Ten Years of EU Membership – The Maltese Parliament. Occasional Paper 1/2014

Introduction. The European Union has long seen the use of enlargement as a means to transform its neighbours. For many of the 2004 enlargement countries, membership was a means to open economically and politically. For Malta and Cyprus, established democracies with extensive trade links across Europe, EU membership still had the capacity to transform their political and economic systems and hence the need, a decade on, to take stock. With this in mind and conscious that the EU political system has often raised concerns over legitimacy and accountability, attention is increasingly being focused on how the complexities of the EU political system, and the role national governments play in that system, impacts the legitimacy and accountability of the domestic political system, in particular the functioning of the national parliament. To this end, this paper will analyse how the Maltese Parliament has been impacted by membership and seek to establish whether there has been a significant alteration in its ability to hold the national executive to account.