Introduction

Abstract

As Europe moves unsteadily forward from the Maastricht Treaty on European Union, in force since November 1993, towards the next Intergovernmental Conference, or IGC, scheduled for 1996, the future of the Union’s institutional structure is uncertain and highly controversial. This book considers one of the EU’s main institutions, the European Parliament (EP), from the specific angle of how it relates to Europe’s other institutions of representative democracy, the national parliaments of the EU’s member-states. One central aspect of the subject is the question of how far the EP, which has now been directly elected by Europe’s citizens in four successive elections between 1979 and 1994, can lay any claim to a greater legitimacy as the democratic controller of the EU’s policies than the national parliaments, whose claim to control their respective governments goes back in some cases for centuries.