A reading sample from “At the Origins of Parliamentary Europe. Supranational parliamentary government in debates of the Ad Hoc Assembly for the European Political Community in 1952–1953” by Kari Palonen. Read a snippet from the second chapter “Parliament in post-war European projects”.
2 Parliament in post-war European projects
The inclusion of a parliamentary element in international organisations and institutions is a relatively late phenomenon. The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) was founded in 1889 as a peace project in the form of a debating society of parliamentarians. Only after the First World War did it become a forum for debating on and defending parliamentarism and democracy, a feature it lost in part after the Second World War, when countries with façade parliaments, such as the Soviet Union, were accepted as members (see Kissling 2006). Nonetheless, ‘representative democracy’ remains one of its main activities, in addition to human rights, sustainable development and promoting women in politics (http://archive.ipu.org/iss-e/issues.htm).
The Hague Peace Conferences (1899 and 1907) were hybrid assemblies of diplomats, scholars and parliamentarians, but used parliamentary rules of proceeding as the model for debates in their meetings. The Assembly of the League of Nations and in particular the General Assembly of the United Nations can also be considered quasi-parliamentary institutions in their procedures of deliberating; and many countries have elected parliamentarians to serve as members of their UN delegations, although the government and not the parliamentary delegation decides on the country’s vote. Proposals for establishing a parliamentary assembly for the UN been made, but they have still not been realised (see Leinen and Bummel 2017).
2.1 Post-war pro-European projects
The Europe-wide cooperation of the immediate post-war years had its origins in different voluntary Europe-related organisations, which were inspired by ideas from the period of war-time exile (see the documentation Historical Archives of the European Union, and Documents on the History of European Integration, eds Walter Lipgens and Wilfried Loth, vols III and IV, 1988, 1991 and Loth’s introduction to both volumes). These projects could be roughly divided as follows: the federalists à la Altiero Spinelli, who founded the ‘Union des Fédéralistes Européens’ and the intergovernmental unionists around Winston Churchill and Duncan Sandys with their ‘United Europe Movement’ as well as Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s ‘Union Parlementaire Européenne’ (see Schlochauer 1953/55; Wiesner 2018; for British debates Haapala 2022).
Wilfried Loth mentions four ‘basic impulses’ for the European integration: ‘a desire for a new system of security in a world in which national states could no longer provide effective protection against foreign aggression’; ‘the quest for a solution of the “German question” that would provide greater stability than the discredited system of Versailles’; ‘attempts to create larger economic areas’ and the fact that ‘Europeans desired to assert their identity vis-à-vis the new world powers’ (1991, 1). The main point is that there existed genuine attempts to create political institutions transcending the nation-state. Worth noticing here is the absence of a teleological vision for Europe.
The European projects took place in the context of such events as the formation of the Soviet Bloc, including the Berlin Blockade of 1948–1949 and the forming of the West and East German states, the US policy of the Marshall Plan aid to West European countries, including at first the 1947 Brussels Pact between Britain, France and the Benelux States, and the slow breakup of both the British Commonwealth and the French Union. All this is visible in the debates on a supranational and parliamentary Europe.
The debate on European cooperation in the post-war years and the activities of the European movement were held on a general level. If the documents edited by Lipgens and Lüth offer a representative picture of the movement, it is obvious that parliaments did not play any explicit role in the plans before the Hague Congress of 1948. Even the federalists did not necessarily support parliamentary government (on the different views among British federalists, see Haapala 2022). The supranational and parliamentary stands discussed in this chapter remained minoritarian, and the situation changed only with the Schuman Declaration of 1950.
Why was so little attention dedicated to parliaments? It might have been the case that a parliament was a self-evident part of planning a federation or a confederal union. For example, in the debates on the West German Grundgesetz in the Parlamentarischer Rat in 1948/49, no real disputes arose on the acceptance of a parliamentary government (see Otto 1971, Feldkamp 2008).
Equally plausible could be that the activists of movement politics were suspicious of parliaments, due to the experiences of parliamentary failures in the inter-war years or the felt need for urgent government action. Public opinion in the early Federal Republic was suspicious of parliamentary government (see Ullrich 2009). Direct participation of citizens, US-style presidential models (as attempted in the Bavarian constitution), and the plebiscitarian practices of Switzerland were present among movement activists and different party groups (see Charles de Gaulle’s ‘Europe per Referendum’, in Documents vol. 3, 110– 113).
For many in the European movement, political procedures and institutions were regarded as secondary compared to economic interests and cultural values. Only with the Hague Congress for Europe arose the disputes between a parliamentary versus a governmental basis for European institutions as well as between the federalist versus unionist political regimes. For the period after the Hague, the Documents of Lipgens and Loth make visible the struggles on the status and the form of parliamentary representation in the European integration.
In this chapter I shall discuss the Hague debates from the viewpoint of the supranational and parliamentary politicisation of Europe. I shall also analyse some less known documents, which, although having no immediate political significance, did contain ideas later discussed in the Ad Hoc Assembly.
2.2 The Hague Congress
The inter-European meeting of parliamentarians and activists was the Congress for Europe in the Hague in May 1948 (see https://archives.eui.eu/en/fonds/158711?item=ME.45.01=). The aim was to bring together federalists and unionists as well as of government representatives. The proceedings followed parliamentary practices.
Different pro-European organisations made remarkable preparations and a huge number of participants came from Western Europe – even a couple of Finnish representatives were present, also emigrants such as Salvador Madriaga from Spain as well as some participants from the Soviet-bloc countries. European unification was on the agenda across the continent. The organising committee consisted of the following organisations: ‘Conseil Français pour l’Europe’, ‘Une Ligne Indépendante de Coopération Européenne’, ‘Nouvelles Equipes Internationales’, ‘Union Européenne des Fédéralistes’, ‘Union Parlementaire Européenne’, and ‘United Europe Movement’ (Document divers, ME–1264.pdf), thus including both federalists and unionists.
In parliamentary committee style, the organisers prepared a ‘Political Report’ that justified the plans for a new Union. It was a first draft for a constitutional document and was followed by a ‘Political Resolution’ as a motion to be debated and voted upon in the plenary session of the Congress in a protoparliamentary manner. I have disregarded the other documents submitted to the Congress.
***
Would you like to continue reading?
Order “At the Origins of Parliamentary Europe” in our shop or download as e-book
At the Origins of Parliamentary Europe.
Supranational parliamentary government in debates of the Ad Hoc Assembly for the European Political Community in 1952–1953
by Kari Palonen
About “At the Origins of Parliamentary Europe”
In 1952, politicians from Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed an Ad Hoc Assembly with the aim of drafting a constitution for a future European Political Community. Rediscovering this previously neglected origin of parliamentary Europe, Kari Palonen investigates the significance of the Ad Hoc Assembly for the politicization of European integration. He delves into how the debates of the assembly functioned as a project of European integration after the Second World War, interpreting it as a moment in the political theory and conceptual history of parliamentarism that opens new perspectives on the later stages of the parliamentarization of the EU.
