PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY - Inter-Parliamentary Union

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An effective parliament (II): Parliament’s involvement in international affairs I 167 Further online reading about parliam entary involvem ent in international affairs: Chutikul, K (2003). Options for a parliamentary dimension of the WTO. Discussion paper presented to the Parliamentary Conference on the WTO. Inter-Parliamentary Union Committee for a democratic UN Hubli, S., & Mandaville, A. (2004). Parliaments and the PRSP process. World Bank Institute International parliamentarians’ petition (IPP) for democratic oversight of the IMF and World Bank. Inter-Parliamentary Union (2005). Parliamentary involvement in international affairs. Inter-Parliamentary Union, United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women (2003). The Convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women and its Optional protocol. Handbook for parliamentarians. Inter-Parliamentary Union, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (2005). Human rights: Handbook for parliamentarians. United Nations Development Programme, National Democratic Institute (2004). Strengthening parliament involvement in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Process and the Millennium Development Goals. Parliamentary involvement in regional integration processes Several regions in the world are moving in the direction of integration. While the phenomenon started in Europe, similar moves are being made in Africa, Latin America and, more recently, in Asia and the Arab world. While they are clearly at very different stages, they do share some common features.
168 I PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY As we noted in the introduction to this chapter, for a variety of reasons which differ from one region to another, States have decided to integrate gradually their markets, economies and other sectors of the State. By definition this means relinquishing, if only very partially, some sovereignty to a common regional structure. This is fundamentally different from the cooperation that takes place between States at the global level, where States have not agreed to relinquish any of their authority and, in principle, participate on equal terms. Common to the regional integration processes is the establishment of a governance structure that takes its inspiration from the national State. Hence, some form of executive and parliament are set up for this new regional entity. These regional parliaments exist alongside the national parliaments and complement each other much in the same way as do the two chambers of a bicameral parliament in a federal State; one represents the community views and interests, the other the national views and interests. In this section we shall consider the situation in the European Union (EU) since it is the most advanced regional integration process in existence in the world today and we shall focus on the challenges that regional integration poses to the national parliaments. Many of the European parliaments making submissions to this Guide described the issue of oversight of their government’s EU policy as a major challenge. Their accounts of attempts to address it will hopefully have a wider interest, as they exemplify a pattern that may become increasingly common where parliaments surrender legislative competence to supranational institutions in order to tackle common regional or global problems. The issue for national parliaments, therefore, is how to monitor and influence the positions taken by their own ministerial representatives in these institutions. The issue is well defined in a submission from the Polish Senate: Involving the national parliament in the mechanism of deciding the government position presented subsequently to the EU is a way of overcoming the European Union’s deficit of democratic legitimacy. To put it briefly, that deficit is associated with the overall legitimacy of an Executive representing a Member State in the EU and the ensuing marginalization of the role of representative bodies. ……Consequently, the transfer of entitlements from the national parliament to the Union necessitates a certain compensation, and that is precisely what the reinforcement of parliamentary competencies in cooperating with the national government on European decisions is supposed to ensure.
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