Acceso usuarios
Kari Palonen, Claudia Wiesner
The development of the European Union (EU) regime, with the frequent changes of institutions and their competencies by treaty revisions, allows for new opportunities for parliamentary studies. This article discusses the role and competencies of the European Council (EC) in the EU regime, using the heuristic and methodological resources of procedural commentaries, parliamentary rhetoric, conceptual history and political regime analysis. This study is a textual analysis, based on the 2009 Lisbon Treaty and especially on the EC's rules of procedure. The Lisbon Treaty and the respective rules of procedure serve as key documents that fix the rules, the framework and the margin of manoeuvre for the EU's institutions. This is particularly relevant in the European Union as a ‘polity in the making’, as continuous changes in institutional competencies are the rule. These changes both leave room for and are shaped by acting politically between and within the institutions. Taking Quentin Skinner's thesis that ‘political life itself sets the problems for the political theorist’ as a point of departure, it is suggested that these ongoing challenges in power relationships between the EU institutions also lead to interesting theoretical and conceptual moves. From this perspective the authors discuss possibilities to extend the conceptual apparatus of parliamentary studies to such quasi-parliamentary institutions focusing especially on the EC.
