The Baltic Sea Region as a Laboratory for Inter-parliamentary “Dialogue”

Abstract

To take up a metaphor that was originally coined for constitutional judges (Jackson 2009), national parliaments are nowadays more and more engaged in transnational relationships. Globalization has influenced this phenomenon, which dates back to the late 19th century, in two ways: from a quantitative point of view, since the number of inter-parliamentary contacts has significantly increased over the last 30 years, and from a qualitative point of view because it has become less “deliberative” and more “relational”. Following Vicki Jackson’s theory, this means that parliamentary engagement is mostly provided by international, supranational and national norms, contrary to the past, when it was mainly left to the autonomous initiative of parliaments. The end of the Cold War and the proliferation of regional integration processes have certainly strengthened such quantitative and qualitative trends.