Trilogues

Auteur
Giacomo Rugge is currently working as Legal Advisor in the Legal Service of the Council of the European Union. He was Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg and Contract Agent at the European Parliament's Legal Service. He holds a degree in law from the Catholic University of Milan and a PhD from the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main. He has extensively published in leading international journals on EU law.

Texte du rabat

Provides an account of the European legislative process that does justice to the democratic potential inherent in trilogues. In particular, the book offers a systematic appreciation of the relevant legal sources and draws on the insights of legal and political scholarship.

Résumé
The events of the last ten years have shaken the permissive consensus that kept the European integration process going for many years. 'Output democracy', as based on decisions presumably meeting the needs of the citizens, is no longer enough to obtain public support. Never before has a process-oriented approach to European democracy been more urgent. This book aims to address this urgency, by providing an account of the European legislative process that is less conventional and does justice to the democratic potential inherent in trilogues. In particular, this book provides: a comprehensive reconstruction of the workings of trilogues, relying on internal documents collected through a series of access to documents requests; gives meaning to the legal notion of informality, understood as one of the most defining, although elusive, features of trilogues; squares the practice of trilogues with the European democratic order of the Treaties, showing that such a practice is compatible with a model of 'negotiation democracy'.

Contenu
Introduction; 1. A historical reconstruction; 2. Setting the stage: the European institutional triangle; 3. Unpacking the law and practice of trilogues; 4. Trilogues: informality meets positive law; 5. Inter-chamber coordination in a comparative perspective; 6. Trilogues and European democracy; Conclusions; Bibliography.