Legislative and Popular Oversight: The Democratic Control of the Eu's Common Foreign and Security Policy

Legislative and popular oversight are important channels for the democratic control of foreign security policy. Foreign security policy is traditionally executive-driven and often asks for rapid decision-making that is difficult to control ex-ante. Therefore, oversight is an essential mechanism for holding the executive to account in this domain. The EU’s Common foreign and security policy (CFSP) represents no exception to this rule. Research acknowledges this, and many studies deal with the democratic oversight of the CFSP. This literature, however, mainly considers the European Parliament and has little attention for its national counterparts. Also, it largely ignores oversight by societal actors and how this could provide input to the legislative oversight of the CFSP. This study aims to remedy these gaps by proposing an integrated evaluation of the CFSP’s democratic oversight. The proposed paper systematically assesses the different tools of legislative oversight that apply to the CFSP and evaluates their actual use. Thereby, it looks at both the European Parliament and some national parliaments, while also considering possible inter-parliamentary cooperation. In that way, the paper acknowledges the policy’s multilevel character. Concerning the second strand of popular oversight, the paper addresses the possibilities that exist in this regard, as well as the extent to which societal actors such as NGO’s or journalists make use of this potential. In addition, it discusses the connexion between popular and legislative oversight. Thus, this study provides a comprehensive approach of, and novel insights into, the democratic oversight of the Common foreign and security policy.