EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT.

At the founding of the European Communities (1951 and 1957), the European Parliament was essentially a consultative institution. It was established to serve four functions: as a symbol of reconciliation between the member states; to establish a balance between the institutions (as the house of the peoples, it was designed as a counterweight to the Council, the body that represented the governments); to mirror the other international organizations created in that period (including the United Nations, the Western European Union [WEU], the Council of Europe, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO]), all of which had parliamentary assemblies; and to legitimize the European Community by exercising some control over the activities of its executive.

Since the 1950s, many changes have been made to the treaties. The European Parliament has emerged as a powerful institution in the context of international pressure to parliamentarize the European Community's institutional system. The assembly has gradually taken on all the typical characteristics of a national parliament: financial independence, an internal physical and administrative organization, an election process, and immunities and privileges for its members. The European Parliament has thus become a powerful force in the EU's political system, exercising multiple functions.

First and foremost, the European Parliament can adopt declaratory resolutions on all the matters that fall under the EU's jurisdiction, which makes it the principal forum for political debate at the supranational level. Second, it controls the activities of the European Commission and, to a lesser degree, of the Council. Third, it plays a central role in the appointments procedure for the Commission and other Community institutions. Fourth, it exercises major budgetary powers, both in allocating funds and in controlling the implementation of the budget. Fifth and most conspicuously, it exercises legislative powers; although at the outset the Parliament had only a consultative role, which deprived it of any influence, in the early twenty-first century it participates with the Council in adopting most legislative texts, and its status is equal to the Council's.

Initially, the European Parliament was composed of delegates from the national parliaments. The Treaty of Rome (1957) nevertheless provided for the possibility of its members being elected by universal direct vote. This was done for the first time in 1979 and has been done ever since at five-year intervals. These elections, which take place within the member states, have not generated the excitement among citizens anticipated by federalists. This can be explained by the lack of scrutability of the European Parliament's functions, weak media coverage of its activities, and the tendency of national parties to downplay the event. In 2004, when the European Union membership rose to twenty-five states, the assembly was made up of 732 deputies divided among the states roughly according to population. At one extreme, Malta had five deputies; at the other, Germany had nine-nine.

The European Parliament has always sat in political groupings, although this is not required under the Treaty of Rome. After 2004 elections, it contained seven groups, which corresponded to the main party groupings within the member states. Until the end of the 1990s, the Parliament was dominated by a split between supporters and opponents of the quest for European integration, which led the two main groups—the Christian Democrats and the Socialists—to make common cause regularly. Because of the criticisms generated by this convergence, as well as because of European policies that have led to ideological conflicts, a traditional split between left and right has become increasingly apparent. However, the assembly's functioning remains highly complex. The determining factor in the dominant split varies according to the decision-making procedures and the subject of the texts. When the Parliament is taking decision at simple majority, mainly to adopt declarative resolutions, a split between left and right is very common. But when it is voting on legislative texts, it must reach the majority of its members, and not only voters; this is a strong incentive for the two main groups to find a compromise. National conflicts remain fairly muted, however, and the statistical cohesion of the political groupings remains strong. By contrast, relations between the European Parliament and the Commission are not governed by party affiliation, because the Commission does not resemble a government and the two institutions continue to operate independently.

In addition to the increase in its powers, the assembly's history is also characterized by a progressive rationalization of its functioning. As a supranational assembly, the European Parliament is confronted with manifold and growing pressures: a broad cultural and political heterogeneity; the use of many languages (twenty in 2004); a dispersal across three working sites (Strasbourg, Brussels, and Luxembourg); a large number of members; an overcrowded agenda; the frequent obligation to vote placed on the majority of its members rather than voters; delays in legislative and budgetary matters; a strict application of the "personal and individual" nature of the deputies' voting rights (i.e., only members who are in the room at the voting time can vote; they cannot delegate their voting right); and the constant need to protect the interests of the institution against those of the Council and the Commission. In confronting all these pressures, the deputies enjoy certain powers: the total independence of their institution, which cannot be dissolved; complete freedom as to how they organize their deliberations and define their agenda; substantial autonomy with regard to national parties; and a progressive institutional framework that is conducive to the extension of the assembly's powers.

In order to overcome the pressures on their deliberation, the deputies have regularly adapted the assembly's regulations in order to rationalize its functioning. Since the early 1990s, the assembly has been characterized by a meticulous organization of all the plenary assembly's activities and institutions and the precise timing of plenary sessions. This process has reinforced the assembly's hierarchical institutions through increasing delegation of legislative work and control to parliamentary committees. It has also conferred a leading role on the political groupings and their officials, to the detriment of individual initiative on the part of the deputies. The European Parliament's internal organization is therefore the object of frequent and contentious debate, both between those who subscribe to differing views of the parliamentary work (mainly a "Latin" tradition of political debate vs. a "Nordic" tradition of policy making) and between members of the small as opposed to the two large political groupings.

The European deputies have always played an important, albeit indirect, role in deepening European integration. Pro-European members, who want to promote a more federalized Europe, have always held a large majority. This objective has associated the objective of European integration with that of reducing the "democratic deficit" (a concept invoked in the argument that the European Union and its various bodies suffer from a lack of democracy and seem inaccessible to the ordinary citizen because their method of operating is too complex), which is generally understood to necessitate an increase in the European Parliament's powers.

See alsoCouncil of Europe; European Union; Rome, Treaty of.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Corbett, Richard, Francis Jacobs, and Michael Shackleton. The European Parliament. 5th ed. London, 2003.

Costa, Olivier. Le Parlement européen, assemblée délibérante. Brussels, 2001.

Kreppel, Amie. The European Parliament and the Supranational Party System: A Study in Institutional Development. Cambridge, U.K., 2002.

Magnette, Paul. "Appointing and Censuring the Commission: The Adaptation of Parliamentary Institutions to the Community Context." European Law Journal 7, no. 3 (2001): 289–307.

Olivier Costa