National Parliaments and the Principle of Subsidiarity - Legal Options and Practical Limits

Abstract

At the fourth joint meeting on the future of Europe of members of national parliaments and the European Parliament, on 4 and 5 December 2007, Mr. Jaime Gama, the Speaker of the Portuguese Assembleia da Republica, in its summing up of the second day’s debates said that “national parliaments are the great winners of the new treaty”. The chairman of the Convention on the future of Europe, Valery Giscard d’Estaing exposed another vision in June 2003 on the draft constitutional treaty. For him, the great winner was the European Parliament. One can ask whether the differences between the Lisbon Treaty and the failed Constitutional Treaty justify these two diverging appreciations. The declaration of President Giscard d’Estaing was based on the increased legislative role recognised to the European Parliament in the draft produced by the Convention. The co-decision procedure between the E.P. and the Council was to be the ordinary legislative procedure and this procedure was introduced in an important number of cases. On the other hand, Giscard who had promoted in vain the traditional French idea of creating a “Congress” composed by national as well as European MPs in order to counterbalance the impact of the E.P could not see in the results of the works of the Convention a significant victory for national parliaments. The judgment of Mr. Gama reflects the latent climate of rivalry in the relationship between national and European Parliaments, although the official language underlines that there is no competition between both and that “they have different roles to play, but with the common objective of bringing the EU closer to citizens” But Mr. Gama was right in underlining that the role of national parliaments has been growing through successive revisions of the treaty, from the two declarations annexed to the Maastricht Treaty to the Amsterdam Protocol on the role of national parliaments in the European Union to the Rome Constitutional Treaty of 2004, with the new Protocol on the application of the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality up to the Lisbon Treaty. The Lisbon Treaty includes some interesting and undoubtedly important new elements, both symbolic and substantial.