The EU’s multilevel parliamentary (battle)field: Inter-parliamentary cooperation and conflict in the area of foreign and security policy

The Treaty of Lisbon has been dubbed ‘the Treaty of Parliaments’, as the new legal framework upgraded the position of both the European Parliament and the national parliaments within the institutional system of the EU. However, the implementation of the new Treaty also brought to the surface the uneasy relationship between the European and national parliamentary spheres in a number of domains. Drawing on the notion of ‘parliamentary field’, this article aims to account for this growing divide, by highlighting the competitive dynamics that may emerge from a mismatch between the formal constitutional authority and the actual parliamentary capital that parliaments enjoy. The article examines this proposition within the domain of foreign and security policy, where the process of establishing a new inter-parliamentary mechanism for scrutinizing this policy, as mandated by the Treaty of Lisbon, has placed the European Parliament and the national parliaments visibly at odds.