On 9 January 2007, the National Assembly resumed deliberations following the winter break. Its Speaker, the Gaullist Jean-Louis Debré, opened the question time with this pronouncement:
My dear colleagues, by now you have certainly not failed to notice the presence of the national flag in the Chamber. In response to a wish unanimously expressed by the National Assembly, I insisted upon putting an end to an anomaly that, astonishingly, had persisted under each Republic: the absence of a Republican national symbol in the Chamber. Today, thanks to you, this symbol has been restored.1
The MPs applauded. During the next dayâs session, as on every first Wednesday of the month, the first four questions were dedicated to European topics. The Minister for European Affairs, Catherine Colonna, concluded her response to a question by alluding to the previous dayâs decision: âAllow me to express my wish, since itâs the season for it, that the day will come when the European flag is present beside the French flag in this Chamber. After all, we have been part of Europe for the past fifty yearsâ.2 Speaker DebrĂ© interrupted: âThat decision would fall under the National Assemblyâs responsibilityâ. A few minutes later, another incident occurred:
- Jean Dionis du SĂ©jour:
- In the name of the UDF party, I wish to support Ms. Colonnaâs proposition to place the European flag next to the tricolour flag. (Applause from several benches of the Union for French Democracy party.)
- Speaker:
- Mr. Dionis du SĂ©jour, the absence of the European flag has no symbolic significance. The Bureau of the National Assembly considers this Chamber to be emblematic of national debate and the development of national law.
- Jean Lassalle:
- Hear, hear!
- Jacques Desallangre and M. Maxime Gremetz:
- Quite right!
- Speaker:
- That is the reason why the Bureau chose to place only the French flag here. (Applause from several benches of the Union for a Popular Movement, the Union for French Democracy, the Socialist group and the Communist and Republican group.)3
This seemingly insignificant anecdote is revealing in several ways. First, it bears witness to the Assemblyâs fierce desire for independence from the executive branch. This impulse is far from new; it constituted the main driver for the institutionalisation of Parliament in France (Gardey 2015). This impulse may even explain the long absence of the tricolour flag in the Chamber: the avoidance of Republican symbolism evinces the Palais-Bourbonâs penchant for insularity ad absurdum.4 Second, the anecdote illustrates the destabilising effects of the European issue on divisions between political parties. Speaker DebrĂ©âs blunt refusal to fly the European flag recalls his opposition to the Maastricht Treaty. Fifteen years on, the neo-Gaullists remained split, with the Chirac-appointed Minister (Colonna) supporting putting the flag in place. More generally, these divisions hold true for most of the right wing, as between the two centre-right MPs, Dionis du SĂ©jour and Jean Lassalle, in the above exchange. Finally, the anecdote reveals forms of emerging cross-party support: the cries of âHear, hear!â from MPs sitting in the extreme left of the Chamber, as well as the applause from members of all political groups. More than a year later, a different Speaker, Bernard Accoyer, made a proposal to the Bureau of the Assembly to place the European flag in the Chamber during the French presidency of the European Union in the second half of 2008.5 This was accomplished, and the flag has not since been removed.
However, the controversy around the flag has remained. One decade later, in June 2017, the colourful extreme-leftist MP Jean-Luc MĂ©lenchon was elected to the Assembly. As he was visiting the hemicycle the day after his election, surrounded by journalists, he exclaimed pointing at the flag: âHey, honestly, do we have to stand for that? Itâs the French Republic here, not the Virgin Maryââan allusion to the stars surrounding Mary in the Christian iconography that by the creatorâs own admission inspired the flag. A new Speaker, François de Rugy, was elected the following day. At the end of his thank-you speech, he said:
In this so particular moment for a political life, I am also thinking of my family, of the values my parents and grandparents transmitted to me. Victims of World War Two, they passed on to me a deep European commitment that makes me proud to sit before you, in front of this European flag. Speaker Accoyer had the wise idea to place this symbol of lasting peace in our hemicycle: this is its place, next to our national colours.6
He was warmly applauded. But MĂ©lenchon did not relent. In October 2017, his group officially proposed withdrawing the flag. His motion, supported by the extreme right, was defeated, but it enabled him to develop a strategy for capturing extreme-right voters by focusing on issues of sovereignty. President Macron, who has shown himself willing to frame the debate on Europe, said in reaction that France, like some other Member States, officially recognised the symbols of the European Union (EU). A National Assembly resolution proposed by his party affirmed this decision.
The controversial rejection of the blue twelve-starred flag in the Chamber of the Palais-Bourbon, its almost surreptitious installation, and finally the repetition of the controversies years later reveal the Parliamentâs troubles in adapting to Franceâs participation in European integration. I have chosen to speak of âthe bluesâ in the sub-title of this book chiefly to underscore the normative importance of the democratic stakes implicated in the subject. Within each Member State concerned, European construction raises the question of legislative authority. The European states decided, de facto, to federalise certain competencesâcustoms, currency, internal market rules, and international trade. The EU also acts in a great number of other domains. Even where the Union does not intervene or does so in a limited manner, it still exerts an influence through the effects of its decisions, for example through the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice or the monitoring of public financing. Indeed, within the framework of the Economic and Monetary Union, the EUâs institutions seek to set limits on national budget deficits. The integration of Europe is predicated on certain specific legal instruments that are derived from treaties and binding on national legislation. Suggested at times by heads of state or of governments on the European Council, systematically proposed by the European Commission, adopted by ministers on the Council of the EU and, often, by the European Parliament, European regulations and directives are imposedâdirectly in the case of the former, and through transposition for the latterâon national law. The European prerogative is universally binding: on ministries, businesses, citizens and, of course, on national parliaments. The EU thus calls into question the authority of national parliaments not only to participate in the European legislative process but also to legislate freely on the national level.
Aside from legislation, parliaments also have a role in the oversight of executive power, a function which may become difficult to exercise in European matters as much for technical reasons (complexity of the projects, access to information, etc.) as for lack of diplomatic opportunities. The parliamentariansâ state of gloom (which does not preclude brief flights of optimism) therefore stems from their observation of European political systemsâ problems in overcoming the tensions arising from the mechanisms of representative democracy on a national basisâa legacy of the nineteenth centuryâand the integration of a continent, ongoing since the second half of the twentieth century. The portrait of an institution with a âcase of the bluesâ will be frequently reinforced and only rarely contradicted in the pages that follow.
However, following the example of other European assemblies, the French Parliament has not been idle in the face of these existential challenges. It has successfully worked to obtain new rights, created structures and procedures for European issues, and dedicated substantial resources to these new tools. Yet the Assembly and the Senate remain marginal players on the European stage in both the creation and debate of European public policies. This book seeks not only to illuminate the reasons for this ineffectuality but also to elucidate the multiple, diffuse, and unequal forms of French parliamentariansâ acculturation to Europe, beyond any specialised procedure. It aims, in effect, to grasp how Franceâs participation in the EU has progressively changed what it means to be a parliamentarian and how to behave and even to think as a representative. In this respect, I assert that even if French Parliamentarians do not change Europe, the inverse is not true. Few aspects of parliamentariansâ vocation have been immune to the process of continental integration, whether relationships with voters, with the law, with ministers or with themselves.
More precisely, this book considers the Europeanisation of the French Parliament over the quarter of a century beginning in 1992. Most of the case studies were conducted during the three terms from 1997 to 2012.7 By Europeanisation, I mean changes instigated in Parliament by Franceâs participation in the EU as well as parliamentary activities applying to European subjects per se: ratification of treaties, transposition of EU norms, scrutiny of EU drafts, debates and questions in sittings, etc. Finally, in addition to legislative and oversight practices, I consider those which concern each parliamentarian directly: grant-writing, communication of voter grievances, lobbying in Brussels, and realisation of political strategies, to name some examples.
The book will focus on the National Assembly but will also occasionally consider the Senate. It will first consider the specific control and participation procedures in European affairs, concluding with an assessment of their relative superficiality. However, the observation of a certain surface-level Europeanisation is not the end of this analysis but rather its starting point. A more general reflection on parliamentary behaviour in its state of subordination to the executive branch has led me to...