Brexit and democracy: the role of parliaments in the uk and the european union thomas christiansen -
Brexit and Democracy: The Role of Parliaments in the UK and the European Union Thomas Christiansen
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After Brexit: Consequences for the European Union 1st Edition Nazaré Da Costa Cabral
The Role of Parliaments in the UK and the European Union
Edited by Thomas Christiansen and Diane Fromage
European Administrative Governance Series
Editors
Thomas Christiansen Maastricht University
Maastricht, The Netherlands
Sophie Vanhoonacker Maastricht University
Maastricht, The Netherlands
The series maps the range of disciplines addressing the study of European public administration. In particular, contributions to the series will engage with the role and nature of the evolving bureaucratic processes of the European Union, including the study of the EU’s civil service, of organization aspects of individual institutions such as the European Commission, the Council of Ministers, the External Action Service, the European Parliament, the European Court and the European Central Bank and of inter-institutional relations among these and other actors. The series also welcomes contributions on the growing role of EU agencies, networks of technical experts and national officials, and of the administrative dimension of multilevel governance including international organizations. Of particular interest in this respect will be the emergence of a European diplomatic service and the management of the EU’s expanding commercial, foreign, development, security and defence policies, as well as the role of institutions in a range of other policy areas of the Union. Beyond this strong focus of EU administrative governance, the series will also include texts on the development and practice of administrative governance within European states. This may include contributions to the administrative history of Europe, which is not just about rules and regulations governing bureaucracies, or about formal criteria for measuring the growth of bureaucracies, but rather about the concrete workings of public administration, both in its executive functions as in its involvement in policymaking. Furthermore the series will include studies on the interaction between the national and European level, with particular attention for the impact of the EU on domestic administrative systems. The series editors welcome approaches from prospective contributors and are available to contact at t.christiansen@maastrichtuniversity.nl and s.vanhoonacker@ maastrichtuniversity.nl for proposals and feedback. All books in the series are subject to Palgrave’s rigorous peer review process: https://www. palgrave.com/gb/demystifying-peer-review/792492
More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14977
Thomas Christiansen • Diane Fromage Editors
Brexit and Democracy
The Role of Parliaments in the UK and the European Union
Editors Thomas Christiansen Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Maastricht University
Maastricht, The Netherlands
Diane Fromage Faculty of Law
Maastricht University
Maastricht, The Netherlands
ISSN 2524-7263
ISSN 2524-7271 (electronic)
European Administrative Governance
ISBN 978-3-030-06042-8 ISBN 978-3-030-06043-5 (eBook)
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Preface
The idea for this book arose from the common interest we share in the role of parliaments in the European Union (EU). Working on a wider project on executive-legislative relations in the EU,1 it occurred to us that the developments around Brexit are a particular, and particularly important, issue for parliamentary scrutiny. Considering how little academic attention had hitherto been focused on this aspect of the otherwise widely studied Brexit, it was an easy decision then to embark on the path leading to this publication.
In doing so, we followed a number of objectives: to ensure that our book would cover developments in both the United Kingdom (UK) and the EU, to aim for a multidisciplinary approach involving expertise from both law and political science, and to be able to bring the publication to the readers swiftly, so as to inform the ongoing debate about Brexit and its democratic implications.
We are satisfied that this edited volume achieves these objectives. Having obtained the necessary funding, and following a call for papers, we were able to bring together a group of international scholars for a one-day workshop in Brussels to address the various angles from which to examine the relationship between Brexit, parliaments and citizens. We were fortunate that our publisher Palgrave Macmillan supported the idea of this book from the start and managed both the peer review stage and the production process very efficiently. And we had great cooperation from the contributors who reliably met intermediate and final deadlines while also responding to our—sometimes repeated—requests for revisions and updates.
1 D. Fromage, A. Herranz-Surrallés and T. Christiansen (eds), Executive-Legislative (Im) balance in the European Union, Hart (for thcoming).
Yet this smooth publishing process is completely at odds with the messy, unpredictable and much-maligned subject matter. The fact that the Brexit process has been a trip into the unknown for the United Kingdom, the European Union and also for academia made the project a highly challenging endeavour. Indeed, when the then British Prime Minister David Cameron gave his famous Bloomberg speech in January 2013,2 the prospect of the UK’s exit from the EU was not considered as a serious possibility by most observers. Yet, on 23 June 2016, a narrow majority of British voters decided that their country should leave the EU. The withdrawal procedure foreseen by Article 50 of the Treaty of the EU was triggered on 29 March 2017, and the two-year period available to negotiate the first divorce settlement between the EU and one of its Member States started. Negotiations were anything but easy and were dominated by uncertainty. In fact, as this volume goes to press early February 2019, the outcome of this process is still unclear. A proposed ‘withdrawal agreement’ defining the conditions of the UK’s divorce and of the two-year transition period to follow could finally be agreed on 13 November 2018, but it was immediately contested by hard Brexiteers. The political declaration on the future relationship was a much shorter document describing in rather broad terms the agenda for subsequent negotiations. Limited support for this deal within Prime Minister Theresa May’s own cabinet, resignations in protest by several ministers and divisions within her party meant that the House of Commons would play a decisive role in the final stage of the Brexit process. The fractious distribution of opinions there, together with the tenuous support for the government’s position, created a situation where—less than two months before the 29 March 2019 deadline—it was still unclear whether an agreement would be adopted, whether the UK would request an extension of the deadline, whether the UK would crash out of the EU with ‘no deal’ (indeed a scenario that the UK, other Member States and EU institutions alike had started to actively prepare for) or whether a second referendum might still reverse the original decision in favour of Brexit. This uncertainty notwithstanding, the Brexit process presents at least two characteristics that make its study worthwhile regardless of its outcome. First, it is not the only crisis that has hit the European Union over the past decade; the EU also had to deal with the economic and financial crisis or the migration crisis for instance. However, Brexit and the debates around a possible exit from the EU that took place in other Member States such as Greece or the Netherlands have clearly evidenced a deeply rooted democratic and legit-
2 David Cameron, EU speech at Bloomberg, 23 January 2013 available at: https://www. gov.uk/government/speeches/eu-speech-at-bloomberg
imacy crisis within the EU. The question of the European integration process’s ‘democratic deficit’ has arguably been vividly debated since it was first conceptualised by David Marquand in 1979. The results of the Danish and the French referendums on the Maastricht Treaty also showcased citizens’ increasing scepticism towards integration. Despite the progressive strengthening of the role of the European Parliament—the only directly elected EU institution—Dutch and French citizens rejected the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe in 2004, and Eurosceptic parties continued to gain more votes in elections to the European Parliament, as well as in national parliamentary elections, since the early 2010s. These are all signs of citizens’ increasing discontent with the EU, while Brexit clearly remains the strongest manifestation of opposition to European integration. It was admittedly only a slim majority of British citizens that voted in favour of Brexit, and there is tangible evidence that the stakes of the Brexit referendum, as well as its actual consequences, were unknown to a large part of the voters. One conclusion from these developments is, however, that EU ought to urgently start a process of self-reflection and far-reaching reforms, and that the solutions used so far mostly in the form of increasing powers for the European Parliament and national parliaments did not suffice to regain citizens’ trust.
Yet even though they may not be able to solve this problem alone, parliaments certainly play a key role in the debates about the future of the EU due to their quality as primary institutions enshrining democracy and political pluralism. In fact, it is worth noting that parliaments have been at the core of the debates on Brexit and the future of the EU, either because parliaments should regain more powers (as in the UK), or because of proposals that parliaments be granted a bigger say in the EU’s actions, as envisaged for instance by the ‘Task force on subsidiarity, proportionality and doing less more efficiently’, created in 2018.
In the course of the Brexit negotiations as such, especially the UK Parliament and the European Parliament played a crucial role. In the British case, the question of Parliament’s role in the triggering of Brexit and in the conclusion of the negotiation prompted key constitutional questions related to the balance of powers between parliament and government, and more profoundly to the British tradition of parliamentary sovereignty. Within the EU, even if the European Parliament did not have a formal role during the negotiation procedures as per Article 50, it did exercise a tight scrutiny of the negotiations because its consent on the final divorce agreement was needed alongside that of a qualified majority of Member States sitting in the Council. This gave rise to unprecedented dynamics between executive and legislative institutions both in the UK and in the EU.
In the remaining EU Member States (the ‘EU27’), parliaments’ consent has not been an issue at this stage, but will be required if and when the EU and the UK reach an agreement on their future relationship since this would necessarily affect both EU-exclusive competences and shared competences. The precedent of the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement which almost collapsed because of objections from a single regional parliament—the Walloon Parliament—was an additional motivation in favour of the early and continuous involvement of national and (where necessary) regional parliaments. Additionally, the prospect of Brexit undoubtedly has far-reaching consequences for all remaining Member States because of the UK’s status as a net contributor to the EU budget and as a leading military power, among other reasons. For some Member States, such as Belgium, Cyprus, Ireland or Spain, even more is at stake due to the special issues affecting their relationship with the UK. Throwing light on these wider questions is what motivated us at the start of the process leading to this publication. Our project was facilitated by a collaboration between the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Law Faculty at Maastricht University through the inter-faculty Centre for European Research in Maastricht (CERiM). The above-mentioned workshop entitled ‘The Parliamentary Scrutiny of Brexit: Perspectives from Europe and the UK’ was organised with the help of CERiM and took place on 8–9 March 2018 at Maastricht University’s Campus Brussels. We take this opportunity to sincerely thank all participants, and in particular the practitioners who generously accepted to take some of their time to contribute to our discussion, and our support staff—Elke Hundhausen, Shelly Tsui and the colleagues at UM Campus Brussels without whose efficient help this event could not have taken place. We gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support of CERiM, of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the Law Faculty, the Universiteitsfonds Limburg/SWOL and the Erasmus+ programme of the EU. The subsequent book publication owes much to the enthusiastic support of Jemima Warren, our editor at Palgrave Macmillan, and of Sophie Vanhoonacker, co-editor of the European Administrative Governance series. We also thank Carlotta Borges for her research assistance and help in preparing the manuscript for submission to the publisher, and Oliver Foster at Palgrave Macmillan for his support and advice during the production process.
Maastricht, The Netherlands Thomas Christiansen January 2019 Diane Fromage
5 The Scrutiny of Brexit in National Parliaments: Germany, Luxembourg and the Czech Republic Compared
Vanessa Buth, Anna-Lena Högenauer, and Petr Kaniok
6 National and Regional Parliaments in the Context of Brexit: The Case of Belgium
Vivien Sierens and Nathalie Brack
7 The Polish Parliament and the Scrutiny of Brexit in Poland
Karolina Boronska-Hryniewiecka
8
The European Parliament in the Brexit Process: Leading Role, Supporting Role or Just a Small Cameo?
Monika Brusenbauch Meislova 11 The Impact of Brexit on the European Parliament: The Role of British MEPs in Euro-Mediterranean Affairs
Jan Claudius Völkel 12
Natassa Athanasiadou
notes on contributors
Natassa Athanasiadou is Assistant Professor of European Union (EU) Law at the Faculty of Law, Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Previously, she worked for the European Commission as a legal officer advising on matters of EU institutional, administrative and civil service laws. She holds a doctorate with summa cum laude from the University of Heidelberg and is a qualified lawyer of the Bar Association of Thessaloniki.
Antonio Bar Cendón is Professor of Constitutional Law and Jean Monnet Professor ‘ad personam’ of EU Law and Politics at the Faculty of Law, University of Valencia, Spain. He has been a member of the European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA), Maastricht, and visiting scholar in many other universities and centres. As a consultant, he has worked for the European Parliament, the European Commission, the Council of Europe and other institutions, in various projects in Europe, America and the Middle East. He is a member of the European Commission’s Team Europe.
Gavin Barrett is a barrister and professor specialising in EU Law in the Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin. He is the author of numerous articles in leading law and political science journals and book chapters on European- and democracy-related themes. His book The Evolving Role of National Parliaments in the European Union: Ireland as a Case Study has recently been published.
Karolina Boronska-Hryniewiecka is the head of the EU Program at the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM) and an assistant professor
at the Institute of Political Science of the University of Wrocław. Her research interests revolve around EU institutional reform and the role of parliamentary actors in the EU governance. Her latest publications include From the EWS to the Green Card for National Parliaments: Hindering or Accelerating the EU Lawmaking? (2017) and From Legislative Controllers to Policy Proponents: The Evolving Role of National Parliaments in the EU Multi-level Governance (Palgrave Macmillan 2016).
Nathalie Brack is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Cevipol, ULB, Brussels, and a visiting professor at the College of Europe. Her research interests include Euroscepticism, radical parties, political representation and the linkage between citizens and elites. She recently authored Opposing Europe in the European Parliament. Rebels and Radicals in the Chamber (2018, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-authored How the EU Really Works (2018).
Monika Brusenbauch Meislova is an assistant professor at the Department of International Relations and European Studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. She has studied at universities in the Czech Republic (Palacký University), the United Kingdom (Loughborough University) and Germany (Philipps-Universität Marburg). She has conducted several research stays in London and Brussels and also undertook an internship at the European Parliament. Her main research interests revolve around the study of British politics (especially British European policy and Brexit), Czech foreign policy and Czech-British relations. Her work on these topics has appeared in both scholarly and popular venues (she is, for instance, an occasional contributor to the LSE blog). She regularly presents her work at both domestic and international conferences and often participates in public debates.
Vanessa Buth was a senior research associate in the ‘Negotiating Brexit’ project at the School for Political, Social and International Studies, University of East Anglia (UEA), in cooperation with ‘The UK in a Changing Europe’. She holds a PhD on the representativeness of EU advocacy groups from UEA. She has been involved in three major investigations of the European Commission as an administration (‘The EC in Question’, ‘The EC: Facing the Future’ and ‘The EC: Where Now, Where Next?’) as well as an investigation of the European Council (‘Understanding the EU Civil Service: The General Secretariat of the Council’). She is coauthor of the chapter ‘The Balancing Act of European Civil Society –
Between Professionalism and Grassroots’ (2013) (In: Beate Kohler-Koch/ Christine Quittkat (Eds.) The Demystification of Participatory Governance) and ‘Civil society in EU Governance: Lobby Groups Like Any Other?’ (2009) (with Beate Kohler-Koch, TranState Working Paper).
Thomas Christiansen holds a Chair in European Institutional Politics in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, where he is also Chair of the Research Programme on ‘Politics and Culture in Europe’ and director of the Centre for European Research in Maastricht (CERiM). In addition, he holds regular visiting positions at LUISS Università Guido Carli in Rome, Italy, and at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea. He is executive editor of the Journal of European Integration and co-editor (with Sophie Vanhoonacker) of the European Administration Governance book series at Palgrave Macmillan. His work on different aspects of European integration has been widely published. He recently co-authored, with Christine Neuhold and Anna-Lena Högenauer, Parliamentary Administrations in the European Union (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2016). He is the coeditor, with Emil Kirchner and Han Dorussen, of Security Relations Between the EU and China: From Convergence to Cooperation?, which was published in 2017.
Adam Cygan is Professor of European Law at the University of Leicester. His research interests lie in the field of EU public law and governance. In particular, he focuses on the relationship between national parliaments and the EU institutions within the context of the decision-making process. He has authored numerous publications on this topic, including a monograph on Accountability, Parliamentarism and Transparency in the EU: The Role of National Parliaments (2013). Together with P. Lynch and R. Whitaker, he leads an ESRC-funded project called ‘Parties, Parliament and the Brexit process’ (https://parlbrexit.co.uk/).
Diane Fromage is Assistant Professor of EU Law in the Faculty of Law at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. She previously held a similar position at Utrecht University, and has been a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. She holds PhD in law and in institutions, administrations and regional policies from the University of Pavia and the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona (joint degree). Her research focuses on parliaments in the EU, on independent fiscal institutions and on the Banking Union. Her work
on these issues has been published extensively in journals such as the Journal of European Legal Studies, the Maastricht Journal of Comparative and European Law and the Yearbook of European Law. Furthermore, she has recently co-edited two journal special issues on parliaments in the EU, respectively for the Journal of European Integration and Politique Européenne.
Anna-Lena Högenauer is an adjoint de recherche in the Institute of Political Science at the University of Luxembourg. She holds PhD in political science from the University of Edinburgh. Her areas of expertise are EU multilevel governance and parliamentarism. She was a member of the Observatory of Parliaments After the Lisbon Treaty (OPAL, 2011–2014) funded under the Open Research Area for Europe scheme and the Erasmus Academic Network on Parliamentary Democracy in Europe (Pademia, 2013–2016), and is a member of the ESRC-funded ‘Negotiating Brexit’ project. Her published work includes a monograph on the role of parliamentary administrations with Palgrave Macmillan, and a number of articles in journals such as West European Politics, Journal of Common Market Studies, Comparative European Politics, European Political Science Review and the Journal of Legislative Studies.
Petr Kaniok is an associate professor at the Faculty of Social Science, Masaryk University. He holds PhD in political science from Masaryk University. His areas of expertise are Euroscepticism, political institutions, EU politics and Czech politics. He was involved in 7th FP project bEUcitizen (2013–2017). He is a member of the ESRC-funded ‘Negotiating Brexit’ project and he coordinates Czech Science Foundation-funded project on differentiated integration in Visegrad countries. He has co-authored a monograph on Europeanisation of Czech Euroscepticism. His articles have recently appeared in East European Politics, Journal of Contemporary European Research and Parliaments, Estates and Representation.
Philip Lynch is Associate Professor of Politics at University of Leicester. His main research focus is party politics on the centre right in Britain, and he is particularly interested in the Conservative Party and European integration; the relationship between the Conservative Party and the British nation state; and Euroscepticism in Britain. He runs an ESRC-funded project called ‘Parties, Parliament and the Brexit process’ (https://parlbrexit.co.uk/) with A. Cygan and R. Whitaker.
Vivien Sierens is currently a PhD candidate at Cevipol, ULB, Br ussels, and at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), and Teaching Assistant in Political Science at ULB. His research interests include party membership, political representation and multilevel governance. He recently coauthored the article ‘Prompting Legislative Agreement and Loyalty: What Role for Intra-Party Democracy’ in Parliamentary Affairs (2018).
Julie Smith (Baroness Smith of Newnham) is director of the European Centre at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge. She became a member of the House of Lords in 2014. Her main research interests are in the history and politics of the EU. Her work focuses on the United Kingdom’s relations with the EU; parliaments and the EU; and parliaments and budgetary politics. She is editor of the Palgrave Handbook on European Referendums (London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2019). Her recent publications include The UK’s Journeys into and out of the EU: Destinations Unknown (2017) and The Palgrave Handbook of National Parliaments and the European Union (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), co-editor with Claudia Hefftler, Christina Neuhold and Olivier Rozenberg.
Louise Thompson is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on the UK Parliament, particularly the legislative process, committees, political parties and public engagement with Parliament. She is convenor of the PSA Parliaments Group and academic secretary of the Study of Parliament Group.
Jan Claudius Völkel is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Institute for European Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (IES-VUB). Previously, he was DAAD Long-Term Lecturer in Political Science at Cairo University in the Euro-Mediterranean Studies Programme (2013–2017). His main research interests deal with contemporary developments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), with a particular focus on Arab parliaments. Since 2008, he is the MENA regional coordinator at the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (www.bti-project.org).
Richard Whitaker is an associate professor at the Department of Politics and International Relations at University of Leicester. His main research interests concern the study of legislatures, and British parties and European integration. He is working on an ESRC-funded project called ‘Parties, Parliament and the Brexit process’ with A. Cygan and P. Lynch (https:// parlbrexit.co.uk/).
Ben Yong is a lecturer in the School of Law and Politics, University of Hull. His research interests lie in public law, and bureaucracy and administration (both in the executive and in the legislature).
List of figures
Fig. 6.1 Position of Belgian political parties on the EU in a bi-dimensional space (salience and overall position on EU integration) (2002–2014). (Source: Chapel Hill Expert Survey)
Fig. 6.2 Networks of parliamentary questions (centred on key MPs)
Fig. 6.3 Networks of parliamentary questions (centred on key topics)
139
146
148
List of tabLes
Table 3.1 Select committee composition and the Leave-Remain divide 66
Table 6.1 Descriptive frequency of parliamentary questions. Majority versus opposition 144
Table 6.2 Descriptive network statistics 147
Table 6.3 Descriptive network statistics 149
Table 8.1 Brexit-related reports produced by Oireachtas committees in post-February 2016 parliamentary period 184
Table 9.1 Government appearances before the Parliament concerning European Council meetings (2011–2018)
Table 9.2 Activities of the Subcommittee for the study of the consequences of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. XII Legislature (November 2016–July 2018)
Table 9.3 Activities of the Joint Committee for the EU. XII Legislature (July 2016–July 2018)
Table 10.1 Voting record of the EP’s resolutions on Brexit
Table 10.2 MEPs’ voting behaviour on EP’s resolutions on Brexit (by party groups)
Table 10.3 MEPs’ voting behaviour on EP’s resolutions on Brexit (by member states)
Table 11.1 UK-MEPs in the 8th European Parliament (as of 31 July 2018, sorted by EP group and alphabet)
215
221
223
245
249
251
267
Table 11.2 UK-MEPs in MENA-related committees (as of 31 July 2018) 272
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Thomas Christiansen and Diane Fromage
1 The ConTesTaTion of BrexiT
The United Kingdom’s (UK’s) withdrawal from the European Union (EU) is a historic and momentous event, constituting the first time an EU member state activated Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU). Based on the outcome of a referendum held in Britain in June 2016, this decision occurred in a context of rising Euroscepticism and anti-European populism. Certainly, coming in the wake of the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis which had reached its zenith in the summer of 2015, and in the midst of the Syrian refugee crisis, the British people’s decision to leave the EU added to a sense of the European integration project being in terminal decline. While “Brexiteers” in the UK celebrated their victory at the polls, elites in the remaining member states were haunted by the fear that other states may also opt to leave the Union, like dominoes falling.
T. Christiansen (*)
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands
e-mail: t.christiansen@maastrichtuniversity.nl
D. Fromage
Faculty of Law, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands
T. Christiansen, D. Fromage (eds.), Brexit and Democracy, European Administrative Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06043-5_1
T. CHRISTIANSEN AND D. FROMAGE
Yet, the years after the Brexit vote in 2016 painted a surprisingly different picture: in the UK, the governing Conservative Party continued to be riven by internal disagreement, leaving the government with a fragile majority in parliament, whose fragility was exacerbated by the outcome of the snap election called by Prime Minister Theresa May in June 2017 at which the Conservatives lost their parliamentary majority and had to rely on support from the Democratic Unionist Party in order to continue governing. But also beyond the Conservatives, the prospect of Brexit exposed a country deeply divided about the choices involved. Theresa May’s insistence that “Brexit means Brexit” could hardly hide the fact that fundamentally different ways of relating to the EU could be chosen after Brexit, from the “softer” variants of remaining in a customs union with the EU, or even participating in the Internal Market itself (like Norway does through its membership in the European Economic Area) to the “hard” versions of Brexit that would place the UK firmly outside the EU’s Internal Market and imply the setting up of tariff and non-tariff barriers between the two sides, though these could be moderated through a free-trade agreement that would reduce or avoid such barriers in selected economic sectors.
As negotiations between the UK and the EU about the withdrawal arrangements and future relationship commenced, it quickly became evident that these were highly complex matters, with difficult decisions abound. Three issues in particular complicated matters significantly: first, participation in the Internal Market would require the UK to accept the continued jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the EU—something that had been ruled out early as a “red line” in the British negotiating position. Second, the “opting in” of Britain into selected EU policies or institutions such as regulatory agencies was not deemed possible without a financial contribution to the EU budget—again something the British government could not conceive of. Third, achieving a “hard” Brexit appeared to be incompatible with maintaining open borders between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and was thus in conflict with the Good Friday Agreement as well as with the EU’s position in support of Ireland. Furthermore, there have also been serious concerns about the protection of citizens’ rights—EU citizens resident in the UK as well as UK citizens living in the other member states—in such a scenario.
The elusiveness of a simple choice in the Brexit process engendered much debate and disagreement in the UK: all the main political parties took up different positions, and not only the Tories but also Labour were riven by internal splits. The government of Scotland, where the majority
of the population had voted in favour of remaining in the EU, took a position that was antithetical to that of the UK government, contending that only continued membership in the Internal Market and the customs union would be acceptable to them. And at a popular level, an increasing polarisation became evident, with a movement for a “People’s Vote” demanding a second referendum that might overturn the original vote in favour of Brexit, while radicalised Brexit supporters labelled those seeking even a partial membership in the EU as “traitors”.
Against the background of such fundamental dilemmas and such a divided country, the search for a decisive position supported by a majority remained elusive, and Brexit negotiations dragged on from the official withdrawal notification on 29 March 2017 until a specially convened European Council meeting in November 2018, just a few months before the final deadline for the UK’s withdrawal two years after the notification based on Article 50 TEU had been submitted by the British government.1 The fact that key ministers, such as former chief negotiator David Davis, resigned from the cabinet in the later stages of the negotiations, and actively campaigned against the government’s official position in the negotiations, added to the difficulties in achieving an agreement acceptable to all sides.
The difficulties on the British side were mirrored by an—arguably surprisingly—united EU which maintained remarkable coherence and steadfastness throughout the negotiations. The governments of the remaining 27 member states—the EU27 as they became known—were represented in the negotiations by a European Commission “Task Force” under the leadership of Michel Barnier, former French minister and Single Market Commissioner. In accordance with the procedure spelt out in Article 50-2 TEU, the European Council, that is, EU27 Heads of states and governments, first defined the mandate providing the guidelines which Michel Barnier and the Brexit Task Force had to follow in the negotiations. Even though the costs and—to the extent to which these existed—benefits of Britain leaving the EU were unevenly distributed across the different member states, the EU27 persistently maintained a common line that regarded the four freedoms—the free mobility of goods, services, capital
1 According to Article 50-3 TEU, the negotiations between the seceding state and the EU are limited to last for a maximum of two years, unless a prolongation is agreed unanimously by European Council members.
T. CHRISTIANSEN AND D. FROMAGE
and persons—as indivisible. In other words, access for the UK to the Internal Market was off the table, unless it also included the free movement of people which had been explicitly ruled out by the British government. Equally strong was the assiduous support of the other member states and the European Commission for the Republic of Ireland on the issue of the Northern Irish border.
Brexit, then, was a divisive societal issue as well as a highly complex and technical matter in the hands of expert negotiators. However, the negotiations were conducted in the context of political accountability. As the EU27’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier reported back to the Council at regular intervals. According to Article 10 TEU, Council members, that is, the responsible ministers, are accountable to their respective national parliaments. It follows that parliamentary scrutiny is another key dimension to Brexit as it represents a test of parliamentary scrutiny of the EU executive. At both the national and the European levels, and in the UK as well as in the remaining member states, Brexit challenged parliaments to hold executive leaders and negotiators to account, to ensure a degree of transparency during the negotiations, to seek influence in some cases, and, in the case of the UK parliament, to establish a right to have a final say on the outcome of the process.
It is this particular aspect of Brexit that is the central focus of this volume. It addresses the critical issue of the democratic legitimacy of the Brexit process by raising a number of important questions: “How deeply and decisively have parliaments been involved in the process?”; “How effective has their scrutiny of the negotiations been?” and “To what extent have their formal powers matched their actual influence over the outcome?”
Answers to these questions will allow us to assess the degree to which the decision-making around Brexit can be seen as democratically legitimate. Yet they also go beyond Brexit, raising much wider issues about the manner in which parliamentary systems and participatory processes in the EU are capable of dealing with extraordinary events and crises, and the impact that such developments have on the relationship between parliaments and governments more broadly. Brexit is, in this sense, an external and unexpected shock to parliamentary systems on both the national and the European levels. Studying closely how this particular challenge has been dealt with by parliaments in different member states, and at the EU level, provides us with new insights about the way in which parliaments cope with such challenges, and even utilise opportunities that present themselves to reassert their role in EU affairs. This volume brings together
research on this particular experience in the EU. But it is not just an examination of the interaction between Brexit and democracy, as the title suggests; it also adds to the broader literature on executive-legislative relations in the EU and on parliaments’ role and democratic legitimacy in the EU more generally.
The contributions to this book investigate these issues empirically in a range of institutional contexts, and they do so from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, with particular emphasis on constitutional and European law, and political science. The authors of the various chapters have studied distinct empirical environments, and particular aspects relevant to each system through a set of common questions based on the different dimensions to best highlight the various effects of parliamentary involvement in Brexit. This common frame guiding the empirical research presented in each of the contributions is developed below, after the following section provides a more general overview of recent developments with regard to parliamentary scrutiny in the EU in an attempt to contextualise this debate.
2 arenas of ParliamenTary sCruTiny in The eu
Parliamentary involvement in Brexit is an important topic for scientific investigation not only because of the significance of Brexit itself, but also because it has occurred against the backdrop of a decade-long debate about parliamentary empowerment in the EU. Traditionally, the main focus of those concerned with the EU’s democratic credentials has been the European Parliament (EP). The EP has indeed seen a steady increase in its powers through successive treaty reforms, with additional areas of EU decision-making transferred to co-decision and a progressive increase in the EP’s budgetary powers (Beach 2007; Biesenbender 2011; Shackleton and Raunio 2003; Dinan 2012). With the Lisbon Treaty, this equal status between the EP and the Council representing member state governments has been generalised as the Ordinary Legislative Procedure and now applies in the vast majority of legislative domains. Beyond legislation, the EP has become a key actor in other domains such as the conclusion of international agreements between the EU and third countries (Monar 2010; Ripoll Servent 2014), and the appointment of the President and the members of the European Commission (Christiansen 2011; Goldoni 2016). In particular, the changes introduced by the Lisbon Treaty with regard to the appointment procedure of the Commission President and the subsequent creation of the Spitzenkandidaten process
T. CHRISTIANSEN AND D. FROMAGE
have significantly changed the dynamics between European Council, European Commission and EP (Christiansen 2016; Shackleton 2017).
However, even though the EP is now recognised as a powerful player in EU decision-making, critical questions about its role in EU decisionmaking have been asked. These concern the mismatch between its formal powers and the capacity the EP has to actually translate these into influence (Christiansen and Dobbels 2012; Fromage 2018b). There has also been some debate about the degree to which post-Maastricht reforms in general, and crisis decision-making in recent years in particular, have strengthened the intergovernmental aspects of the EU, to the detriment of the supranational institutions, including the EP (Bickerton et al. 2015; Rauh 2018). As the European Council became the de facto decision-making body in the context of the sovereign debt crisis and the refugee crisis, solutions were frequently found through political agreements and new intergovernmental treaties concluded outside of the EU framework rather than following the traditional community method and rather than resorting to EU law-based solutions. In parallel, the Juncker Commission radically reduced the number of legislative initiatives in comparison to its predecessor under the headline of ‘Doing Less More Efficiently’ (Juncker 2014). Consequently, the EP was not able to fully realise the influential role of an equal of the Council that successive treaty reforms had promised.
The increasing differentiation of the EU has also complicated the role of the EP: its central function as the democratic institution at the heart of the Euro-polity is somewhat compromised by the many opt-outs of individual member states, often in key policy areas. The fact that neither the Eurozone nor the Schengen area aligns with the formal membership of the EU means that the EP is not readily acceptable as the only institution that provides the democratic legitimacy for decision-making in these cases (Cooper and Smith 2017; Barrett 2018), even if the European Commission regularly reaffirms the EP’s status of the sole organ for parliamentary legitimacy within the EU (inter alia Commission December Package). In fact, research has demonstrated that the dialogue between the EP and the European Central Bank (ECB) has established an effective accountability mechanism (Torres 2013; Fromage and Ibrido 2018). However, neither involving in its work Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) elected in member states that have opted out of these policies, nor excluding these from such decisions—even though they have been elected to represent the common European interest (Article 14-2 TEU)—would seem to be a strategy that provides sufficient legitimacy for EU decision-making in a policy area that
has become increasingly politicised. Consequently, there have been proposals to set up new, dedicated democratic institutions that precisely match the jurisdiction covered by a specific policy area (Kreilinger and Larhant 2016). The idea of a ‘third chamber’ next to Council and Parliament for the Eurozone has been proposed to overcome this dilemma (Calliess 2015).
These limitations and concerns about future developments should however not distract from the EP’s remarkable rise to becoming a powerful player on the European level, a status that was further cemented by the stronger relationship that EP and Commission developed as a consequence of the EP electing the Commission President, and the subsequent ‘coalition agreement’ between the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), European People’s Party (EPP) and Socialists and Democrats (S&D) groups (Euractiv 2014). It formed the basis for the intended cooperation between the two institutions during the five years of Jean-Claude Juncker’s term as Commission President.
Compared to the central role played by the EP in the post-Maastricht era, the involvement of national parliaments in EU affairs is a more recent and more complex affair. It is a development that also owes much to the Lisbon Treaty, both in terms of the origins of this instance of treaty reform in the 2002–2003 Constitutional Convention which directly involved national Members of parliament (MPs) in deliberations about the revision of the treaty, and in terms of the ‘revolution’ the new Treaty has engendered for parliaments (Raunio 2011). Through the new provisions it contained, in particular the creation of the so-called Early Warning System—a novel procedure allowing national parliaments to scrutinise EU draft legislation for subsidiarity breaches—national legislatures for the first time gained a formal standing in the EU treaties (Kiiver 2012). Even if the ‘yellow card’ procedure has rarely been activated in the first decade after Lisbon, it heightened the attention that national parliaments would give to European affairs and thus transformed quite fundamentally the relationship between Brussels and national chambers, and between them and their national governments (Gattermann and Hefftler 2015; Auel and Christiansen 2015).
The post-Lisbon era then has been a watershed for the European engagement of national parliaments which had not so long ago been considered as “losers” of the integration process (Maurer and Wessels 2001). Even if the role of national parliaments at the European level remains largely advisory, and even if their involvement is uneven across the member states of the EU, their direct interaction with the EU institutions has become more frequent and has involved an ever-increasing
T. CHRISTIANSEN AND D. FROMAGE
number of institutions (Fromage 2018a, b). For instance, the 2010s have seen a remarkable rise in interparliamentary cooperation across national boundaries and governance levels in Europe, and national parliaments have submitted more than 3000 contributions to the European Commission in the framework of the Political Dialogue. At the extreme end of this development, national parliaments rose to prominence in fundamental debates about limiting the transfer of competences to the European level in the mid-2010s, with the proposals for a “red card” system allowing individual national chambers to block the adoption of unwanted European legislation. The potential introduction of an (indirect) right of legislative initiative in the form of a ‘green card’ has also been intensively debated (Groen and Christiansen 2015).
While these extreme ideas did not translate into actual reforms at the time of Brexit, national parliaments do now conduct subsidiarity checks on draft legislative acts transmitted to them directly by the European Commission as a matter of routine. They have also become more deeply involved in the ratification of the trade and investment agreements the EU signs with third countries, in particular since the jurisprudence from the Court of Justice of the EU has determined that so-called mixed agreements require approval both at the European and at the national levels (CJEU 2017). Indeed, as the experience of the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) agreement with Canada demonstrated, this development also extends to the Belgian regional parliaments while, in other member states, regional parliaments may need to be informed (Crespy 2016).
Yet, also with regard to national parliaments, the past decade has not been a story of unmitigated success. The Eurozone crisis, in particular, has had a mixed impact on the influence of national parliaments. In some countries—Germany is a case in point—the already strong standing of parliaments was further expanded in the context of the adoption or the constitutional review of the often controversial legislation that underpinned the EU’s crisis management (Auel and Höing 2015). However, in other domestic contexts, the shift of decision-making to intransparent, intergovernmental fora such as the Eurogroup, and the empowerment of technocratic governance in the context of the Troika, meant that national parliaments became increasingly marginalised (Maatsch 2015). Generally speaking, the crisis had the effect of exacerbating existing inequalities among the national parliaments in the EU: strong parliaments acquiring additional powers, and weaker parliaments becoming more powerless visà-vis their respective executives.
Despite such observations about the varied impact of European developments on national parliaments, and their uneven involvement in the process of scrutinising European legislation, the decade after Lisbon has seen a fundamental shift in the Europeanisation of national parliaments. Rather belatedly, compared to other institutional actors, they have become part of the governance structure of the EU, and even if their influence is not often evident, their presence in the EU has certainly been felt and increasingly visible (Christiansen et al. 2014). What matters more here than the direct role that national parliaments have played in Brussels is the degree of emancipation that has occurred in their relationship with national executives, with an improved access to information and greater opportunities to scrutinise and even mandate ministers attending Council meetings they have—at least in some member states (Gattermann et al. 2013). This matters in a range of policy areas and provides the background also to the way in which national parliaments have been able to engage with member state governments in the Brexit process.
3
BrexiT, ParliamenTs and CiTizens
Under Article 50, the EP is formally required to consent to any agreement that the EU reaches with a state seeking to leave the Union, and this clearly provides the Parliament with influence also over the Brexit negotiations, even if, formally, its participation only intervenes at the ratification stage. As with other matters of a constitutional nature, this formal say on the withdrawal agreement has energised MEPs into having an influential role in the process. Soon after the UK government submitted its notification under Article 50, the Parliament’s Conference of Presidents set up a “Brexit Steering Group” composed of six leading MEPs and chaired by Guy Verhofstadt, leader of the ALDE group in the EP. Guided by this steering group, the EP attentively followed the negotiations and issued motions and opinions on a regular basis, and indeed determined its own ‘red lines’ that would need to be met in order for it to provide its consent to the eventual agreement (European Parliament 2017). Consequently, this volume includes a thorough examination of the way in which the EP was involved in the Brexit process.
Next to this analysis of the EP’s participation, national parliaments, both from the UK and the EU27, are also considered. The role they played in scrutinising the Brexit process needs to be seen against the background of a post-Lisbon, post-crisis landscape of significant diversity
T. CHRISTIANSEN AND D. FROMAGE
across legislatures in the EU described above. The manner in which national parliaments are formally empowered, institutionally capable and politically motivated to oversee the Brexit negotiations conducted by the executive branches differs from one member state to another, and thus requires the examination of the particular circumstances in individual domestic contexts. For this reason, this volume contains a number of case studies looking at the particularities of specific member states. These cases have been chosen with a view to study a range of different national systems—unicameral as well as bicameral; federal as well as unitary; debating as well as working parliaments—while also ensuring that those countries for which Brexit has a particular significance (e.g. Germany/manufacturing industry; Spain/Gibraltar; Luxembourg/financial services; Ireland/ Northern Irish border; Poland and the Czech Republic/free movement of citizens) are examined.
A very special case in this regard is of course the UK itself—it is here that the anticipated impact of the decision to leave the EU was considered to be most far-reaching, and where the issue was most controversial and politicised. As discussed above, Brexit has not only seen a population divided, but also exposed divisions within the main political parties and indeed the political establishment more generally. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that it has also pitched the UK parliament against the government, and indeed put the two Houses of Parliament at loggerheads on various occasions. The situation in the UK is further amplified by the peculiar nature of the unwritten British Constitution which has given rise to disputes about the role of parliament in the context of Brexit, as well as by the importance of parliamentary sovereignty in the UK (Gordon 2016). It took heated public debates, judicial challenges and backbench rebellions to overturn the government’s initial position that parliamentary approval for the UK’s withdrawal from the EU was not required.
In the process, the UK parliament has become a central focus for debates about the nature of Brexit, and the key location for ultimate decisionmaking in this matter. In recognition of this significance, three chapters in this volume are devoted to distinct aspects of the role of parliament in the UK decision-making process on Brexit. This includes examinations of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, of the parliamentary scrutiny of the executive and of the internal politics in each House, leading to discussions of the role of committees and the nature of party politics. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate the massive influence that the UK parliament has had on the Brexit process and the shape of the final agreement.
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zip through in minutes or seconds. It was something like working all year building an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display, touching the match, and seeing the whole thing go up in spectacular smoke for a brief moment. Of course the end justifies the means in either case, and as soon as the computer has quit whirring, or the skyrockets faded out, the programmer gets back to work. But some short cuts were learned.
Even a program for a unique problem is likely to contain many “subroutines” just like those in other problems. These are used and re-used; some computers now have libraries of programs they can draw on much as we call on things learned last week or last year.
With his work completed, the programmer’s only worry is that an error might exist in it, an error that could raise havoc if not discovered. One false bit of logic in a business problem; a slight mathematical boner in a design for a manned missile, could be catastrophic since our technology is so complicated that the mistake might be learned only when disaster struck. So the programmer checks and rechecks his work until he is positive he has not erred.
How about the computer? It checks itself too; so thoroughly that there is no danger of it making a mistake. Computer designers have been very clever in this respect. One advanced technique is “majority rule” checking. Not long ago when the abacus was used even in banking, the Japanese were aware that a single accountant might make a false move and botch up the day’s tally. But if two operators worked the same problem and got the same answer, the laws of probability rule that the answer can be accepted. If the sums do not agree, though, which man is right? To check further, and save the time needed to go through the whole problem again, three abacuses, or abaci, are put through their paces. Now if two answers agree, chances are they are the right solution. If all three are different, the bank had better hire new clerks!
A word picture “flow chart” of the logical operation of selecting the proper key.
Remington Rand UNIVAC
Arithmetic or Logic
Now that our computer has the two necessary ingredients of input and control, the arithmetic or logic unit can get busy. Babbage called this the “mill,” and with all the whirring gears and clanking arms his engine boasted, the term must have been accurate. Today’s computer is much quieter since in electronic switches the only moving parts are the electrons themselves and these don’t make much of a racket. Such switches have another big advantage in that they open and close at a great rate, practically the speed of light. The fastest computers use switches that act in nanoseconds, or billionths of a second. In one nanosecond light itself travels only a foot.
The computer may be likened to someone counting on two of his fingers. Instead of the decimal or ten-base system, most computers use binary arithmetic, which has a base of two. But fingers that can be counted in billionth parts of a second can handle figures pretty fast, and the computer has learned some clever tricks that further speed things up. It can only add, but by adroit juggling it subtracts by using the complement of the desired number, a technique known to those familiar with an ordinary adding machine. There are also some tricks to multiplying that allow the computer again to simply add and come up with the answer.
With pencil and paper we can multiply 117 times 835 easily. Remember, though, that the computer can only add, and that it was once called a speedy imbecile. The most imbecilic computer might solve the problem by adding 117 to itself 835 times. A smarter model will reverse the procedure and handle only 117 numbers. The moron type of computer is a bit more clever and sets up the problem this way:
A moment’s reflection will show that this is the same as adding 7 times 835, 10 times 835, and 100 times 835. And of course the computer arrives at the answer in about the time it takes us to start drawing the line under our multiplier.
The Bendix Corp., Computer Division
Assembly of printed-circuit component “packages” into computer
Perhaps smarting under the unkind remarks about its mental ability, the computer has lately been trying some new approaches to the handling of complex arithmetical problems. Instead of adding long strings of numbers, it will take a guess at the result, do some smart checking, adjust its figures, and shortly arrive at the right solution. For nonarithmetical problems, the computer substitutes yes and no for 1 and 0 and blithely solves problems in logic at the same high rate of speed.
Memory
When we demonstrated our superiority earlier in multiplying instead of adding the numbers in the problem, we were drawing on our memory: recalling multiplication tables committed to memory when we were quite young. Babbage’s “store” in his difference engine, you will recall, could memorize a thousand fifty-digit numbers, a feat that would tax most of us. The grandchildren of the Babbage machine can call on as many as a billion bits of information stored on tape. As you watch the reels of tape spinning, halting abruptly, and spinning again so purposefully, remember that the computer is remembering. In addition to its large memory, incidentally, a computer may also have a smaller “scratch-pad” memory to save time.
Early machines used electromechanical relays or perhaps vacuum-tube “flip-flops” for memory. Punched-card files store data too. To speed up the access to information, designers tried the delay-line circuit, a device that kept information circulating in a mercury or other type of delay. Magnetic drums and discs are also used. Magnetic tape on reels is used more than any other memory system for many practical reasons. There is one serious handicap with the tape system, however. Information on it, as on the drum, disc, file card, or delay line, is serial, that is, it is arranged in sequence. To reach a certain needed bit of data might require running through an entire reel of tape. Even though the tape moves at very high speed, time is lost while the computer’s arithmetic unit waits. For this reason the designers of the most advanced computers have gone to “random access” instead of sequential memory for part of the machine.
Tiny cores of ferrite material which has the desired magnetic properties are threaded on wires. These become memory elements, as many as a hundred of them in an area the size of a postage stamp. Each core is at the intersection of two wires, one horizontal
and one vertical. Each core thus has a unique “address” and because of the arrangement of the core matrix, any address can be reached in about the same amount of time as any other. Thus, instead of spinning the tape several hundred feet to reach address number 6,564, the computer simply closes the circuit of vertical row 65 and horizontal row 64, and there is the desired bit of information in the form of a magnetic field in the selected core.
Hot on the heels of the development of random-access core memories came that of thin metallic film devices and so-called cryogenic or supercold magnetic components that do the same job as the ferrite cores but take only a fraction of the space. Some of these advanced devices also lend themselves to volume production and thus pave the way for memories with more and more information-storage capability.
Magnetic core plane, the computer’s memory.
In the realm of “blue-sky” devices, sometimes known as “journalistors,” are molecular block memories. These chunks of material will contain millions of bits of information in cubic inches of volume, and some way of three-dimensional scanning of the entire block will be developed. With such a high-volume memory, the computer of tomorrow will fit on a desk top instead of requiring rows and rows of tape-filled machines.
International Business Machines Corp
Today, tape offers the cheapest “per bit” storage, and it is necessary to use the external or peripheral type of information storage. This is not much of a problem except for the matter of space. Since most computers are electronic, all that is required to tie the memory units to the arithmetic unit is wire connections. Douglas Aircraft ties computers in its California and North Carolina plants with 2,400 miles of telephone hookup. Sometimes even wires are not necessary. In the Los Angeles area, North American Aviation has a number of plants separated by as many as forty miles. Each plant is quite capable of using the computers in the other locations, with a stream of digits beamed by microwave radio from one to the other. Information can be transferred in this manner at rates up to 65,000 bits per second.
Output
Once the computer has taken the input of information, been instructed what to do, and used its arithmetic and memory, it has done the bulk of the work on the problem. But it must now reverse the procedure that took place when information flowed into it and was translated into electrical impulses and magnetic currents. It could convey the answer to another machine that spoke its language, but man would find such information unintelligible. So the computer has an output section that translates back into earth language.
Babbage’s computer was to have printed out its answers on metal plates, and many computers today furnish punched cards or tape as an output. Others print the answers on sheets of paper, so rapidly that a page of this book would take little more than a second to produce! One of the greatest challenges of recent years is that of producing printing devices fast enough to exploit fully the terrific speeds of electronic computing machines. There would be little advantage in a computer that could add all the digits in all the phone books in the world in less than a minute if it took three weeks to print out the answer.
Impact printers, those that actually strike keys against paper, have been improved to the point where they print more than a thousand lines of type, each with 120 characters in it, per minute. But even this is not rapid enough in some instances, and completely new kinds of printers have been developed. One is the Charactron tube, a device combining a cathode-ray tube, something like the TV picture tube, with an interposed 64-character matrix about half an inch in diameter. Electrical impulses deflect the electron beam in the tube so that it passes through the proper matrix character and forms that image on the face of the tube. This image then is printed electrostatically on the treated paper rather than with a metal type face. With no moving parts except the paper, and of course the
electrons themselves, the Charactron printer operates close to the speed of the computer itself, and produces 100,000 words a minute. This entire book could be printed out in about forty-five seconds in this manner.
Minneapolis-Honeywell,
Electronic Data Processing Division
A high-speed printer is the output of this computer It prints 900 lines a minute
There are many other kinds of outputs. Some are in the form of payroll checks, rushing from the printer at the rate of 10,000 an hour. Some are simply illuminated numbers and letters on the face of the computer As mentioned earlier, the SAGE air defense computer displays the tracks of aircraft and missiles on large screens, each accurately tagged for speed, altitude, and classification. The computer may even speak its answer to us audibly.
General Electric engineers have programmed computers to play music, and come up with a clever giveaway record titled “Christmas Carols in 210 Time,” à la pipe-organ solo. Some more serious musical work is now being done in taking a musical input fed to a computer, programming it for special effects including the reverberant effect of a concert hall, and having that played as the output.
A more direct vocal output is the spoken word. Some computers have this capability now, with a modest vocabulary of their own and an extensive tape library to draw from. As an example, Gilfillan Radio has produced a computerized ground-control-approach system that studies the radar return of the aircraft being guided, and “tells” the pilot how to fly the landing. All the human operator does is monitor the show.
The system uses the relatively simple method of selecting the correct words from a previously tape-recorded human voice. More sophisticated systems will be capable of translating code from the computer directly into an audible output. One very obvious advantage of such an automatic landing system is that the computer is never subject to a bad day, nerves, or fright. It will talk the aircraft down calmly and dispassionately, albeit somewhat mechanically.
These then are the five basic parts of a computer or computer system: input, control, arithmetic-logic, memory, and output. Remember that this applies equally to simple and complex machines, and also to computers other than the more generally encountered electronic types. For while the electronic computer is regarded as the most advanced, it is not necessarily the final result of computer development. Let us consider some of the deviants, throwbacks, and mutations of the computer species.
Kearfott Division, General Precision, Inc
The tiny black box is capable of the same functions as the larger plastic laboratory model pneumatic digital computer
Packaging densities of more than 2,000 elements per cubic inch are expected
Another Kind of Computer
We have discussed mechanical, electromechanical, electrical, and electronic computers. There are also those which make use of quite different media for their operation: hydraulics, air pressure, and even hot gases. The pneumatic is simplest to explain, and also has its precedent in the old player-piano mentioned earlier.
Just as an electric or electronic switch can be open or closed, so can a pneumatic valve. The analogy carries much further. Some of the basic electronic components used in computers are diodes, capacitors, inductors, and “flip-flop” circuits which we have talked of. Each of these, it turns out, can be approximated by pneumatic devices.
The pneumatic diode is the simplest component, being merely an orifice or opening through which gas is flowing at or above the speed of sound. Under these conditions, any disturbance in pressure “upstream” of the orifice will move “downstream” through the orifice, but any such happening downstream cannot move upstream. This is analogous to the way an electronic diode works in the computer, a one-way valve effect.
The electrical capacitor with its stored voltage charge plays an important part in computer circuitry. A plenum chamber, or box holding a volume of air, serves as a pneumatic capacitor. Similarly, the effect of an inductor, or coil, is achieved with a long pipe filled with moving air.
The only complicated element in our pneumatic computer building blocks is the flip-flop, or bistable element. A system of tubes, orifices, and balls makes a device that assumes one position upon the application of pneumatic force, and the other upon a successive application, similar to the electronic flip-flop. Pneumatic engineers use terms like “pressure drop” and “pneumatic buffering,” comparable to voltage drop and electrical buffering.
A good question at this point is just why computer designers are even considering pneumatic methods when electronic computers are doing such a fine job. There are several reasons that prompt groups like the Kearfott Division of General Precision Inc., AiResearch, IBM’s Swiss Laboratory, and the Army’s Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratory to develop the air-powered computers. One of these is radiation susceptibility. Diodes and transistors have an Achilles heel in that they cannot take much radiation. Thus in military applications, and in space work, electronic computers may be incapable of proper operation under exposure to fallout or cosmic rays. A pneumatic computer does not have this handicap.
High temperature is another bugaboo of the electronic computer. For operation above 100° C., for instance, it is necessary to use expensive silicon semiconductor elements. The cryogenic devices we talked of require extremely low temperatures and are thus also ruled out in hot environments. The pneumatic computer, on the other hand, can actually operate on the exhaust gases of a rocket with temperatures up to 2000° F. There may be something humanlike in this ability to operate on hot air, but there are more practical reasons like simplicity, light weight, and low cost.
The pneumatic computer, of course, has limitations of its own. The most serious is that of speed, and its top limit seems to be about 100 kilocycles a second. Although this sounds fast—a kilocycle being a thousand cycles, remember—it is tortoise-slow compared with the 50-megacycle speed of present electronic machines. But within its limitations the pneumatic machine can do an excellent job. Kearfott plans shrinking 3,000 pneumatic flip-flops and their power supply and all circuitry into a one-inch cube; and packing a medium-size general-purpose digital computer complete with memory into a case 5-1/2 inches square and an inch thick. Such a squeezing of components surely indicates compressed air as a logical power supply!
Going beyond the use of air as a medium, Army researchers have worked with “fluid” flip-flops capable of functioning at temperatures ranging from minus 100° to plus 7,000° F.! The limit is dictated only
by the material used to contain the fluid, and would surely meet requirements for the most rigorous environment foreseeable.
The fluid flip-flop operates on a different principle from its pneumatic cousin, drawing on fluid dynamics to shift from one state to the other. Fluid dynamics permits the building of switches and amplifiers that simulate electronic counterparts adequately, and the Army’s Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratory has built such oscillators, shift registers, and full adders, the flesh and bones of the computer. Researchers believe components can be built cheaply and that ultimately a complete fluid computer can be assembled.
The X-15 is cited as an example of a good application for fluidtype computing devices. The hypersonic aircraft flies so fast it glows, and a big part of its problem is the cooling of a large amount of electronic equipment that generates additional heat to compound the difficulty. Missiles and space vehicles have similar requirements.
Tomorrow’s computer may use liquid helium or a white-hot plasma jet instead of electronics or gas as a medium. It may use a medium nobody has dreamed of yet, or one tried earlier and discarded. Regardless of what it uses, it will probably work on the same basic theory and principles we’ve outlined here. And try as we may, we will get no more out of it than we put in.
“It is the machines that make life complicated, at the same time that they impose on it a high tempo.”
—Carl Lotus Becker
4: Computer Cousins—Analog and Digital
There are many thousands of computers in operation today—in enough different outward varieties to present a hopeless classification task to the confused onlooker Actually there are only two basic types of computing machines, the analog and the digital. There is also a third computer, an analog-digital hybrid that makes use of the better features of each to do certain jobs more effectively.
The distinction between basic types is clear-cut and may be explained in very simple terms. Again we go to the dictionary for a starting point. Webster says: “Analogue.—That which is analogous to some other thing.” Even without the terminal ue, the analog computer is based on the principle of analogy. It is actually a model of the problem we wish to solve. A tape measure is an analog device; so is a slide rule or the speedometer in your car. These of course are very simple analogs, but the principle of the more complex ones is the same. The analog computer, then, simulates a physical problem and deals in quantities which it can measure.
Some writers feel that the analog machine is not a computer at all in the strict sense of the word, but actually a laboratory model of a physical system which may be studied and measured to learn certain implicit facts.
Minneapolis-Honeywell Computer Center
A multimillion dollar aerospace computer facility. On left is an array of 16 analog computers; at right is a large digital data-processing system
The facility can perform scientific and business tasks simultaneously
The dictionary also gives us a good clue to the digital computer: “Digital.—Of the fingers or digits.” A digital machine deals in digits, or discrete units, in its calculations. For instance, if we ask it to multiply 2 times 2, it answers that the product is exactly 4. A slide rule, which we have said is an analog device, might yield an answer of 3.98 or 4.02, depending on the quality of its workmanship and our eyesight.
The term “discrete” describes the units used by the digital machine; an analog machine deals with “continuous” quantities. When you watch the pointer on your speedometer you see that it moves continuously from zero to as fast as you can or dare drive. The gas gauge is a graphic presentation of the amount of fuel in the tank, just as the speedometer is a picture of your car’s speed. For convenience we interpolate the numbers 10, 20, 30, 1/4, 1/2, and so on. What we do, then, is to convert from a continuous analog presentation to a digital answer with our eyes and brain. This analog-
