MacCormick’s nationalism and constitutionalism are inseparable from his theorisation of Europe as holding out political promise for stateless nations, like Scotland. But MacCormick’s interest in Europe also yields conceptual innovation of its own kind, with MacCormick characterising Europe as ‘a post sovereign commonwealth’ governed by ‘subsidiarity’, also embracing ‘constitutional pluralism’ in Europe. This chapter examines MacCormick’s philosophical engagement with Europe, alongside his direct, political involvement in it, first as a Member of the European Parliament (1999–2004) and, at the same time, as a Member of the Convention on the Future of Europe, where MacCormick made important contributions to the writing of the European Constitution. Emphasising MacCormick’s sensitivity to the quality of political discourse, this chapter reads MacCormick’s approach to Europe as a matter of character, e.g., how he deployed a conceptual language – speaking of subsidiarity rather than sovereignty – that he thought could facilitate better relations between political communities.

The chapter focuses on the European Union and the power struggles between its different institutional bodies. European integration started in the economic realm. Political representants were intentionally downplayed to not infringe upon populations’ allegiances to the nation state. Balance sheets, price lists, postmodern architecture, and an assembly-line production of texts generate the image of a space of flows needing to be governed with liberal governance procedures. However, since the direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979, the Members of the European Parliament have embarked on a strategy to stage plenary votes as performative acts, without having had the relevant legal competencies or member states’ approval. Over time, the European Parliament enhanced its power, and the EU now looks a little like a federal state. More recently, another form of political contestation against economic integration has emerged from the heads of governments and states with the mediatization of the European Council. The dramatization of the heads of states’ summits provides a formidable spectacle that stages the EU as an intergovernmental organization. The chapter traces struggles over representants and their backlashes in the EU up to the present. How this order will develop depends on how the general public will receive those representants.

The chapter considers the powers of the central administrative and legislative institutions. The Commission comprises a college of twenty-seven Commissioners appointed for five years. It has four central types of power. It can adopt quasi-legislation. It proposes laws, policies and the budget. It administers EU policies. Finally, it has powers to police the observance of EU law. The Council of Ministers, comprised of national ministers, has the final power of decision over almost all fields of EU law. It votes either by unanimity or by Qualified Majority, where fifteen States representing 65 per cent of the Union population must vote for a measure. The European Council comprises the Heads of Government. Its central role is to provide political direction for the other EU Institutions. The European Parliament comprises 705 directly elected representatives. Depending upon the field, it has the power of veto over legislation, has to assent to it or must be consulted over it. The Parliament also has significant powers to hold the other EU Institutions to account. This chapter concludes by examining the circumstances when individuals can seek disclosure of documents from the EU Institutions.

The Eurogroup has played a central role in decision-making in the area of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) since its very inception. Nevertheless, it is one of those EU bodies that are least understood. This chapter focuses on the political and legal accountability of the Eurogroup, key aspects of which remained ill-defined for a considerable period of time. The discussion begins with the foundations and tasks of the Eurogroup (Section 2). The focus then shifts to the political accountability of the Eurogroup, the emphasis being on its relationship with the European Council and the Economic Dialogues with the European Parliament (Section 3.1). The chapter further looks at its legal accountability, in light of the relevant case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) (Section 3.2). The penultimate section of the chapter provides an assessment of the Eurogroup’s accountability in light of the framework laid down in the introductory chapter to this volume, namely in terms of procedural and substantive ways of delivering the normative goods of accountability (Section 4). Section 5 concludes by outlining the key features of the accountability arrangements and practices pertaining to the Eurogroup.

The European Banking Union (EBU) launched in 2012 relies on a complex institutional architecture; that is, a series of EU institutions and bodies as well as national institutions are involved in its functioning. At the EU level, these include the European Central Bank (ECB) – which acts as the authority in charge of monetary and as banking supervisor, two EU agencies (the Single Resolution Board and the European Banking Authority), as well as the European Commission. This chapter examines the existing accountability mechanisms vis-à-vis each of these institutions and bodies with a view to determining whether any accountability gaps exist. To this end, it first maps these mechanisms and analyses how they have been used to date. It finds that the mechanisms have been used indeed, but that some shortcomings exist in the existing institutional framework. It therefore proposes some reforms to improve the existing situation.

This chapter provides the volumes general conceptual framework. It begins by addressing why new approaches to accountability are needed, arguing that accountability literature has reached a stalemate as a result of an impasse between deductive and inductive approaches to accountability in the EU. It then argues that overcoming the stalemate requires developing a generalised framework of what accountability is for, deriving four accountability goods to be used in subsequent chapters. The chapter argues that each of the goods can be delivered in procedural or substantive ways, focusing either on the process by which decisions are made or the substantive worth of decisions themselves. The chapter concludes by discussing the strengths and weaknesses of both varieties of accountability before mapping out how the concepts will be applied across policy fields and institutions in subsequent chapters.

As the most powerful executive actor in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), the Eurogroup has faced continuous demands to improve its accountability record since the euro crisis. One reform introduced to meet these demands were the Economic Dialogue – a regular exchange of views between the European Parliament and the President of the Eurogroup designed to ‘ensure greater transparency and accountability’ in the EMU. This chapter investigates the practical functioning of the Economic Dialogues with the Eurogroup between 2013 and the 2019 European Parliament elections. Applying the theoretical framework of the introduction, the purpose is to examine the extent to which the Parliament focuses on procedural or substantive accountability when questioning the Eurogroup President. Moreover, the chapter investigates the reasoning of parliamentary questions in line with the four accountability goods identified at the outset (openness, non-arbitrariness, effectiveness, and publicness). The findings show that Members of the European Parliament are eager to question the extent to which Eurogroup decisions are substantively open and effective, and to a lesser extent whether they are arbitrary or protect EU interests more generally. The analysis is based on fourteen transcripts of Economic Dialogues with the Eurogroup President, which took place between 2013 and 2019.

Since the Treaty of Lisbon, trade policy has become an explicit part of, and integrated into, the general framework of the EU’s external policy but must also be in conformity with internal policies. Thus, trade policy is subject to a requirement of multiple coherence. Beyond constitutional obligations, other drivers work for the inclusion of non-genuine commercial policy objectives in trade policy, such as the orientation of contemporary trade politics towards the behind-the-border issues of national regulation, so that trade policy became closely intertwined with domestic regulatory policy. Therefore the actors primarily responsible for legislation, i.e. parliaments, advocate for their extended participation in determining trade policy, and rightly so for reasons of transparency, control and political inclusiveness. Parliaments thus become actors of respect for and positive consideration of non-commercial policy objectives in trade policy, which also applies to the European Parliament (EP). Hence, an institutional design of policy formulation cycles and decision-making in EU trade policy that strives for better coherence of trade concerns with non-trade policy objectives (NTPOs) must focus on strengthening the influence of the EP and improving its participatory rights in decision-making and its control and monitoring mechanisms. Consequently, this chapter derives proposals for improving EP´s monitoring mechanisms for the benefit of NTPOs in trade policy from an analysis of weaknesses in the negotiation and implementation stage of trade policy.

This chapter discusses the roles of and relations between political parties, political groups and members of the European Parliament (MEPs). Domestic political parties play an important role because they are responsible for selecting the candidates for the European Parliament elections. Once elected, most of these political parties and their MEPs work together in political groups. In these political groups MEPs from like-minded parties organize their work and tend to vote as cohesive blocks. Political groups thus help to make the EP work in a much more effective manner than would be possible if the more than 200 parties that are represented there did not build coalitions. These political groups are organized along two main cleavages: a classic left–right cleavage as well as a more recent cleavage between groups that are more supportive and groups that are more critical of European integration. Finally, in addition to domestic parties, there are also European political parties. They have more limited tasks and mostly provide a platform for like-minded parties from the different member states.

This chapter outlines the EU’s seven official main institutions (the European Council, Council of the European Union, European Parliament, Commission, Court of Justice, Court of Auditors and European Central Bank) and the different executive, legislative and judicial powers that are allocated to them. It describes their tasks and the way they have organized their work. The EU’s combination of institutions is unique and can be characterized as ‘mixed government’ or as ‘a polity with many principals’. It is nevertheless based upon a common model for organizing democratic systems, namely that of consensualism, and aims to disperse power and constrain the use of it.

This chapter aims to examine a topic that up to now has received scant, if any, attention: the use of customary international law (CIL) by the European Parliament, the Council and the European Commission. To that effect, the actions resulting from the exercise of different powers of those three institutions (such as proposals, acts of secondary law, parliamentary questions, statements before the CJEU and other courts) have been taken in consideration. The examination of the practice of the political institutions of the EU does not reveal significant differences between them. References to rules of CIL from their side are relatively rare and mostly included in instruments with an international dimension. They all tend to invoke precise rules of CIL when doing so is essential for substantiating their legal position. They also seem to be aware of the fundamentals of this source of international law. By contrast, the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission fail to demonstrate (here is another common feature) that the rules of CIL they invoke are well established or that practice and opinio juris, as constitutive elements of CIL, concur. It must be highlighted as well that no pattern has been identified in this empirical analysis on the use of CIL by the political institutions of the EU.

In EU policy-making, questions concerning legal limits and EU competence are routinely treated as a domain reserved for lawyers, as if they were indeed objective in nature, and as such somehow separate from policy-making. Yet such legal advice is often decisive in settling the scope or intensity of EU legislative intervention. The European Parliament is a free market of legal advice where law seldom counts as absolute truth and legal determinations are formally allocated to a political body, the Legal Affairs Committee. Building on over 50 interviews with legal advisers and policy makers (including in particular MEPs), this chapter provides an empirical study of what legal advisors in the European Parliament do and what remains of their power in a policy-making environment where only compromises count, and the main function of the lawyer is to assist in identifying the compromise. Their main institutional agenda is geared at defending the clients’ interest: the prerogatives of the Parliament as an institution. Yet objectivity is vital when navigating among the agendas of eight political groups from 28 Member States and hundreds of political parties.