Parliamentary Control and the Constitutional Definition of Foreign Policy Making in Democratic Poland

Abstract

IN WHAT IN ITS TIME WAS A CLASSIC STUDY of the British experience, Peter Richards's Parliament and Foreign Affairs argued that 'there are formidable difficulties to effective parliamentary examination of foreign affairs', if only because 'the essence of foreign policy is negotiation rather than legislation'.1 Studies of the once-powerful American Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee indicate that, despite occupying a central role on paper, they have both become 'remarkably ineffective in shaping US foreign policy'.2 The same is true of the post-1979 House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs. The limited impact of its enquiries, reports and activities, except possibly for specialists and the media, can easily be explained by the constraints of the Westminster parliamentary framework.3 Both cases also confirm the importance of differing political cultures and institutional frameworks for parliamentary control of foreign policy. Recent comparative experience shows the role of modem parliamentary assemblies to be rather limited. This generalisation does not, however, apply uniformly across the board. It is certainly not borne out by the Polish case which will be examined in this article to see whether it is a local and transient