Franz C. Mayer

holds the Chair in Public Law, European Law, Public International Law, Comparative Law and Law and Politics at the University of Bielefeld (Law Faculty). He studied Law, Political Science and History at the Universities of Bonn and Munich and at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences-Po). LL.M. (Yale Law School) 1995; Dr. iur. (University of Munich) 1999; Habilitation (Humboldt University) 2005. He was Visiting researcher at Harvard Law School 2000; Visiting lecturer at University of Warsaw since 2000; Visiting professor at Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne) 2007 and at Paris 2 (Panthéon-Assas) 2010. Professor Mayer was Counsel to the German Parliament in the Treaty of Lisbon-trial at the German Constitutional Court in 2008-2009, and is currently counsel in the case pending on the Euro stabilization mechanism. (His fellowship was made possible with the support of German Academic Exchange Service-DAAD and Deutsches Haus at NYU).

Research Project

Parliaments and Globalization – Parliamentarianism in Times of Europeanization and Globalization

The dream of a World Parliament has to a large extent remained a dream. Globalization and Europeanization have led to an increasing amount of international, transnational and sometimes even supranational co-operation. At the same time, international, transnational or supranational parliamentarianism has not been the central topic of globalization and Europeanization. It appears even that parliaments may turn out to be on the losing side of these developments. Governments and ministerial bureaucracies are perceived as the key players, emerging as the actual law-makers in a globalized word. Is parliamentarianism bound to become irrelevant because of globalization? Was parliamentarianism just a temporary phenomenon that emerged in the 18th and 19th century, in order to be gradually overcome in the 20th and 21st century? Are we witnessing the final days of parliamentarianism? And if parliamentarianism is changing, what about democracy? I would like to explore these questions starting out from the European Union experience, pursuing a comparative perspective. European integration points to the fact that there are two perspectives in the present context: on the one hand the question of parliamentarianism beyond the nation-state, on the other hand the changes traditional parliamentarianism in the nation-state undergoes. With the European Parliament, the EU has created some unique form of international parliament. At the same time, European integration has also transformed national parliaments in the EU. It is the national parliaments I am particularly interested in, because here a comparative approach with developments outside the EU is of particular interest. At the same time, I would not want to limit my analysis to the impact of Europeanization on national parliaments, I am also interested in the impact that other realms of internationalization and globalization have on national parliaments in the EU Member States and elsewhere.