Parliamentary cooperation and diplomacy in EU external relations

In today’s increasingly complex and interdependent world, the role of parliaments remains a relatively understudied research topic. The multiple patterns of global governance are mostly dominated by the executive branches of government, with parliaments remaining at the sidelines. Through the prism of current research on parliamentary cooperation in the European Union (EU), the present volume aims to revisit parliamentary cooperation. At the same time, this volume obviously adds to the literature of European Foreign Policy, which so far has treated parliamentary activity and relations in the EU’s external relations rather as an afterthought. The phenomenom of parliamentary cooperation – interparliamentary cooperation between national parliaments and the EP in the EU (Article 12 TEU; Protocol 1, Article 9 ff. TEU) and diplomacy of parliaments in EU external action (Stavridis 2002; Weisglas & de Boer 2007) – is a relatively new object of research. Scholarship on the field has only started to emerge with a number of important publications regarding interparliamentary cooperation within the EU and European Parliament diplomacy in the context of EU external action.This volume will look at these different developments together by analyzing parliamentary cooperation and diplomacy both at the EU level and within other European and international organizations. The aim is hence to look at the internal and external dimension of parliamentary cooperation and situate it in the context of EU external relations.