Beyond veto leveraging? Practices of European Parliament involvement in the negotiation of international agreements
(2023) RELATE workshop — Location: En ligne (17.January.2023)
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- Authors
Bardou, Marine 
- Abstract
- This paper studies the relationship between the European Parliament (EP) and the EU negotiator during the negotiation of international agreements. Since 2009, the EP can veto the conclusion of most international agreements. In practice, the EP veto is not used, and the literature has documented other formal and informal means of EP involvement in negotiations. It mainly envisages them from the perspective of anticipation: because the EP has veto power, the institution acting as EU negotiator (generally the Commission) has to take EP concerns into account. However, this literature has largely ignored how individual actors make sense of these means of involvement (e.g. EP members, Commission negotiators). The nature of the EP-EU negotiator relationship therefore remains unknown. Hence, the paper asks: What kind of relationships are crafted between the EP and the EU negotiator through the (absence of) repeated contacts during the negotiation of international agreements? The paper analyses the EP-EU negotiator relationship, crafted through practices. It considers actor’s practices within the specific policy fields the actors pertain to, and studies the (informal) ways through which institutions engage with each other at actor-level, as well as their motivations. For that purpose, 26 semi-structured interviews are conducted with EP and EU negotiator officials, across policy fields. As intermediary results, four practices and two resulting EP-EU negotiator relationships are identified: 1) a ‘side by side’ relationship with low mutual engagement and a scrutinized/scrutinizer dynamic and 2) a ‘hand in hand’ relationship with dense, informal mutual engagement and collaborative patterns.
- Affiliations
Citations
Bardou, M. (2023). Beyond veto leveraging? Practices of European Parliament involvement in the negotiation of international agreements. RELATE workshop, En ligne. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/100942