Parliamentary Diplomacy and Legislative‐Executive Relations in EU Foreign Policy: Studying the European Parliament's Mediation of the Macedonian Political Crisis (2015–17)

Abstract

This article studies the co‐operation between parliamentary and executive diplomats in EU foreign policy. Building on transnational perspectives, the European Parliament is conceptualized as an actor capable of pursuing autonomous diplomatic behaviour through cross‐border agency over its elected representatives, its bureaucracy, as well as through European party federations. A novel framework is proposed, built around the hypothesis that parliamentary and executive actors co‐operate by exchanging institutional, information, legitimacy and access resources in order to reach their goals more effectively. To demonstrate the argument empirically, the article studies EU‐facilitated mediation talks in Macedonia (2015–17). Building on semi‐structured interviews with 27 key stakeholders, the analysis shows how during the different stages of the mediation, executive and parliamentary actors exchanged crucial diplomatic resources in order to effectively conclude and implement the so‐called Pržino‐agreements between the government and opposition parties.

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“…Its fundamental proposition is that organisations engage in exchanges with external organisations to acquire the resources necessary for reaching their goals, while seeking to manage both the degree of their dependence on external actors and the social demands that external actors make. By extending the RDT approach to the study of national parties and their transnational activities, I contribute to the further conceptualisation of parliaments and parties as transnational actors in the European Union (Chryssogelos, 2017;Fonck, 2018).…”

“…Instead, I employ the term to denote the actual behaviour of actors (Kaiser & Starie, 2005, p. 5). National parties are considered to be transnational actors in their own right in so far as they have the ability to engage in transnational interactions (see also Chryssogelos, 2017, p. 258-260;Fonck, 2018Fonck, , p. 1307. Transnational party activities, then, are understood as any form of interaction between political parties across borders or levels of governance (see also Miklin, 2013, p. 26).…”

“…The core logic of Resource Dependence Theory, however, helps to conceptualise relations between organisations and their environment beyond private firms (Davis & Cobb 2010, 31;Lipson, 2017, p. 81; see e.g. Bouwen, 2002;Fonck, 2018;Rhodes, 1981;Rhodes & Dunleavey, 1995;Vantaggiato, 2019).…”

“…RDT has not previously been applied to the study of transnational party or interparliamentary cooperation. The argument of Fonck (2018) about how resource exchange characterises cooperation between parliamentary and executive diplomats, however, resembles a resource-dependence approach. Pfeffer and Salancik's original work provides a promising framework to study the transnational activities of political parties, because it can address some of the shortcomings of existing approaches to political parties in the European Union.…”

“…I thus extend the few recent considerations of resource dependence as driver for inter-organisational activities in the literature on European Studies to the transnational activities of national parties. Such previous considerations include research on the lobbying activities of companies and other interest groups in the EU (Beyers & Kerremans, 2007;Bouwen, 2002), the pooling of resources between expert and regulatory agencies in the EU (Vantaggiato, 2019;Vestlund, 2017), and the diplomatic activities of actors in the European Parliament (Fonck, 2018) Second, RDT allows for the integration of insights about domestic politics offered by Comparative Politics (CP), the other main sub-discipline of Political Science, to theorise about the specific conditions under which political parties engage in transnational interactions (see Hillmann et al, 2009Hillmann et al, , p. 1416. CP scholars have developed theories about party behaviour and categorisations of party organisation at the national level.…”