The Eu's Legitimacy Crisis and the Multilevel Parliamentary System. How a Europeanisation of National Parliaments Can Contribute to a Solution

The EU’s legitimacy crisis and the multilevel parliamentary system. How a Europeanisation of national parliaments can contribute to a solution. 

The EU faces multiple political crises at the same time (migration, Eurozone, Brexit, …). On top of these, substantial pockets of the general public seem to turn their back on the EU by voting for openly anti-EU parties. A common theme in the critique is that the EU is unable to address the concerns of those who feel to be at the losing side of economic globalization. In this paper we link the observation that EU policy output is contested to the fact that the multilevel context of the EU is dominated by executive actors. The paper explores the idea of a Europeanisation of national parliaments to bring the EU more in line with what Schattschneider has called a substantive democracy. By giving the European public the chance to opt for policy (and candidate) alternatives at the European level, at least the possibility is created for a change into the direction of more redistribution, which may reconcile the unhappy groups with EU. The paper discusses alternative forms of bicameral representation that combine a realistic position (the national level as corner stone of European integration) with a desirable outcome (the survival of the European level which is a necessary condition to create the welfare to redistribute). It concludes that a Europeanisation of national parliaments that brings national representatives together in a new EU level chamber may be a valuable solution.