, we
only looked at the Lower House of Parliament, given that it is the chamber that is directly
elected and that is hence most likely to also attract public attention. Notably, however, as we
fill find below, in four of the seven cases also Senators were allowed to attend the visit.
The country selection focusses on long-standing member states in Western Europe. Indeed, it
includes five of the six founding member states and adds the two biggest member states that
have joined since (including the one that has recently left the EU again). Thus, by analysing a
quarter of the total number of member states, the coverage of our sample is high in terms of
EU population share (68.7%) and also rather good in terms of its share in the total of visits by
the Juncker Commission to national parliaments (35.6%). What is more, the sample
encompasses significant variation in terms of the powers that the different Lower Houses enjoy
(Sieberer, 2011; Auel et al., 2015).
The sample that we have works sufficiently for the exploratory purpose of this paper. Critically,
however, as a consequence of our reliance on the RECONNECT WP6 partners, the insight that
this sample provides is incomplete and it lacks any Scandinavian member states, which boost a
strong traditions of accountability and transparency, and any cases from Central and Eastern
European member states, where democratic parliaments have only been re-established in the
1990s. In that sense, the present analysis privileges the practice and the experiences of the
EU’s centre over the periphery (Kukovec, 2015). As we work towards an academic publication,
we intend to to expand our sample in that direction while benefitting from the present findings
as they allow us to provide future case studies with much more precise instructions.
Table 1 (Relevant) Visits of Commissioner Malmström to selected parliaments
Date Parliament Info
BE 20 September 2016 BE Chambre des Meeting with the Foreign Affairs Committee and the
Représentants Advisory Committee on European Affairs
DE 14 January 2016 DE Bundestag Meeting with the Economic Affairs and Energy
Committees
FR 15 April 2015 FR Assemblée nationale/ Meeting with the European Affairs and Economic
Sénat Affairs Committees
FR 10 April 2018 FR Assemblée nationale Joint Hearing with the European Affairs and Foreign
Affairs Committees
DE 14 January 2016 DE Bundestag Meeting with the Economic Affairs and Energy
Committees
IT 11 April 2017 IT Camara/ Senato Meeting with the Industry Committee
NL 2 February 2016 NL Tweede Kamer Meeting with the Foreign Affairs, Trade and
Development Aid Committees
ES 6 March 2015 ES Congreso de los Comité de Asuntos Económicos Financieros y
Diputados/ Senado Competitividad
UK 25 February 2016 UK House of Commons Meeting with the Business, Innovation and Skills
Committee
www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 12 of 58For each country, we undertook a narrative analysis in which we analysed the formal set-up of the visit, the logic of interaction and public communication of Commissioner Malmström’s visits to the national parliaments of the selected countries. The case studies were based on official transcripts, desk research, media monitoring and interviews with MPs and/or parliament staff. They are included in the appendices to this paper, as is the checklist that was communicated to the case study authors. The qualitative methodology employed here allows us to explore each visit in-depth and in context, and hence provides us with a rich picture of all the vicissitudes involved. This seems appropriate given the exploratory nature of our examination. At the same time, such a focus on one (or two, in the French case) has the risk of unrepresentativeness because of the particular characteristics of this one case. Thus, for instance, the visit to the UK House of Commons was overshadowed by the fact that it occurred in the week that the UK government secured a compromise with the other member states on its envisaged status in the EU. In any case, EU-UK relations were bound to be exceptional. While such ‘incidents’ may obscure the representativeness of our findings, we also believe that procedures in parliaments are generally institutionalised enough to ensure that rules and practices followed in one case are likely to carry over to others. 4. Hosting EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström (2014-19): variations between national parliaments 4.1 Formal set-up: the prevalence of national routines Looking (only) at eight visits of Trade Commissioner Malmström to parliaments in Western Europe, we encounter a wide range of variation in the way in which the Commissioner interacts with them. In the German Bundestag, Malmström interacts in public with a crowd of more than fifty parliamentarians, while in the UK she meets around ten parliamentarians in a small-scale informal setting behind closed doors. The House of Commons is an exception as all six other meetings take place in public. Another exception is the videoconference-format that is employed in the meeting under study with the Italian parliament, while Malmström appeared in person in all other cases (but obviously we expect the videoconference format to have gained in popularity in corona-times). Part of the variation that we observe seems to directly reflect variations in the routines and traditions of each parliament, in particular the way in which parliamentary committees frame their interactions with visitors (other than government ministers) (cf. Müller and Sieberer, 2014). Some indication of these differences can be traced in the way that parliaments characterize the visit of the Commissioner. Basically, we encounter three types. One is the ‘conversation’, with the UK private meeting as an extreme form, but it is also the characterization that is used for the encounter in the Netherlands which seems not too distant from the UK format even if it takes place in public and even under the watchful eye of a livestream; both meetings are small-scale and seem to leave considerable space for a relatively informal back-and-forth exchange. One important difference in the Dutch case, though, is that the meeting was not closed to the members of one committee only but also open to members of other committees. Notably, the term ‘conversation’ is also used in the case of the German www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 13 of 58
Bundestag, although this appears as a much more massive and formal event with more than 50 parliamentarians present and being staged in a hemicycle. As an alternative to ‘conversation’, the Belgian and Spanish parliament speak of an ‘exchange of views’ (and to some extent this may also be implied in the German case). By underlining the presence of multiple perspectives, this characterization nicely buttresses the political character of the meeting. Finally, the French and Italian parliament rather speak of an ‘hearing’. Contrary to the terms of ‘conversation’ and ‘exchange of views’, the term ‘hearing’ underlines the asymmetrical relationship between the parliament and its visitor. In that sense, ‘hearing’ may be most conducive to an accountability relationship; the term hearing underlines that parliament wants to know and hear things and that the visitor is there to communicate the desired insights. In contrast, regardless of whether the German Bundestag regards the meeting as a ‘conversation’ or an ‘exchange of views’, it seems committed to underline the symmetrical nature of the exchange (see Table 2 for details across the seven parliaments). The different ways in which national parliaments approach the visits of the Commissioner are probably indicative of the different objectives that they attach to them. Besides direct accountability of the Commission and its transmission to the public, parliaments may also see these visits in a more instrumental way to provide them with information that they can use in scrutinizing their national government. Further, parliaments may also their interactions with the Commission less as a means for accountability and transparency and more as a means to exercise influence on EU decision-making. These objectives may compete with each other and, to the extent that the latter objectives prevail, it may be less important (and even undesirable) for parliaments to hold the Commission visit in public and to engage in active scrutiny (cf. Naurin, 2006; Fasone and Lupo, 2015). www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 14 of 58
Table 2 Key features of eight visits (seven countries) of Commissioner Malmström to national parliaments
Indicators Belgium France France Germany Italy The Netherlands Spain UK
Date 20-09-2016 15-04-2015 10-04-2018 14-01-2016 11-04-2017 02-02-2016 06-03-2015 25-02-2016
Public or private Public Public Public Public Public Public Public Private
In person or video In person In person In person In person Videoconference In person In person In person
Qualification of the meeting Exchange of Hearing Hearing Conversation Hearing Conversation Exchange of Private meeting
views views
Jointly with Senate or exclusive for With Senate Chamber only With Senate Chamber only With Senate Chamber only With Senate Chamber only
chamber
Policy/trade committee involved - Economic affairs Economic affairs Committee for Productive Foreign Trade Committee of Business,
economy and activities and Economy and Innovation, and
energy + nine Development Competitiveness Skills Committee
invited Aid
committees
EU affairs committee(s) involved Joint Federal European affairs Foreign affairs - EU affairs - Mixed EU -
Advisory committee committee Committee
Committee on
European Affairs
+ Foreign Affairs
Committee of
the Chamber
Live videostream Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Videorecording available Yes Yes No No
Official report/notes Yes Yes Yes Private until next Shorthand No Yes No
parliamentary report
term
Length 2 hours 2 hours around 1.5 hours 35 minutes 1 hour 1 hour and 25
minutes
Number of representatives present 9 10 22 56 8
www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 15 of 58Another variable that may be less indicative of long-standing practices and more of the practical organisation of each parliament concerns the committees involved in the visit. Interestingly, we find that in all parliaments except Belgium the meeting is primarily an affair of the specialised committee. In most cases, this is a Committee for Economic Affairs and in the Dutch case even a specialised committee for Foreign trade and developmental aid. There is however considerable variation in the extent to which the EU affairs committee also gets involved. It is completely excluded in the case of the UK; in the German and the Dutch case, its members are invited to join; while in Italy and Spain they are actual co-organizers, while in the French Assemblée nationale this is the case once but not on the other occasion. The Belgium case is the exception in this respect because here the meeting is controlled by the Foreign and European Affairs Committees. The close involvement of the EU affairs committee often has an additional implication, as in several countries (Belgium, Italy and Spain) there are bicameral committees involved with joint membership from the upper house of parliament. In the case of France, we find that the visit of the Commissioner in 2018 was incidentally organised in coordination with the Senate. Thus, in four of the seven cases, we also find Senators attending the meeting. A further aspect that appears to be very much engrained in the routines of the different parliaments is the extent to which they consider the meeting with the Commissioner as a public matter that is integral to their representative function and should be fully accessible to their constituencies and the public at large. Importantly, the meeting was publicly announced by all parliaments. Often this announcement is accompanied with a minimal agenda that focuses on the general issue of EU trade policy. In several cases (like Belgium, Germany), some further pointers are provided, like TTIP and CETA, the main trade agreements that the EU was negotiating at the time. In other cases, we found some local flavour added, like the focus on ‘EU dumping practices and trade defence measures’ in the Italian case and ‘trade with Latin America’ in Spain. For the rest, the meetings do not seem to come with a lot of documentation provided by either the Commission or the parliament. Thus, parliamentarians seem to approach the meetings with rather little preparation and the freedom to focus on their own concerns. As regards the meeting itself, we already observed the UK case as an extreme one as the whole meeting was set up privately. All other meetings took place in public, which would indeed seem to be a minimal condition for multi-level accountability, However, also among the other parliaments there are interesting variations in the level of publicity of the meeting. One aspect is that in many parliaments the meeting does not only take place in public but can also be followed online through a livestream. This is the case in Belgium, France, Italy and the Netherlands. The more important indicator of publicity and of the status bestowed on the meeting may be the extent to which the meeting is documented, so that its proceedings remain accessible afterwards for all parliamentary actors as well as for the public at large. Notably, it appears that only in Belgium, France and Spain a full report of the meeting is publicly available, which in France is even accompanied by the full video-recording. In contrast, in Italy only a shorthand report is drawn up, while in Germany the report remains locked away for one more legislative term, and in the Netherlands, as in the UK, no report is made at all. www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 16 of 58
4.2 Logic of interaction: more information than accountability The initiative for a meeting can come from both sides. In the case of the French parliament, we see for instance that it has actively invited the Commissioner and the visit to the Belgian parliament follows up on a promise made at an earlier visit. In contrast, the visit to the Dutch parliament is initiated by the Commissioner’s office as she has to come to the Netherlands in any case for an informal Council of trade ministers. The length of the meeting tends to vary between one and two hours. Being a videoconference, the meeting with the Italian parliament was shorter and took only 35 minutes. In the Netherlands, the meeting was fixed at one hour, while in France two hours are usually reserved. As already indicated above, there is significant variation in the number of parliamentarians attending. In most parliaments, the meeting is a relatively small-scale affair. Most parties are represented by no more than one party member, the speaker on trade issues, who is generally a backbencher. However, in Germany and Italy we see a much larger attendance with full committees turning out, even if questions remain limited to a few spokespersons. The French Assemblée nationale seems to vacillate between the models, as its meeting in 2015 only involved eight speakers coming mostly from the government factions, while three years later it involved no less than twenty speakers that covered the whole party spectrum. Also in the order of the meetings we find some notable variation. In all parliaments, the Commissioner gets the floor to make an introductory presentation. However, in the two parliaments that frame the meeting as a hearing, France and Italy, this presentation was preceded by a substantial introduction, in which the committee chair not only introduced the Commissioner Malmström but also introduced already some of the issues and posed several questions. There also seems to be a perceptible difference in the statement that the Commissioner gives. The formal setting in the Spanish and the French parliament seems to invite her to make a more extensive presentation, while in the more conversational setting of the German and the Dutch parliament she limits herself to some more pointed introductory remarks. As the meetings then moved to questions from the parliamentarians, we also encounter different models. Typically, in Spain there was one question round in which six parliamentarians made statements and raised questions for a maximum of five minutes each. The Commissioner then made a, relatively brief, statement in response and that concluded the meeting. In France, the questions are organized in two rounds, which may allow for a bit more back-and-forth, even though also in this case the interventions of the parliamentarians were as much about presenting their own positions as that they really involved questions to the Commissioner. In the case of the videoconference with the Italian parliament, questions were posed one-by-one with the Commissioner directly responding but without allowing the parliamentarians the opportunity to come back on that basis. Possibly, more interaction can be found in the more informal settings of the Dutch and the British parliament, but in those cases we lack records and, hence, these interactions failed to have much political resonance. Turning to the substance of the exchanges, the case studies indicate the predominantly informative logic. Most parliamentarians use the meeting with the Commissioner to get a better insight into the logic of the trade negotiations, the issues involved, and the exact www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 17 of 58
positions that the Commission promotes. Various parliaments (like the German and the Belgian
one) use the Commissioner’s visit to promote their own institutional interests in insisting on
the transparency of the negotiations and the need that all treaties are eventually also subject
to national ratification. In other cases, party-ideological concerns come to the fore. Thus, in
various cases (Spain, the Netherlands), there are parliamentarians from the Left and the Greens
who raise specific concerns with some of the trade agreements negotiated by the EU and led
by Commissioner Malmström. Notably, in France and, particularly, Belgium, the political
concerns seem to be more geographically organized. In France, parliamentarians invoke
specific interests of their local constituencies, while in Belgium the issue of trade divides the
pro-trade Flemish parties from their more sceptical Walloon counterparts.
Still, the informative logic prevailed in most parliaments. To the extent that we can compare
the debates in the different parliaments, it seems to have become most political in Spain and
France. Importantly, in those cases we also see indications that the two actors do not only speak
to each other but are aware that their exchange is eventually oriented to the public at large.
This is, for instance, the case when French parliamentarians directly invoke the interests of their
constituencies.
Overall, it is the Commissioner – much more than the parliamentarians – who seems to
approach these meetings as public meetings that are part of a wider democratic process.
Commissioner Malmström tailors her remarks to the concerns of the national constituencies
and, at various occasions, she appeals to the (national) citizens over the heads of their
representatives. Particularly telling in this regard is her statement before the Spanish Congreso:
We need everyone's participation through political debate based on facts, not myths or
rumours. I am here because I want to show that the commitment of the European Union
is to generate more opportunities for trade and investment for all. I hope I can count on
your support.
At the same time, Malmström’s behaviour also reflects that these are not full-blown political
encounters. Her statements seem to be mostly geared towards the national constituencies that
may be favourable to the EU-negotiated trade agreements and she seems much less open to
engage with their critics at the national level. Arguably, this is the logical implication of her EU-
wide mandate, which prevents her from being taken hostage by all opposition forces across the
EU. However, it also implies that the visits of the Commissioner emerge more as an effort of
transparency than of actual accountability.
4.3 Public communication: Little connection between the parliamentary
intervention and the public sphere
A consideration of the public communication about the Commissioner’s visits confirms the
impression that these are mostly institutional meetings with little wider resonance. Obviously,
the meetings are duly announced by the Commissioner and by the parliaments and/or the host
committee. The Commissioner tends to tweet about the visit taking place, but we do not find
her addressing anything of their substance. We also find participating parliamentarians posting
about the event on their social media accounts, but the number of postings remains small and
they trigger little engagement.
www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 18 of 58There are only a few instances where we have found mainstream media covering the visit to the national parliament. In Spain we find some national news outlets adopting the standard reports by the national press agencies and main quality newspaper El Pais following up with an interview with Malmström. In the Netherlands, the business newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad covered the committee meeting in the Tweede Kamer and published a profile of Malmström. Furthermore, we find some coverage of the meetings in the specialised press, like the EU news dedicated website euractiv or the Dutch magazine for farmers, Boerderij Vandaag. Notably, however, there is a bit more attention for Commissioner Malmström’s visit when we zoom out from the specific visit to the national parliament. In general, the Commissioner combines these visits with other meetings in the country, like a meeting with business representatives, attendance of a public seminar, or a dedicated ‘Town Hall meeting’. Notably, given the salience of EU trade, on various occasions (in Belgium and the Netherlands) these events also attract protesters, whose presence actually helps to attract media attention. Most notably, in the Netherlands, the ‘Town Hall meeting’ in Amsterdam that features Commissioner Malmström the day after she met with the Tweede Kamer, attracts a few dozen of protesters but also three television crews, two national ones and one local one, that cover the event. 5. Discussion: from briefings to hearings Obviously, we need to be cautious in interpreting these findings as they involve a limited sample of the visits of only one Commissioner to only seven national parliaments. However, to be sure, as our sample includes some of the most prominent national parliaments, we have not found much of a real accountability relationship. The overall picture emerging from our analysis is that there is little systematicity in the Commissioners’ meetings with national parliaments and that many parliaments, especially the more prominent ones, have not (yet) embraced their role as integral actors in the EU political system that the Treaty of Lisbon bestowed on them. The visits of the Commissioner Malmström display little of a sense of the Commission and the national parliaments being part of a joint political system. The Commissioner is rather treated as an outside visitor and a source of information. This is all the more notable because in almost all of these meetings the debate centred on the trade negotiations with the US and Canada, and while the negotiations with the US have been broken off, the treaty with Canada (CETA) eventually was presented for ratification to the parliaments. While the first parliaments already ratified CETA by the end of 2017, twelve of them are still wavering, including five of the parliaments that have been analysed (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands). One wonders whether those parliaments should not already have gotten more out of their meetings with Commissioner Malmström in the time leading up to the conclusion of the negotiations. Interestingly, this detachment of EU politics from national politics seems strongest among parliaments that enjoy greater powers. They remain primarily preoccupied with national politics and also perceive the Commissioner through that lens. In that sense, it is no coincidence that the Commissioner’s visit was most depoliticized in the UK House of Commons that was already taking its distance from the EU as it was on its way to Brexit. Also in the strong parliaments of Germany and the Netherlands, the tendency is to engage in a ‘conversation’ with the Commissioner rather than to frame the relationship as one of ‘accountability’. Instead of regarding the European Commissioner as (also) their main executive agent in trade policy, they treat her either as an outside force or as a source of information that they can then www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 19 of 58
mobilize against their main antagonist, the national government. To paraphrase Vivien Schmidt (2006), national parliaments still focus the politics of the national level, even if it may increasingly be emptied of policy, rather than that they seek to insert some politics into the policy-rich EU level. By contrast, if anywhere the Commissioner is subjected to direct scrutiny and indeed recognized to exercise executive powers on their behalf, it is in relatively weaker parliaments, particularly those of Italy and France. Here the meeting with the Commissioner is framed as a ‘hearing’. In these cases, there are also occasional indications that the interaction is not only about the two institutional actors involved, but that the stakes concern the citizens at large, indeed. Thus, we find French parliamentarians directly appealing to their constituencies. In turn, in the Spanish parliament, Malmström is led to appeal to the Spanish citizens over the heads of their representatives. Still, these are only incidental sparks of the political stakes involved in the work of the Commission and the value that accountability for that also takes place in the national parliaments with the potential to resonate in national public spheres. We find very little evidence of the visits of the European Commissioner attracting substantial media coverage beyond the obligatory service tweets of the actors involved. What is more, in those cases that Malmström’s presence is communicated to the public at large, it tends not to be connected directly to the visit of the national parliament, but rather to protests related to trade, interviews in the national media, or other events that take place on the same occasion. Obviously, it is unfeasible and undesirable that an EU wide regulation can harmonize the practices in national parliaments. Still these findings suggest some good practices in how national parliaments can organize the visits of European Commissioners if they do not only regard it as input for their role in national decision-making but also aim to live up to their role in the wider framework of the multilevel EU polity. One thing is of course that these need to be public meetings and not private ones, as was the case in the UK House of Commons. It seems also appropriate that these meetings are organised by the relevant policy committee and there seems little need for prominent involvement of the EU affairs committee, unless the topic is specifically related to EU institutional affairs. Furthermore, it seems appropriate to frame these meetings as ‘hearings’, which indicates that they are not a symmetrical exchange but that the Commissioner is actually subject to scrutiny. This need not preclude a presentation by the Commissioner, but the focus and issues to be discussed should be firmly controlled by the parliamentarians. To secure that, it may be helpful to have the Commissioner’s intervention preceded by a substantial introduction by the committee chair. Furthermore, if we take these meetings seriously as scrutiny mechanisms in the context of the EU political system, then they need to be properly recorded so that other parliamentarians can refer to what has been said. One could imagine that the reports of these meetings are shared between parliaments through the Interparliamentary Exchange System (IPEX). In terms of public communication, the case studies show that the Commissioner often combines her visits to the national parliament with other public appearances. Notably, various of these appearances attracted more media attention than her encounter with the parliamentarians. This demonstrates that there are obvious political stakes involved in the work www.reconnect-europe.eu Page 20 of 58
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