How Europeanisation Affects Integration: Explaining why Collective National Parliamentary Participation Cannot Ensure the Democratic Control of the EU’s Centre in the Future

The increasing participation of national parliaments in EU decision-making is in vogue both in academic and political discourse in order to complement the still uncomplete democratic control through the European Parliament (Rittberger). The Lisbon Treaty’s Early Warning Mechanism has even been interpreted as a ‘Virtual Third Chamber’ (Cooper). One of the main – albeit implicit – assumptions of those supporting this idea is that with time MPs’ understanding about parliamentary participation will increasingly converge - enabling them to exercise collectively parliamentary control of the EU’s decision-making centre. Using a theory-guided comparative and diachronic micro-sociological approach, the paper shows that for MPs in the Assemblée nationale and the Bundestag the opposite is true. The increasing Europeanisation of the two chambers since the first direct election of the European Parliament in 1979 led paradoxically to strong national cleavages in MPs’ practices and ‘polity-ideas’ (Jachtenfuchs et al. 1999). In contrast to this, before the full implementation of the treaty of Maastricht norms were shared transnationally along groups of MPs holding the same ’ideology’ about European integration. This result provides evidence for assumptions drawn from a theoretical model for Europeanisation understood as institutionalisation of EU practices based on Bourdieudian practice theory and Max Weber’s ‘old’ institutionalism. With the increasing institutionalisation of EU practices (mainly through adaptation to dominant national parliamentary practices), the (democratic) values and norms embedded in the national institutions get increasingly important for actor’s ‘word and deed’ (Schatzki). Before, EU politics served as a battlefield for (integration) ‘ideologies’ and interests of MPs. The results explain the difficulties experienced by long-existing inter-parliamentary institutions and show that only a ‘new’ parliamentary institution such as the European Parliament developing its own sui generis practices can in the long run ensure an efficient parliamentary control based on increasingly shared norms (Habermas).