Who represents whom or what in the current European imbroglio provoked by the debt crisis? Considering what is at stake, democratic legitimacy of the decisions taken by European actors is crucial. But despite Article 10 TEU stating that “the functioning of the Union shall be founded on representative democracy”, reality is obfuscated by claims of “true” representation of member states interests by the European Council, the ECOFIN, the Eurogroup and the Commission. On many of the currently most salient questions the European parliament is side-lined and the national parliaments have to provide accountability not only to the European decisions, but also to implement domestic reforms.
While the outline for this workshop discusses the “representative turn” in EU integration we also ask whether the financial crisis does not rather tend to foster a “technocratic turn”, whereby the pressures from financial markets and their deadlines thwart the need for democratic deliberation in parliaments and communication with citizens. In our paper we wish to test the hypothesis that the European debt crisis leads to a collision between this “technocratic turn” - provoked by the need for efficient decision-making on highly complex economic issues – and the principles of representative democracy. The Lisbon ruling and the ruling on the euro rescue package of the German Constitutional Court for instance clearly safeguard the parliamentary rights of participation and the right of the Bundestag to retain its influence on decisions to provide guarantees. However, by referring to the “necessities of the market” governments are pressured to get the affirmative decisions taken by their respective parliaments.
The members of the Eurogroup have created the EFSF/ESM as a société anonyme incorporated in Luxemburg, on the basis of a multilateral agreement outside EU law, without any accountability mechanisms to the European Parliament as the representative of the European citizens, whereas national parliaments are called to ratify and legitimize the EFSF. National parliaments are to accept the executive’s solution as “without alternative” (Angela Merkel). The European mechanisms for tackling the European debt crisis rely mainly on an “output”-legitimacy than on an input from democratically elected bodies. Thus national parliaments are hardly the place where European decisions are challenged or reshaped but an arena for domestic political leveraging. This holds true not only for the creation of rescue mechanisms but also for domestic reforms.
We aim to test our hypothesis by analysing the parliamentary debates within the German Bundestag (the strongest national economy of the EU, but also with a Constitutional Court that has repeatedly urged for safeguarding “sufficient parliamentary influence”), the Austrian parliament (with an ongoing debate on introducing a constitutional “debt break”) and the national parliament of Italy (where a technocratic government was set up to implement strict austerity measures). Specific questions that have to be addressed are how the political bargaining process is shaped by this technocratic-representative collision, if and how special institutional arrangements are installed on the domestic level to address these issues and whether – as the EP is kept out of the process on the European level – national parliaments take into consideration not only the national, but also the European interest.
