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Democratic Implications of the Treaty of Lisbon
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parliaments should, according to the logic of parliamentary
democracy, have the power to determine whether an issue stays at
home or goes to Brussels independent of what other parliaments
decide. Former German President Roman Herzog complained that,
with 84% of the legal acts adopted by the Federal Republic of
Germany stemming from Brussels, it is questionable whether
Germany can still be called a parliamentary democracy (Mahony,
2007). By demanding solidarity among one-third or even a half of
member state parliaments in order to raise an objection to a
Commission proposal
—
and only with consultative effect, the
Treaty of Lisbon early warning system is likely to be only rarely
used. With the Commission being able to ignore up to 55% of
member states, a motion by an individual national parliaments to
object to a Commission proposal is likely a waste of time.
(B) Empirical Assessment
The number of reasoned opinions from national parliaments
to the Commission has continued to increase since the Treaty of
Lisbon came into force. In 2010, the Commission received 34
reasoned opinions raising subsidiarity concerns. In 2013, 88 such
reasoned opinions were received (Table 1). Considering that there
are 28 Member States with 41 legislative chambers, and 472 draft
legislative acts have been forwarded to national parliaments by the
Commission the Treaty of Lisbon came into force, the number of
reasoned opinions appears to be remarkably low.
There is a large degree of variation in the extent to which
national parliaments actively exercise their power to scrutinize the
extent to which Commission’s legislative proposals are in
accordance with the subsidiarity principle. The national
parliaments which have issued the highest number of reasoned
opinions are the Swedish
Riksdag,
followed by the Netherlands,
and the UK (Table 2). The fact that only a handful of chambers are
particularly active in exercising this power confirms the worry that,
arithmetically, it is difficult to reach the threshold for issuing a
yellow card (Cooper, 2013: 2).