Having established itself as a sovereign Community institution and christening itself a parliament, the European Parliament had far transcended the institution that the Treaties had created on paper. Building on its successful use of customs as a way to further acquire new competences, moreover, the Parliament would further cement its position throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. The previous chapter has already shown that there was a strong tendency in Strasbourg, because of its composition and pairing with a supranational executive, to cultivate a consensus culture from below. Delving deeper into the inner workings of the Parliament, this chapter asks how MEPs exercised their representative function within their institution and the Community at large. As delegates from national parliaments, the question for them was how to orient themselves – toward their national electorates and citizens of the Community, or the supranational executive, which they were supposed to control. This chapter charts this tension between constituency and Community through the lens of the constitutional repertoire and the repertoire of representation.

Although there have been studies on the role perception of MEPs, these overwhelmingly focus on the period after 1979, when the first European elections were held. The received wisdom, especially among political scientists and legal scholars, is that 1979 was really the zero hour of European parliamentarism, marking the transition of the European Parliament from an alleged “talking shop” to a “powerhouse” (Kohler 2014; Rittberger 2005: 3). By extension, the preceding period is depicted as one of inertia – a waiting room, in which the Parliament was wholly dependent on the benevolence of the member states for small extensions of its competences and, ultimately, elections. As the previous chapter has shown, it bears underlining that the European Parliament had developed strongly even before its first direct elections, and that the first elected MEPs entered an institution with an established institutional culture, working method and role perception (Patel & Salm 2021; Dinan 2021).