The European Parliament and Development Policy: Democratic Legitimacy of the ‘Low Politics’ of EU External Relations

The European Union and its Member States spend billions of euros on development policy, as a means of furthering the Treaty commitment to seek to eliminate poverty and promote democracy, the rule of law and human rights in the world’s least developed countries. The European Parliament (EP) enjoys an array of powers in this policy field, ranging from legislative and budgetary powers to scrutiny and democratic oversight. However, the role of the EP in development policy has largely been overlooked. Partly this stems from the ‘low politics’ nature of development, when set against the ‘high politics’ of EU external relations as typified by the CFSP/CSDP and trade. Development, and the EP in particular, has generally been absent from the key debates in the EU foreign policy literature on the institutional questions of who ‘speaks’ for the EU and in the literature on the democratic representation aspects of the EP’s veto-wielding role in trade negotiations (e.g. TTIP and CETA). Rather, in development policy the EP can be characterised as having worked largely in the shadows. This paper uses a legal analysis of the EP’s post-Lisbon powers in EU development policy, complemented by the new European Consensus on Development of June 2017, to assess how the EP has succeeded in gaining an ever more significant role in this policy field. The paper further discusses the internal institutional means and interinstitutional interactions through which the EP shapes the democratic legitimacy of EU development policy. On this basis, the paper argues that the ‘low politics’ of EU development policy is highly susceptible to the EP’s institutional assertion and empowerment in overall EU external relations.