National parliaments in Europe’s post-crisis economic governance

Valentin Kreilinger

Dissertation submitted to the Hertie School of Governance in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor rerum politicarum (Dr. rer. pol.) in the Doctoral Programme in Governance

Berlin, 2019 First advisor: Prof. Dr. Henrik Enderlein Hertie School of Governance

Second advisor: Prof. Dr. Olivier Rozenberg Sciences Po Paris

Third advisor: Prof. Dr. Ben Crum Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

National parliaments in Europe’s post-crisis economic governance 2 Summary

This dissertation provides a comprehensive account of the role of national parliaments in Europe’s post-crisis economic governance. It examines national parliaments in the European Semester, in relation to the European Stability Mechanism and the Interparliamentary Conference on Stability, Economic Coordination and Governance and challenges the view that the Euro crisis has only reduced the influence of national parliaments.

The analysis moves beyond prerogatives and institutional capacities to actual parliamentary involvement. Scrutinising the different stages of the European Semester remains a challenge for many national parliaments that have been marginalised by this multilevel coordination and surveillance process. In case of the third rescue package for Greece, the overall involvement by national parliaments exceeded what legal provisions would have demanded. But both economic governance domains suffer from asymmetries between those national parliaments that are willing and able to become actually involved and those that are not. One possible remedy against these asymmetries would be to involve national parliaments into economic governance collectively. The provision of Article 13 TSCG and the Interparliamentary Conference established on this basis, however, fall short of collective involvement or joint scrutiny and the experience of negotiating the institutional design of the new Conference even suggests that any kind of joint parliamentary body for the Euro area would be very difficult to realise.

As a general overhaul of the Economic and Monetary Union seems indispensable to make the common currency weather-proof, a more symmetric involvement of national parliaments is necessary to strengthen the legitimacy that they supply. In the European Semester this could be achieved via minimum standards for parliamentary involvement, but the tangled web of procedures for ESM rescue packages is likely to persist and interparliamentary cooperation can only be developed incrementally.

National parliaments in Europe’s post-crisis economic governance 3 Acknowledgments

This dissertation is the result of my doctoral research at the Hertie School of Governance from 2014 to 2018. It has been a great pleasure to focus on this important and evolving topic. The Hertie School’s Doctoral Programme in Governance and the Jacques Delors Institute Berlin have been an ideal place for researching national parliaments in Europe’s post-crisis economic governance.

I am most grateful to my three PhD advisors. Henrik Enderlein has been an excellent supervisor of my dissertation who supported this project from its very beginning. My second supervisor, Olivier Rozenberg, has always provided very helpful advice for my thesis and we have cooperated fruitfully ever since we first met in Paris. Ben Crum, as third member of my PhD committee, has generously commented on individual chapters on numerous occasions.

The Hertie Foundation provided financial support for this project with two short-term grants in 2015 and 2018 and the IPID4all programme of the German Academic Exchange Service allowed me to present my findings at international conferences and workshops, to undertake field trips to European capitals for interviews, and to be an observer of interparliamentary cooperation. I thankfully acknowledge this support and I am highly indebted to Members of Parliament, officials and staff in nati