In this event, Karolina Boronska-Hryniewiecka and Lucy Kinski will discuss the findings of their recently published collected volume entitled Parliamentary dimension of the Conference on the Future of Europe: Synergies and legitimacy clashes.
While for many observers of EU political life, the Conference in the Future of Europe (CoFoE) might appear as a relatively irrelevant political process that has not meaningfully impacted European integration, for democracy scholars there is at least one important implication of this unprecedented socio-political experiment for the functioning of EU democracy: By bringing together a transnational group of citizens and their parliamentary representatives (Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and members of national parliaments (MPs) in one plenary room to discuss the outcomes of citizens’ deliberations, CoFoE was the first ever attempt to establish an interface between the participatory and representative dimensions of EU multi-level democracy. The importance of reconciling these two dimensions is acknowledged in both theoretical and empirical research on democratic innovations and EU politics alike. Yet, the emerging literature on the CoFoE has been still lacking an analysis of the multi-level parliamentary perspective of this process, including parliamentary representatives’ attitudes and preferences towards it, along with an evaluation of its broader significance for EU democracy.
The presented book contributes to filling this gap by comparatively analysing the extent to which parliamentary actors engaged (or not) in the CoFoE, acting as transmission belts or intermediaries between citizens and EU politics. One of the crucial puzzles of the book is also the extent to which the Conference became a testing ground for inter-parliamentary cooperation, both in horizontal terms (among national parliaments) and in vertical terms (between national chambers and the EP). The synergies and legitimacy clashes identified by the authors might have crucial implications for the future of EU democracy, the discussions about possible scenarios of EU reforms and their feasibility in the context of the prospective EU enlargement. Regardless of when the decisions on the potential enlargement-related reforms will materialize, it will be for national parliaments and their governing majorities, to ratify potential treaty changes.
The book is available in open access here.
Karolina Boronska-Hryniewiecka is Associate Professor at the Institute of Political Science and at the Jean Monnet Chair of the University of Wroclaw. She is also associate research fellow at the Centre européen de sociologie et science politique (CESSP) of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her research lies at the intersection of comparative European politics, legitimacy and parliamentary studies. She is currently a principal investigator in the project Two sides of the same coin. Unravelling the potential of inter-parliamentary cooperation in the EU (InPaCo) financed by the Polish National Science Centre. In the past, she was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, lecturer at Masaryk University and a head of EU programme at the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM). Her works have appeared in European Political Science Review, Journal of European Integration, Politics and Governance, Parliamentary Affairs and The Journal of Legislative Studies among others.
Lucy Kinski (Dr.) is Postdoc in European Union Politics at the Salzburg Centre of European Union Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of Salzburg, Austria. Her research focuses on parliamentary representation in the EU multi-level system and combines EU studies with comparative politics. She is the principal investigator of the ERC Starting Grant Project Intangible and Invisible Interests, Concealed Constituents and Excluded Electorates: Understanding the Politics of Absence (INCONEX). She has published in journals such as Environmental Politics, Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of European Integration, Political Studies, Politics and Governance, and The Journal of Legislative Studies. Her monograph European Representation in EU National Parliaments (Palgrave 2021) was shortlisted for the UACES best book prize 2021.