Abstract
The recurrent reluctance towards placing a European flag within the National Assembly’s hemicycle provides a striking illustration of the difficult adaptation of the French Parliament to the European Union. This book supports the view that the new prerogatives and procedures obtained by both assemblies in order to scrutinize EU issues are not sufficient. Yet, France’s membership to the EU has contributed to transforming many aspects of parliamentary activities.
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Notes
- 1.
Journal officiel de la République française (JORF), Assemblée nationale (AN), Compte rendu (CR), second session of Tuesday 9 January 2007, p. 31.
- 2.
JORF, AN, CR, first session of 10 January 2007, p. 108.
- 3.
Ibid., p. 109.
- 4.
The Palais-Bourbon is the name of the National Assembly main building, the name for the Senate being le Palais du Luxembourg.
- 5.
Minutes of the Bureau meeting of 25 June 2008.
- 6.
JORF, AN, CR, 124th session of 27 June 2017, p. 91188.
- 7.
From 1997 to 2002, France experienced its third episode of divided government with a right-wing President, Jacques Chirac, and a leftist majority in the National Assembly resulting from Chirac’s order of dissolution. Lionel Jospin was Prime Minister of a coalition government dominated by the Socialists and allied with the Communists, the Greens, the center-left Radicals and a small group of former socialists called the Citizens. In 2002, Chirac was re-elected and supported by a large majority in Parliament. For Prime Minister he appointed Jean-Pierre Raffarin, then, in 2005, after the rejection by referendum of the European constitutional treaty, Dominique de Villepin. In 2007, a former minister of his, Nicolas Sarkozy, was elected. Although originating from the same party, Sarkozy pretended to break with Chirac’s legacy. He was backed by an absolute majority in Parliament and chose François Fillon as Prime Minister for his whole term. In 2012, Sarkozy was defeated by François Hollande, second Socialist President of the Fifth Republic.
- 8.
As part of a doctoral dissertation defended in 2005 at Sciences Po Paris, under the direction of Professor Richard Balme.
- 9.
See the list of interviews with parliamentarians in the Appendix. Names have been removed from all other interviews, which are simply listed by number. The Centre for Socio-Political Data at Sciences Po, and its beQuali project, offer access to unabridged transcriptions to interviews with political players and to certain analyses of primary documents. It is also possible to listen the interviews. My warmest thanks to the founder of this project, Sophie Duchesne, and to Guillaume Garcia for its implementation. See http://www.bequali.fr/fr/les-enquetes/lenquete-en-bref/cdsp_bequali_sp3/ or the website of the Quetelet network.
- 10.
As a part of the OPAL project led by Sciences Po and Cambridge, Cologne and Maastricht Universities from 2011 to 2014, funded in France by the National Research Agency.
References
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Searing, D. (1994). Westminster’s World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Rozenberg, O. (2020). Introduction. In: The French Parliament and the European Union. French Politics, Society and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19791-9_1
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