The role of national parliaments as representatives of the peoples in the EU political system can be challenged on many grounds, such as the minor role of EU affairs in national political campaigns or limited powers of national parliaments regarding EU issues. This paper looks beyond the electoral and competency issues and studies whether the national parliaments can fulfil the role of strong publics within European publics sphere(s) (Fraser 1992), representing and addressing the general publics. Since the national parliaments can serve as a source of legitimacy of the EU both on national level through their scrutiny of national governments and on the European level through relations with EU institutions (or, in other terms, also through the existence of the multi-level parliamentary field, Crum and Fossum 2013), and particularly through the Early Warning Mechanism, both these levels are considered. Whether collective will formation on European issues occurs in the national parliaments individually and among national parliaments collectively can be, at both levels, determined by four factors: (a) participation, (b) inclusiveness (in relation to general publics), (c) deliberation and (d) decision-making. Related issues of openness and communication towards the general public are also considered. After developing the existing conceptual framework, the paper examines these issues on the cases of discussion documents and legislative proposals issuing from the 2015 Agenda for Migration. The paper seeks to advance our understanding of national parliaments as possible individual and aggregate representatives of European general publics by examining their individual and collective ability to carry out sufficiently broad and deep debates and translating them into the output of the EU decision-making process.
