‘Domesticising’ and Differentiating Europe: Parliamentary EU Experts in the Assemblée nationale and Bundestag from 1979 to 2013

This article contributes to the question about how certain EU entrepreneurs have changed national parliamentary participation and discursive practices about the EU since the first direct election of the European Parliament. Using a micro-sociological approach, the paper shows how both in Assemblée nationale and in the Bundestag small groups of EU experts have changed EU practices and formal frameworks from the middle of the 1990ies onwards – incorporating EU affairs into national parliamentary practices. As a somewhat paradoxical consequence, EU practices and discourse on the future of parliamentary democracy in the EU have been increasingly nationally cleaved between both parliaments. The appearance of MPs holding EU knowledge and long-term experience in national parliamentary institutions after the ratification of the treaty of Maastricht changed profoundly parliamentary EU practices. Before, the type of parliamentary control exercised by the MPs in the committees for European affairs had depended strongly on the ideological orientation of the committee’s chairmen. Practices were often more similar within certain transnational groups of MPs, but mostly disconnected from the rest of the legislative work of the domestic chamber. EU practice is analysed through ‘thick description’ (Clifford Geertz 1973) based on interview evidence with current and historic parliamentary actors, secondary analysis of historical interview evidence, and the study of documents and secondary literature. The paper complements these findings through a qualitative-quantitative analysis of parliamentary debates on treaty of Maastricht and treaty of Lisbon with the help of the software MAXQDA. The paper interprets the observations with the help of Max Weber’s institution theory (Weber 1973) and assumptions drawn from Bourdieudian approaches as used by practice theorists in EU studies. The empirical evidence helps to understand the differentiation processes in the European Union as a ‘feedback’ of the incorporation of ‘doing EU' into domestic practices.