The European Parliament (EP), like the US Congress, is often depicted as a parliament with strong committees and weak parties. This article compares the powers of the EP's committees with their counterparts in national legislatures and examines the role of party groups in the committees. Analysing the principles guiding the appointments to committees, the selection of committee chairs, and the distribution of reports within the committees, we show that national party delegations inside the transnational groups are often key gatekeepers in the division of spoils within the groups, with group leaders restricted in their ability to direct the actions of their committee members. The distribution of reports between party groups and national delegations produces interesting variation, with the two largest groups (PES and EPP) largely in control of key reports, while the size of national parties inside the main groups is the primary factor in explaining the output of national delegations. * We are grateful to Nick Clegg, Francis Jacobs, Michael Shackleton, Richard Whitaker and the editors of this special issue for their helpful comments.
VIRGINIE MAMADOUH AND TAPIO RAUNIO
As with all wars, the U.S. military invasion of Iraq in 2003 needed to be portrayed as a just war in an attempt to garner support and legitimacy, domestically and internationally. The United States was acting as hegemonic power in the international state‐system and, in light of this role, had imperatives and tools in creating the argument for a just war that differed from those used by nonhegemonic states. The United States acted extraterritorially by diffusing a message of moral right. Arab resistance to the war was evident in the construction of the United States and its leadership as immoral, precluding its ability to wage a just war. This article focuses on the Arab response by analyzing the portrayal in Arab newspapers of the imminent war on Iraq. Sixty‐five newspapers of the Arabic language (plus the Iraqi news agency), published in seventeen Arab countries, of which four were Iraqi newspapers, were consulted for the purpose of this study. Interpretation of the geopolitical rhetoric within newspaper reports and political cartoons published in Arab newspapers highlights the way that arguments of morality and immorality were connected to understandings of territorial sovereignty and hegemonic extraterritorial influence into territorial sovereign spaces.
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