Opening Pandora’s Box: Binging in the National Parliaments into the European Semester By Stealth

Since its launch the European Semester has gone through several annual iterations which have incrementally led to its procedures, actors and guiding principles having been largely established and to a large extent hardened through the twin-effects of institutionalisation and ever heavier path-dependencies. If the efficiency – i.e. policy impact or opportunity - of the Semester’s remain widely debated its institutional set-up seems increasingly accepted and understood, be it either at the European or Member State levels or in political or bureaucratic circles. With regards to the legitimacy of the European Semester’s overall implementation, parliamentary involvement remains the single point of continued contention. As such, debates surrounding the possible involvement of parliament(s) have ranged from the homeopathic proposal to amend the Semester’s calendar to allow for more debates with the EP to the radical call for the creation of a new parliament of the Eurozone by way of the intermediary calls for more decentralisation through the involvement of national parliaments. This paper will focus on the implication of this third avenue, assessing the implications of such a new form of parliamentary at the European level where national legislatures become directly involved in the European regulatory process. To answer this question, the paper will offer a two-pronged analysis incl. on the one hand an assessment of how this latest evolution ties into the longer ‘democratic deficit debates’; and on the other the lessons drawn from another policy-filed having experienced a recent increase in the involvement of national parliaments: the Common Commercial Policy