‘A friend in need is a friend indeed’? The role of ‘Europe’ when discussing budgetary decisions: analysing parliamentary debates on planning documents in Italy (2006-2014) Alba Ferreri1 Introduction The role of national legislatures within the European economic governance … ‘under pressure’ Ever since the reforms started in 2005-2006, a new architecture of the economic policy-making has emerged in the EU (Begg 2006: 2). The revised version of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP2), the re-launch of the Lisbon strategy and the allocation of the EU multiannual financial framework 2007-2013 were some of the building blocks of this reviewed structure – encompassing structural policies and measures pertaining the demand side. Such modifications were oriented to provide stability and coordination under the umbrella of the ‘Lisbon II’ strategy, which somehow comprised all the other economic governance processes sponsored and supervised by the European Commission. The outbreak of the economic and financial crisis has seriously put under pressure the whole system, especially for what the relationship between monetary integration and democratic government in the EU is concerned (Crum 2013). In particular, the principal characteristic of the regulatory framework established to face the crisis at a European level is fragmentation; also, the varied nature of the instruments adopted by the EU institutions and through intergovernmental treaties, coordination measures and acts addressed to some or all the member states has proved to be somehow limiting for what parliamentary participation is concerned3. For instance, the so-called ‘two pack4‘ brought new powers to the European Commission, for controlling the member state budgetary plans – thereby taking control off national parliaments, without providing any compensation in democratic terms. As the German constitutional court underlined in the ‘Lisbon ruling’ dated 20095, the question of the level at which democratic legitimacy of economic governance measures should be provided is controversial. However, since national parliaments traditionally hold budgetary prerogatives at national level, one could consider them as the only source of legitimacy for these measures. 1PhD Candidate in European and Comparative Politics, Centre for the Study of Political Change (CIRCaP) – University of Siena 2 The Stability and Growth Pact primarily entered into force on Jan 1999, with the purpose of ensuring the maintenance of fiscal discipline and the enforcement of the EMU. In March 2005, the EU Council, under the pressure of France and Germany, relaxed the rules – in order to better respond to criticisms of insufficient flexibility and to make the pact more enforceable. Another reform was enacted in March 2011, due to the breakthrough of the economic and financial crisis. The EU member states adopted a new reform under the Open Method of Coordination, aiming at straightening the rules e.g. by adopting an automatic procedure for imposing of penalties in case of breaches of either the deficit or the debt rules. The new ‘Euro Plus Pact’ is designed as a more stringent successor to the Stability and Growth Pact, which has not been implemented consistently. 3 An interesting report on the role of the European Parliament in anti-crisis decision-making is available at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/bibliotheque/briefing/2012/120397/LDM_BRI(2012)120397_REV1_EN.pdf 4 The so-called ‘Six-Pack’, five regulations and one directive4 into force as of December 2011, with a view to strengthening the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) anticipated the ‘Two-Pack’, two further regulations aimed to strengthen euro area budgetary surveillance. This reform package entered into force on 30 May 2013 in all Euro area Member States. The new measures were meant to increase transparency on their budgetary decisions and stronger coordination within the 2014 budgetary cycle, as well as to recognize the special needs of Euro area Member States under severe financial pressure. 5 http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/entscheidungen/es20090630_2bve000208en.html In this direction could be read Van Rompuy's report titled ‘Towards a genuine economic and monetary Union’6(December 2012). It states that democratic control and accountability should occur at the level at which decisions are taken: while assuming that, it is also specified that this principle, key to ensuring the effectiveness of the integrated financial, budgetary and economic policy framework, should maintain ‘the pivotal role of national parliaments, as appropriate’ (p.16). In fact – it is premised – ‘decisions on national budgets are at the heart of Member States' parliamentary democracies’. Notwithstanding such an appraisal, recent research (Poiares Maduro 2012; Fasone 2014) points out that the position of national parliaments has been negatively influenced by the reform of the economic governance in the EU. Just a few years after the entry into force of the Lisbon treaty – which managed to create new mechanisms for involving national parliaments in EU policy-making, expanding their room of maneuver (Neuhold and Strelkov 2012), the continuous resort to inter-governmental procedures characterizing the ‘new’ economic governance structure (Fabbrini 2013) appears to have marginalized again those representative bodies. As Fasone (2014: 1) righteously states, the EU law stemming from the reform of the economic governance […] almost completely disregards national parliaments, leaving only to the ‘Fiscal Compact7‘ the task of recognizing a role for national parliaments as participants – alongside with the European Parliament – to the application of the treaty (art. 13). Of course, the implementation of the measures provided by the new European economic governance framework requires parliaments to re-adjust, by means of finding new inputs to exercise already existing powers or, else, to arrange them according to new formats (Fasone 2014). Such an operation naturally entails different processes of adaptation, according to the positions of each member state. Furthermore – Cotta (2014: 74) remarks, ‘in a compound polity like the EU combining theoretically sovereign nation- states within a significant supranational architecture where it is not yet clearly decided which of the two levels prevails, divergences are to be expected when framing a crisis’. It follows that finding asymmetries in the way parliaments respond to this changing scenario is not surprising at all – and specifically this may hang on the degree of parliamentary autonomy on fiscal and budgetary matters (Fasone 2014). According to some observers (Deruelle 2013), this differentiation has overall produced two parallel phenomena: first, a process of harmonisation of national legislatures’ modi operandi; second, a series of a series of coercive measures which raises the question of coercive federalism – hereby conceived reminding Kincaid’s (1990) understanding of it8. More than that, concerns have been voiced by scholars envisaging a possible extension of the democratic deficit of the EU – subsequent to the crisis – to a point of ‘democratic default’ (Majone 2012). 6 Text available online at http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/en/ec/134069.pdf 7 The so-called Fiscal Compact is an international agreement outside the EU legal framework signed by all EU member states but the UK and the Czech Republic, please find the online text at http://www.european-council.europa.eu/media/639226/10_-_tscg.it.12.pdf 8 As explained by Kincaid, coercive federalism is a perverted version of cooperative federalism: in a cooperative system, once the highest level of governance cannot rely on federated entities to achieve its goal, it will rely on coercive measures. Coercive federalism, by its ‘violent’ nature brings the assumption that tensions arise in the system of governance. The risk is thus to have difficulties in achieving common goals between the two level of governance whereas the option of cooperative federalism ensures a much smoother approach of inter-institutional relations and multilevel governance. More on the point when reading Deruelle 2013. Parliaments and the communicative function To date, the literature has greatly focused on formal valuations of the abovementioned facts, tackling the national parliaments (NPs’) legal responses or gaging changes in institutional organisations and functioning. The emphasis here is instead on the so-called ‘communicative function’ exercised by national arenas (Auel and Raunio 2012, 2014). The assumption is that a more dynamic debating role (Wendler 2014) of the parliament may be a good starting point to justify an enhancement of the parliament’s relevance with respect to other (national and European) institutions. Particularly, a territory that still appears as partially uncharted is the role played by national parliaments as representatives of different political positions and interests primarily expressed by citizens and manifested in the parliaments by the national representatives of the political parties. The underlying puzzle is whether parliamentary discourses are adapting to the new, externally induced, forms of governance brought by the mounting European commitment lately experienced, specifically on the matters of fiscal discipline and budgetary policy. The concept of ‘implementation’ is also touched upon – conceiving the latter as deriving from the thematization operated by parliamentarians discussing policy issues within the arena observed, namely the parliament.