Parliamentarians in government delegations: An old question still not answered
| Author | Michal Onderco |
| Date | 01 September 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836717737571 |
| Published date | 01 September 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836717737571
Cooperation and Conflict
2018, Vol. 53(3) 411 –428
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836717737571
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Parliamentarians in
government delegations:
An old question still not
answered
Michal Onderco
Abstract
Why do governments include parliamentarians in the delegations to international negotiations?
Conduct of the diplomatic negotiations is among the most tightly controlled prerogatives of
the executive, and executives have been historically dominant in the conduct of foreign policy.
This article draws on the participation of members of parliaments in national delegations to
the Review Conferences of the Non-Proliferation Treaty over the past 40 years. The emerging
patterns show that legitimation through oversight is unlikely to be the reason for participation.
Drawing on literature on institutional variation in legislative–executive relations, the data indicate
that executives are more interested in co-opting the parliamentarians, in order to make them less
opposed to the government’s policy.
Keywords
International negotiations, multilateralism, Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Review
Process, parliaments
Introduction
In 1969, Peter Baehr published an article titled ‘Members of Parliament and Government
Delegations: An Old Problem Revisited.’1 In this article, Baehr studies the practice of
including Members of Parliament (MPs) in the government delegations to international
negotiations. While the practice has persisted over time, curiously, little attention has
been given to it.
Participation of MPs in government delegations is unusual. Foreign policy, in general,
has been seen as the area where the executive dominates (Huff, 2015). Diplomacy, spe-
cifically, has also been traditionally the focus of the government (Weisglas and De Boer,
2007). The inclusion of MPs to such delegations therefore warrants further attention as it
represents neither trivial nor commonplace activity. Yet, MPs’ participation in
Corresponding author:
Michal Onderco, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, 3000
DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Email: onderco@essb.eur.nl
737571CAC0010.1177/0010836717737571Cooperation and ConflictOnderco
research-article2017
Article
412 Cooperation and Conflict 53(3)
government delegations to international negotiations has been explicitly addressed only
by a handful of authors (Biedenkopf, 2015; Götz, 2005, 2011; Riggs, 1977). The existing
scholarly focus on MPs’ involvement in foreign policy focuses on the phenomenon of
parliamentary diplomacy, defined as a
[f]ull range of international activities undertaken by parliamentarians in order to increase
mutual understanding between countries, to assist each other in improving the control of
governments, and the representation of a people and to increase the democratic legitimacy of
inter-governmental institutions. (Weisglas and De Boer, 2007: 94)
This translated into a lively research agenda focusing on the role of parliaments in the
scrutiny of foreign policy, and on studying interparliamentary bodies (Alger, 2010): con-
ference diplomacy, practised by national MPs (Götz, 2005; Rittberger, 1983). In the for-
mer stream, attention was given to the involvement of the parliaments in their country’s
foreign policy in general (Raunio and Wagner, 2017; Stavridis and Jančić, 2017), with a
special focus on the parliamentary scrutiny of European Union (EU) affairs (Auel and
Christiansen, 2015; Gattermann et al., 2016; Raunio, 2009). In the latter stream, scholars
analysed bodies such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Parliamentary
Assembly (Flockhart, 2004; Wagner, 2013), the Organization for Security and
Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Parliamentary Assembly (Gawrich, 2017; Habegger,
2006) and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean (Cofelice, 2017). In opposi-
tion to such studies, this article looks at parliamentarians’ participation in government
delegations, that is ‘delegations which fall expressly under the responsibility of govern-
ment’ (Baehr, 1969: 4). This focus allows looking at the inclusion of MPs in what is
traditionally a domain of the executive. By doing so, I shed new light on the politics of
parliamentary participation in crafting the foreign policy. In this article, I aim to explain
the inclusion of MPs in national delegations to the Review Conferences of the Treaty on
Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT RevCons). To do so, the article triangulates
data from multiple sources – oral history interviews, country case studies using docu-
ment research and quantitative tests. I look at the NPT Review Process because it pro-
vides a recurring process of active negotiations in an area of high politics (see Hoffmann,
1966, for a distinction between high and low politics), which sets it apart from the other
alternatives, such as the United Nations General Assembly (UN GA).
The rest of the article is organized as follows: in the next section, I will review the
existing scholarship on the parliamentary scrutiny of foreign policy. The subsequent sec-
tion will outline my argument about the logic of involving the parliaments in government
delegations. In the third section, I will present the empirical findings of the research. The
fourth section concludes.
Parliaments and foreign policy
With two notable exceptions, legislative–executive relations in the realm of foreign and security
policy have attracted remarkably little scholarly attention. The first exception is the vast number
of studies on the United States Congress […] [t]he other exception is the recent wave of studies
on the parliamentary control of military missions.
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