Legal aspects of parliamentary oversight in EU foreign and security policy

Abstract

For a long time, the relatively limited role of the European Parliament (EP) in relation to the European Union’s foreign, security and defence policy was not really an issue. Most Member States continued to see (or at least present)1 the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) as a policy area that has not developed beyond the intergovernmental European Political Cooperation of the 1970s and 1980s and oversight was believed to be in the safe hands of the national parliaments. Recent studies, however, revealed that these days CFSP is less to be seen as ‘the odd one out’, and that European integration (and even competence transfer) also took place in that policy field.2 Indeed, a less visible integration perhaps – as CFSP is much less used as a legal basis for policy-making than other external relations provisions – but nevertheless one that has changed the position of CFSP in the EU and hence the commitments of the Member States, the role of the institutions and the way the EU is perceived by other states in relation to its role in global governance.