Philipp Kiiver
The good news is that if the current situation is imperfect but sustainable, it will remain imperfect but sustainable: European integration may continue to deliver positive effects without causing its own foundations to collapse.
Biography
Philipp Kiiver is Associate Professor of European and Comparative Constitutional Law at Maastricht University. He obtained his law degree (2003) and his PhD (2005) from Maastricht. He is a fellow at the Montesquieu Institute Maastricht and a member of the editorial committee of the Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law. From 2008 to 2010 he served as Associate Dean of the Maastricht Law Faculty. He is the co-author of an introduction to comparative constitutional law (Constitutions Compared, Intersentia, 2nd edition 2009) and he gives lectures and co-supervises PhD theses in that field of expertise. In 2008 he was awarded a Veni grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to carry out a three-year research project into different forms of parliamentary accountability. His research interests include EU institutional law and comparative constitutional law, in particular parliamentary studies.
Abstract
The Future of Parliamentary Accountability in Europe
This Think Piece sketches a few perspectives for the future development of parliamentary accountability within the European Union, taking into account both the European Parliament and the national parliaments. Based on past experiences and its current interests, the European Parliament is likely to push for a further uniformisation of its own election system and to claim additional weight vis-à-vis the Commission and the Council but also in the oversight of executive agencies. It is, however, unlikely that any of this will lead to any enhanced connection with the citizens, especially since government-opposition dynamics are lacking and since the European Parliament’s tested strategy to gain strength with respect to the other institutions is exactly the avoidance of such dynamics. The national parliaments, meanwhile, have adapted their procedures to the challenges of European integration and some new developments are likely to arise from their use of the subsidiarity review of EU legislative proposals, but chances are that by and large their adaptation process is over. It may in fact be expected that fresh impulses for the enforcement of national democratic safeguards will increasingly come from rather less obvious actors, namely senates (who are often much more active in scrutinising EU action than lower chambers) and courts (who, by insisting on parliamentary involvement in EU matters, can give parliaments an additional boost). Unexpected events, in particular financial, migration and/or environmental crises, may accelerate European integration along existing trajectories; in case of a breakup of the Union, though, national parliaments will, all else being equal, continue to be the cornerstones of democratic governance in the states that they are now, while the European Parliament will surely not be the institution that is missed most.
