Towards an Asymmetric European Union, Without an Asymmetric European Parliament

Abstract

In the last few years, the European integration process has increasingly resorted to flexible mechanisms of co-operation and decision-making, involving only a limited number of European Union (EU) Member States. The economic and financial crisis itself - and above all the response of the EU to the crisis - has undoubtedly favoured the trend.These ongoing asymmetric mechanisms deeply challenge the supranational architecture upon which the EU experience is based, determining a major change in the formal role and powers of both the European and national institutions. In particular, the European Parliament is incapable of adapting its internal functioning to the asymmetric schemes. In order to contrast these trends, some hypotheses of reform have been formulated, aiming either at building a new institution, a sort of Euro-Parliament; or at adapting the internal organisation of the EP to ongoing asymmetric tendencies limiting the voting rights of MEPs.The essay challenges both these hypothesis, assuming that responding to the increasing asymmetries of the EU by making the existing institutions, above all the European Parliament, more asymmetric, would consistently endanger the cohesion of the Union and threaten the good functioning of its governing bodies. Rather, the approach should be based upon a re-consideration of the overall representative circuit upon which the EU is founded. This implies that an even more asymmetric EU will have to rely on its traditional channels of parliamentary representation: what will need to change is not related to the nature or the format of parliamentary representation, but rather to its operative patterns, which should count on strengthened cooperation among parliaments to accommodate asymmetric tendencies in the EU governance with flexible forms of interaction in the scrutiny of such procedures.