The EuroNest Parliamentary Assembly: The European Parliament as a Socializer of its Counterparts in the EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood? EU Diplomacy Paper 05/2013

This paper examines the EU-Neighbourhood East Parliamentary Assembly (EuroNest PA), an inter-parliamentary forum consisting of representatives from the European Parliament (EP) and from all Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries except Belarus, aiming at political and economic association between the EU and the EaP. More specifically, it analyzes the extent to which the EP tries and manages to socialize the national parliaments of the EaP countries. After introducing the theoretical framework, the paper outlines the structure and working methods of the EuroNest PA, clarifies the absence of Belarus in the framework, and examines the results of the first three plenary sessions. The paper concludes that, although the establishment of the EuroNest PA as such provides a framework to advance the EP’s goals of transmitting its norms and values to the EU’s Eastern neighbouring countries, in practice socialization has taken place only to a limited extent thus far.

The Convention on the Future of Europe: Extended Working Group or Constitutional Assembly? Research Papers in Law, 4/2005

From the Introduction. “We are a Convention. We are not an Intergovernmental Conference because we have not been given a mandate by Governments to negotiate on their behalf the solutions which we propose. We are not a Parliament because we are not elected by citizens to draft legislative texts. […] We are a Convention. What does this mean? A Convention is a group of men and women meeting for the sole purpose of preparing a joint proposal. […] It is a task modest in form but immense in content, for if it succeeds in accordance with our mandate, it will light up the future of Europe”.1 In his speech inaugurating the Convention process on 26 February 2002 in Brussels, Convention President VALÉRY GISCARD D’ESTAING raises three issues: first, he refers to the Convention’s nature and method; second, he talks of the Convention’s aim and output; and, third, he evokes the Convention’s historic and symbolic significance. All three aspects have been amply discussed in the past two years by politicians and academics analysing whether the Convention’s purpose and instruments differ fundamentally from those of previous reform rounds; whether the input into and output of the Convention process qualitatively improves European Treaty revision; and whether the Convention as an institution lived up to its symbolic and normative load, reflected in comparisons with “Philadelphia” or references to a “constitutional moment”.2