The European Parliament in Comparative International Perspective

Abstract

The European Parliament (EP) is no longer sui generis but rather an idiosyncratic species filling a unique international-institutional niche. A large number of international parliamentary institutions (IPIs) have formed in Europe in merely in the last decade. Not only is their “parliamentary diplomacy” as an important middle ground between the traditional level of interstate diplomacy and the new level of transnational co-operation amongst grass-roots nongovernmental organizations. Indeed, the actual significance of the phenomenon of IPIs is wide-ranging and growing. They introduce national elites to wider ranges of views and perspectives, particularly in regimes that are not yet fully democratized. IPIs also tend to establish transnational civil-society and nongovernmental relationships that restrain old power-politics patterns. In such a manner they prepare a middle ground for interstate co-operation. The research defines IPIs and studies empirically their worldwide growth since 1945. It reveals the need to elaborate a conceptual framework permitting incorporation of a complex-systems problematique into the study of world society, and it satisfies that need. It presents a typology of IPIs as a framework synthesizing two apparently mutually exclusive taxonomies: one functional, about how IPIs survive; the other epigenetic, about growth. The typology correlates the familiar initiation-takeoff-spillover schema with a hierarchy of epigenetic organizational development (“evolution”) of IPIs. The typology is not teleological but drives the problematique of the research question. The research conceptualizes the organizational performance parameters of a second-order cybernetic system. The conceptual synthesis problematizes relevant theoretical questions, sets the necessary constraints on the research design, and establishes how to code information concerning the development of these organizations. First, communication and information concern the establishment of organizational and cognitive hierarchies. Second, motivation concerns goal definition and realization. Third, spheres of competence especially concern the development of systems to respond to external threat. The approach negates Deutsch’s six “losses” that inhibit organizational learning by transforming them into six capacities for learning. Each such learning capacity is appropriate and requisite to a particular stage of organizational development. The need to embed a complex-systems logic within the world society approach, for the purpose of certain empirical studies, is demonstrated. Autopoiesis, the autonomous setting of self-generated goals as a means to adapt systemically to a changing environment, is a key analytical category for assessing this development of institutions in world society. It is the crucial attribute that marks an organization's successful accomplishment of the developmental stage of take-off, signifying the pro-active undertaking of relations with other organizations. It is the foundation of autonomous motive. Different IPIs come from different political and sociological origins, have different types and spheres of authority according to their respective founding documents, and have different statuses under international law. In contrast to the EP, some IPIs limit a priori the possible scope of their responsibilities and authority, effectively constituting a limit to the development of their international juridical personality. Nevertheless, the uniqueness of the EP's experience lends itself as a template from which other IPIs at various stages of development may borrow such qualities as are useful. In one sense, modern IPIs are only the most recent and recognizable institutionalization of a more general and ancient phenomenon. A distinctive difference, however, is that their density in world society today itself tends catalyze the self-generation of NGOs and inter-NGO networks.