Gendering Parliamentary Diplomacy in EU27-UK Relations: Mid-space practices in the European Parliament

As part of a reflection process on rethinking parliamentary democracy, the former European Parliament President, David Sassoli committed to building the European Parliament’s parliamentary diplomacy. Parliamentary diplomacy means the relationships that parliamentarians or parliaments as institutions, have with other parliaments, parliamentarians and non-state actors to foster peace, democracy, understanding, dialogue, legitimacy and scrutiny of governments. To date, there is a significant research gap on the role that gender plays in parliamentary diplomacy, though one seminal in-depth study has now explored the promotion of gender equality through parliamentary diplomacy (Jancic et al 2021). Based on a unique qualitative dataset of 140 interviews and ethnographic research conducted at the time of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, at the end of the 8th Parliament and the beginning of the 9th parliament, this paper looks at how gendered parliamentary diplomacy was conceived and performed by UK and EU27 MEPs alike. By virtue of being in a supranational political setting, they performed ‘mid space’ diplomacy (Constantinou, 2013) as they sought to maintain relationships. The paper is empirically divided into gendered parliamentary diplomacy between three institutional levels: The European Parliament Level, Political Group Level, and Individual MEP level. Finally, the paper looks towards two ‘new’ institutions of parliamentary diplomacy: the formal Parliamentary Partnership Assembly and the informal EU-UK parliamentary friendship group. It considers how the rules, practices and norms of parliamentary diplomacy might change and what this means for gender equality.