Abstract
Among national parliaments (NPs) in the EU, the Austrian Nationalrat and the German Bundestag stand out as strong legislatures in EU affairs. Both parliaments have used their rights to great extent in recent EU negotiations on international agreements such as the one with Canada on a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. Yet, in the negotiations with the UK their involvement varies. Why is this so? Scholarly work on Brexit so far focused on the European Parliament or the UK parliament, while attention to NPs in the EU27 is scarce. This article fills this void in research by tracing the Austrian and German parliaments’ activities in the Brexit negotiations. Despite similar institutional strength I find that the German Bundestag is more extensively involved, particularly on an informal level, compared to the Austrian Nationalrat. The reason for this is Brexit’s varying saliency in these two countries given their different levels of exposure to the UK’s withdrawal. As saliency of a policy issue is considered a major explanatory factor for why NPs engage in EU affairs, the results of this article confirm this expectation within the realm of EU international negotiations.
Highlights
Negotiations on the withdrawal of the UK from the EU have been under way since 2017
I systematically mapped the agendas of two committees between 2016 and 2018: Regarding the German Bundestag, these agendas came from the EUcommittee and the specialized committee on ‘Economics and Energy’; regarding the Austrian Nationalrat, the agendas from the EU-committee and the main committee were analysed and mapped
Comparing the Austrian Nationalrat’s involvement in the Brexit negotiations to Germany (Table 2), in both cases the political groups do not yield their full potential of parliamentary rights: Parliamentarians in the Bundestag and in the Nationalrat do not use reasoned opinions or decisions in the EU-committee to bind the government to a certain decision (Interview 18, 19, 20)
Summary
Negotiations on the withdrawal of the UK from the EU have been under way since 2017. The European Parliament (EP), according to Article 50 of the Treaty on EU, will have to ratify an eventual agreement on the UK’s withdrawal (Closa, 2019). Relying on theorization of saliency as a trigger for parliaments’ activities on EU affairs (Auel & Christiansen, 2015), I argue that varying vulnerability of Austria and Germany to Brexit explains the differing levels of engagement in these negotiations Even though both parliaments are considered strong legislatures with extensive information and participation rights in EU affairs (see Section 2; Pollak & Slominski, 2003), I find that the German Bundestag is more involved in the Brexit negotiations than the Austrian Nationalrat. This is due to Germany’s exposure to the UK’s withdrawal from the EU while Brexit’s impact on Austria is of smaller magnitude. The conclusion summarizes the results and reflects on their implications for continued negotiations
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