Limiting or liberating? The influence of parliaments on military deployments in multinational settings
| Published date | 01 February 2018 |
| Date | 01 February 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148117746918 |
| Author | Daniel Schade |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148117746918
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2018, Vol. 20(1) 84 –103
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148117746918
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Limiting or liberating? The
influence of parliaments on
military deployments
in multinational settings
Daniel Schade
Abstract
Multilateral contexts often complicate parliaments’ efforts to scrutinise and influence security
policy, as parliaments usually work in a national setting. This article explores how the
internationalisation of security policy has altered parliamentary constraints on executive decision-
making. It focuses on cases where multilateral decision-making is particularly advanced and studies
military deployments under the auspices of the European Union’s (EU’s) Common Security and
Defence Policy (CSDP). Using the examples of France, the United Kingdom and Germany, the
article examines how the policy’s location at the intersection of decision-making on security and
EU matters creates new opportunities for member state parliaments to scrutinise it. Yet, as an
analysis of three CSDP military operations shows, these opportunities do not always translate
into increased scrutiny practice and vary in line with factors such as national troop contributions,
distinct political traditions and an operation’s salience.
Keywords
Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), parliamentary war powers, parliaments,
peacekeeping, security policy
Introduction
Military deployments by European liberal democracies are nowadays embedded mostly in
multinational contexts. Through its Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), the
European Union (EU) has created an additional framework under which they can conduct
military peacekeeping operations. The European nature of such deployments renders their
parliamentary scrutiny increasingly necessary (Lord, 2011; Sjursen, 2011). Yet, their
underlying decision-making complexity has made national parliamentary scrutiny more
difficult. Existing research has focused on outlining this complex set-up of CSDP scrutiny
powers of EU member state parliaments (Anghel et al., 2008; Huff, 2015; Peters et al.,
Department of Political Science, Otto von Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany
Corresponding author:
Daniel Schade, Department of Political Science, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Zschokkestr. 32
39104 Magdeburg, Germany.
Email: daniel.schade@ovgu.de
746918BPI0010.1177/1369148117746918The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsSchade
research-article2018
Special Issue Article
Schade 85
2014). Most of this literature has analysed national parliaments’ roles using a three-pronged
analytical framework (Born and Hänggi, 2004, 2005; Mello and Peters, this issue), distin-
guishing legal from resource-based and motivational factors.
What has not been highlighted, however, is that parliaments can become active in the
policy’s scrutiny not only through their parliamentary war powers but also at earlier
stages of the decision-making process through their role in the scrutiny of EU decision-
making. In line with other features of EU foreign policy decision-making, decisions on
CSDP operations must initially be taken unanimously in a ‘Joint Action’ by the Council
of Ministers, the EU body uniting its national executives. National parliaments have
access to these decisions through their European scrutiny powers. Nonetheless, all mem-
ber state troop contributions to such operations remain voluntary and dependent on the
willingness of individual member states to participate.
While a first step, the decision to launch a military operation is taken by the EU mem-
ber states in the Council. Then, this decision is followed by a second phase under which
member states make pledges for national troop contributions. Only in a third step, troops
are committed under the differing national frameworks for deploying armed forces, which
allow parliaments scrutiny according to their specific war powers. Instead of having to
rely on these latter powers, the use of which would be implicitly constrained by a national
government’s previous agreement to a deployment in the Council, parliament can thus
become active in CSDP scrutiny earlier on.
Highlighting this under-explored aspect in the existing literature, this article argues
that the hybrid nature of CSDP decision-making as both a security and an EU policy not
only renders its scrutiny complex but also simultaneously creates prior avenues for par-
liamentary scrutiny not available under traditional parliamentary war powers. It does so
by, first, detailing how member state parliaments’ EU scrutiny powers enhance the timing
and their formal ability to scrutinise CSDP operations over those for other forms of mili-
tary deployments. In a second step, it then outlines under which conditions those enhanced
powers matter and details when EU member state parliaments make use of their scrutiny
powers in practice. The article argues that parliamentary scrutiny activity can be limited
by differing political traditions, the salience of a deployment as an issue for political con-
testation and national troop contributions. The analysis thus follows a recent trend for the
study of the role of EU parliaments which attempts to go ‘beyond the classical focus on
the formal powers of parliamentary scrutiny by presenting insights into the actual prac-
tice of parliamentary involvement’ (Auel and Christiansen, 2015: 263).
The scrutiny of military operations in the European context
Parliamentary influence on CSDP has been a difficult issue given that it exists at the inter-
section of two political phenomena which have traditionally favoured national execu-
tives: security policy-making and European integration (Peters et al., 2008: 5). On the one
hand, there is a long-standing argument that security policy differs fundamentally from
domestic policies (Peters et al., 2008: 5) given its links to national sovereignty. According
to this line of reasoning, it should be left to the exclusive control of the executive. While
this view has been accepted in most research on the subject, recent contributions chal-
lenge this assumption by arguing that political parties differ on this principle in line with
their position on the left–right spectrum (Sakaki and Lukner, 2017; Wagner et al., 2017).
Political cleavages aside, parliamentary powers on a country’s use of military force vary
heavily among contemporary democracies (Peters and Wagner, 2010) in line with factors
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