Between Military Efficiency and Democratic Legitimacy : Mapping Parliamentary

Parliamentary approval can be of crucial importance to ensure the democratic legitimacy of military operations as it can establish public consent to the executive’s use of force. But involving parliament in decisions to deploy military forces may have negative repercussions on the efficiency of operations, e.g. by slowing down decision-making. As the military activity of democracies has been on the rise since the end of the Cold War, democracies around the world have been increasingly pressed to deal with this trade-off between legitimacy and efficiency in sending troops abroad. This paper surveys the deployment provisions of 49 contemporary democracies to establish whether and how parliaments are actually involved in deployment decisions. It demonstrates that the rules for parliamentary participation mark a continuum that ranges from complete exclusion to a comprehensive veto position of parliament over all potential deployments. In between these two extremes, democracies have found a wide variety of solutions to cope with the legitimacy-efficiency problem. Despite the growing prevalence of military deployments, there is no discernible trend towards parliamentarisation, however. Rather the trend towards internationalisation of security policies contributed to a weakening of parliamentary powers in some countries. SINCE THE end of the Cold War, military deployments by liberal democracies have become more and more common. Until then, involvement in actual armed conflict had been limited to a rather small number of democracies, mainly the USA, Israel, India, the UK, France and Australia. Most other democracies maintained large armies for a worst-case scenario of homeland defence that—fortunately—never materialised. If deployed at all, these armed forces contributed to peace-keeping operations that only allowed the use of force in exceptional cases of self-defence. It was only in the course of the 1990s that United Nations (UN)-mandated operations increasingly allowed for the use of force with the development of ‘robust’ peace-keeping, peaceenforcement operations and UN-mandated operations to combat terrorism or piracy. Democracies have been particularly frequent contributors to these missions. In NATO’s Kosovo campaign in 1999 and Parliamentary Affairs Vol. 64 No. 1 # The Author [2010]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] doi:10.1093/pa/gsq041 Parliamentary Affairs Vol. 64 No. 1, 2011, 175–192 Advance Access Publication 21 September 2010 at V ije U nivrsiteit, L irary on D ecem er 0, 2011 http://pardjournals.org/ D ow nladed from the US-led war some democracies even engaged in military operations not explicitly authorised by the UN. This new military activism of democracies has revived debates about the role of parliaments in decision-making on the use of force. Since the end of the Cold War, many democracies have reformed their deployment regimes and attempted to find an adequate place for parliaments in them. In doing so, they saw themselves faced with a formidable dilemma. On the one hand, parliamentary participation in decision-making may appear as a useful tool or even a crucial prerequisite to provide military deployments with much-needed legitimacy. On the other hand, however, parliamentary involvement may be held to endanger the efficiency of force deployments. Moreover, the emphasis which, in the past two decades, has been placed on ‘rapid reaction’ to international crises militates against the involvement of additional actors in the force deployment process. How did democracies deal with this dilemma? This paper investigates in detail how democracies around the globe have attempted to resolve this trade-off between legitimacy and efficiency regarding parliamentary involvement in deployment decisions. Although deployment legislation and the role which is accorded to parliaments have received growing attention by legal as well as political science scholars the scope of past investigations has usually been confined to the transatlantic region. Not surprisingly, most studies focused on the militarily most active democracies, especially on the USA whose war powers have, moreover, attracted a lot of commentary due to their contested nature; and on the member states of the Western security institutions NATO, EU and WEU. In contrast, this paper looks at almost 50 democracies worldwide. Based on a new data set, which covers the war powers of parliaments in 49 democracies since the end of the Cold War, we can paint a more comprehensive picture of the roles parliaments play in decision-making on the use of armed force and discuss how democracies attempt to finetune the balance between the conflicting requirements of military efficiency and democratic legitimacy. We begin our discussion by briefly reviewing the debate about the desirability of parliamentary involvement in deployment decisions. Based on our data set on parliamentary control of military missions, we then map the war powers in contemporary democracies and discuss main trends and patterns. It will become clear that the most influential oversight instrument, namely full-blown ex ante veto power across all military missions, is granted only to a minority of parliaments worldwide. Yet democracies have found many other ways to involve parliaments in decision-making about military deployments, making a multitude of distinctions between the types of operations over which parliaments have a say and the stages at which they become involved in the decision-making 176 Parliamentary Affairs at V ije U nivrsiteit, L irary on D ecem er 0, 2011 http://pardjournals.org/ D ow nladed from process. An overall trend towards the parliamentarisation of war powers, which has been claimed to exist, is not discernible, however. The case for and against parliamentary war powers Critics of parliamentary war powers can refer to an impressive list of thinkers who argued against the involvement of parliament in decisionmaking over military missions. Machiavelli, John Locke, Montesquieu and Alexis de Tocqueville all argued that the executive should be able to decide autonomously over the deployment of armed forces. Even though the nature of armed conflict and the international system more broadly underwent dramatic changes since the times of these thinkers, the basic arguments against parliamentary involvement remained, by and large, the same: first and most importantly, the involvement of parliament is seen to undermine the efficiency of military operations which requires ‘secrecy, security and surprise’. According to Rasler and Thompson, ‘decentralising power in the face of threat would seem inefficient and highly dangerous, perhaps even inviting attack’. Second, parliamentary involvement is regarded to blur the distinction between executive and legislative responsibilities. As a legislator, parliament may decide on rules governing the use of armed force but should refrain from deciding over individual missions. Moreover, parliament’s ability to hold government accountable for its decisions does not square well with its claim for influencing these decisions in the first place. The only modern addition to these traditional arguments is the notion that parliamentary involvement makes joint military missions with other countries more difficult, complicated and, as a consequence, less efficient. In contrast, proponents of parliamentary war powers emphasise that despite such concerns about efficiency, the use of force requires a special effort to ensure its legitimacy. Few decisions have a more severe impact on the lives of citizens than decisions on military missions, and therefore no meaningful notion of democracy could possibly exempt them from parliamentary control. Countering critics’ arguments about military efficiency, they argue that provisions can easily be made to allow for swift reaction to outside attack while putting participation in ‘wars of choice’ under tighter restraints. Furthermore, proponents argue that the support of parliaments has a beneficial effect on military morale. General Sir Michael Rose testified to the House of Lords that ‘[t]here can be no more debilitating effect on the morale of members of the armed forces for them to know that their country does not support the mission [. . .]. A formal requirement for prior parliamentary authorisation for entering into conflict situations can therefore only be of benefit to members of the armed forces’. Finally, proponents of parliamentary war powers argue that the quality of decisions improve when they are taken with the involvement of parliament (or the public more broadly) instead of small cabinet circles. Ever since Immanuel Between Military Efficiency and Democratic Legitimacy 177 at V ije U nivrsiteit, L irary on D ecem er 0, 2011 http://pardjournals.org/ D ow nladed from Kant’s Perpetual Peace, this line of reasoning has come with a pacifist flavour because if ‘the consent of the citizens is required to decide whether or not war is to be declared, it is very natural that they will have great hesitation in embarking on so dangerous an enterprise’. More recently, empirical studies have found evidence for various effects of democratic control of security policy: democracies have been found to be more likely to win the wars they fight because deliberation and accountability lead to a more careful selection of conflict involvements and to inflict fewer casualties on their own as well as their opponent’s civilian population. In a similar vein, Dieterich, Hummel and Marschall found evidence that democracies with weak parliamentary control were more likely to participate in the Iraq War. However, the Iraq War also demonstrates that a parliamentary vote does not automatically ensure democratic legitimacy. In the UK, for example, the Iraq War remained unpopular despite cross-party support for a government motion in favour of invasion on its eve. The British example serves as a reminder that in parliamentary systems, MPs of the party (and occasionally: parties) in government risk the fall of government and, by extension, their own re-election, when refusing to support government policy. Remarkably, proponents and critics of parliamentary control do not dispute that parliamentary involvement slows down decision-making over military missions and increases public ex ante scrutiny to the effect that, if conflicting, the interests of a reluctant public are more likely to trump security considerations. The main disagreement concerns the desirability of this effect with critics having more confidence in the executive’s capacity to respond adequately to international pressures and requirements and proponents being more alarmed about possibilities of misjudgement and even abuse of executive freedom. Mapping war powers in contemporary democracies How do states deal with this trade-off between efficiency and legitimacy of military operations? Which rights do they grant to parliaments? Parliamentary war powers are, of course, a multidimensional concept encompassing budgetary powers, obligations of government to report to parliament or rights to visit troops during deployment. We will focus in this paper on the arguably most effective tool parliaments can possess to control the executive’s use of force. According to Heiner Hänggi, ‘the strongest means of parliamentary oversight by far is [. . .] the constitutional or legal right to approve or reject such use of force’. Even this right of approval may take a variety of forms, however, and may be differentiated, for example, according to the type of mission or the stage of the decision-making process at which parliaments become involved. We will begin our investigation by examining how wide spread the most extensive form of this kind of parliamentary involvement has become since the end of the Cold War: parliament’s 178 Parliamentary Affairs at V ije U nivrsiteit, L irary on D ecem er 0, 2011 http://pardjournals.org/ D ow nladed from right to veto troop deployments before they are launched. On this basis we will then examine the main differentiations that have developed among parliaments beneath this general level. Our analysis is based on a new data collection we created for this purpose, the ‘ParlCon’ data set. ParlCon assembles information about the parliamentary control of military missions in 49 democracies over the period 1989–2004. As levels of parliamentary control may change over time, the country-year is the unit of analysis in ParlCon. Included are countries that in a given year could be characterised as an uncontested democracy. Following common practice, we used the POLITY IV database to identify these established democracies. Accordingly, every country that has a POLITY score of 9 or 10 in a given year was included in ParlCon for that year. We then excluded those countries that do not have military forces (namely Costa Rica, Mauritius, and Panama) as well as Taiwan because of its special status as an entity with very limited international recognition and its concomitant special role with regard to military missions. Finally, we limit our analysis to the period between the end of the Cold War, 1989, and 2004. All in all, we have gathered data on 49 countries over varying periods of time, yielding a total of 616 country-years. A complete list of countries and their basic parliamentary war powers is reproduced in the appendix. Looking first at the share of countries whose parliament holds ex ante veto power we find that a considerable minority of parliaments enjoy such a right. As Figure 1 demonstrates, such veto power can be found in about a third of democracies. All in all, 21 democracies had institutionalised parliamentary ex ante veto right for at least some period of time, although four of them Figure 1. Share of democracies with and without parliamentary ex ante veto power. Between Military Efficiency and Democratic Legitimacy 179 at V ije U nivrsiteit, L irary on D ecem er 0, 2011 http://pardjournals.org/ D ow nladed from abolished it during the period we studied. It is important to note that this group of states has a highly varied composition. It includes NATO states (e.g. Turkey or Denmark) as well as non-aligned countries (e.g. Ireland or Austria), parliamentary systems (e.g. the four countries just mentioned) and presidential ones (e.g. Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay or Venezuela). The majority of countries, however, do not give parliament a veto power over military missions. This latter group likewise includes parliamentary systems (e.g. Canada, Thailand or, until 1996, Israel) and presidential ones (e.g. Colombia, Ecuador, Madagascar or the USA) as well as alliance members (e.g. Canada or Belgium) and nonaligned states (e.g. India or Jamaica). Although neither the presidentialism/parliamentarism distinction nor alliance membership has any discernible impact on the presence or absence of parliamentary war powers, it is remarkable that almost all members of the Commonwealth, whose constitution has been heavily influenced by the British role model with its doctrine of the royal prerogative, assign war powers exclusively to the executive. Thus, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Botswana, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago and of course the UK itself all lack ex ante veto power. In contrast, Papua New Guinea and, since 2003, Cyprus, are the only Commonwealth members whose parliaments may veto deployment decisions. Figure 1 also suggests that the basic war power provisions have been highly stable in most democracies. A change through which parliament gained or lost its veto right took place in only five states during this period, whereas no change occurred in 37, i.e. in almost 80% of the states we look at. In the remaining states, rules for the deployment of forces were created or clarified for the first time during the period we cover and remained stable from there on. New rules were drawn up especially in newly democratising states, where there were strong incentives to give parliament a prominent role in deployment decisions during the process of democratisation. Because concerns about a possible misuse of the military to oppress democratising forces both within and outside the country were widespread in these countries, constitutional provisions frequently introduced tight controls on the government. Thus, soon after the end of authoritarian rule, parliamentary veto power was introduced in the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Romania. In Hungary where memories of being both a victim of and a participant in military interventions to restore the Communist Party’s control of power were still alive, the constitution even provided for a two-thirds majority of all MPs (whether present or not) before troops could be deployed. Remarkably, this trend towards parliamentary war powers was largely absent in new democracies outside Europe such as Thailand or Peru. Apparently, in these countries, concerns about a military coup against the legitimate 180 Parliamentary Affairs at V ije U nivrsiteit, L irary on D ecem er 0, 2011 http://pardjournals.org/ D ow nladed from democratic government were more important than concerns about the misuse of the military by that government. Where democratic constitutions were already in place and included provisions on military missions they were sometimes limited to the case of declaring war. With a view to contemporary deployments, they were therefore of limited use since war has long ceased to be legitimate under international law. In fact, the UN Charter has delegitimised any use of force other than either in self-defence or on the basis of a mandate of the Security Council. Originating in earlier periods of a country’s constitutional history and having survived dramatic changes in international law, such provisions called for further clarification for missions other than war. Nonetheless, a considerable number of countries refrained from any revision of their constitutional provisions to the effect that parliament effectively lost all its war powers as the only use of force it may authorise was outlawed under international law. This holds true for Australia, Colombia, Mongolia, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Thailand. Other democracies filled this lacuna by either amending or re-interpreting their constitutions. With the exception of the post-socialist countries discussed above, few countries opted for constitutional amendments, the Netherlands being a rare exception. In other countries, constitutional courts were instrumental in (re-)interpreting constitutional provisions. For example, the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled in 1994 that the constitutional provision according to which military force may only be used in self-defence or in the framework of a collective security system, allowed out of area missions in the framework of the UN or NATO. The court also asked parliament to draft a deployment law which entered into force in 2004. We see much more reform activity, however, below the level of constitutional revision. In adjusting their deployment provisions to changes in the international use of force, most countries opted for secondary legislation, either by way of specific deployment laws or as part of more comprehensive military laws. Secondary legislation allowed for a higher degree of differentiation between various types of military missions and for special regulations in case of emergency and consequently for much more fine-grained parliamentary powers. Thus, many democracies have found a more subtle balance between military and democratic requirements than the dichotomous choice between the presence or absence of ex ante veto power suggests. Indeed, the complete exclusion of parliament from decision-making over military deployments and the full-blown parliamentary veto over all military operations are but the two extreme ends of a continuum which includes a wealth of provisions designed to fine tune the balance between military efficiency and democratic legitimacy. On the one hand, some countries whose parliament generally has an ex ante veto power have exempted certain types of missions from this general rule to allow different mixtures of Between Military Efficiency and Democratic Legitimacy 181 at V ije U nivrsiteit, L irary on D ecem er 0, 2011 http://pardjournals.org/ D ow nladed from military efficiency and democratic legitimacy for different types of military missions. On the other hand, many countries whose parliament has no ex ante veto power nevertheless have granted parliament various degrees of involvement in decision-making over military missions such as the right to be consulted or the power of ex post approval. In a similar vein, some democracies have designed provisions to allow a selected group of deputies—but not parliament as a whole— to participate in decision-making on the use of force. Many democracies require ex ante parliamentary approval for some kinds of military missions but allow government to decide autonomously on others. Although several criteria for differentiation are discernible, the underlying idea remains the same, namely that different missions require different balances between the requirements of military efficiency and democratic control. This is most obvious with regard to self-defence in case of an external attack which does not require ex ante parliamentary approval in any state. Further differentiations are frequently made on the basis of two criteria: first, several democracies reserve ex ante approval to severe forms of military force while exempting less severe ones; second, various democracies require ex ante approval in general but exempt military missions which are mandated by international organisations. Exempting traditional peacekeeping operations (as in Sweden), deployments of less than 12 soldiers (as in Ireland) or less than a hundred soldiers and a duration of less than three weeks (as in Switzerland) are typical examples of granting government exclusive decision-making power in cases which are considered of minor importance. In such cases, which are unlikely to escalate and put the lives of servicemen at risk, a lower standard of democratic legitimacy is considered sufficient. In a similar vein, the German deployment law provides for a simplified procedure for minor missions. Some countries also provide for emergency procedures through which they enable government to deploy troops rapidly without consulting parliament in cases of particular urgency. Usually, parliamentary approval has then to be given ex post or else the troops have to be called back within a certain time frame. Such provisions exist, e.g. in Austria (two weeks timeframe), and for certain operations in Japan (20 days), in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (60 days, respectively). From a legal perspective, a mandate from the UN Security Council under chapter VII of the UN Charter plays a pivotal role in this context because any other use of force (with the exception of selfdefence) is illegitimate under international law. Remarkably, however, a UN Security Council mandate does not render ex ante parliamentary approval obsolete in any democracy we studied. Rather, in Ireland such a mandate has been required in addition to parliamentary approval. In the Irish ‘triple-lock’ system, a UN mandate is the first requirement for 182 Parliamentary Affairs at V ije U nivrsiteit, L irary on D ecem er 0, 2011 http://pardjournals.org/ D ow nladed from any military operation (government’s and parliament’s consent providing the keys to the second and third lock). Although without the UN’s power to legitimise the use of force under international law, regional organisations have assumed a more prominent place in democracies’ deployment legislation, at least in Europe. In Austria, for example, troops may only be deployed on request of the UN, the EU or the OSCE. The Finnish armed forces could only participate in traditional UN peacekeeping operations before this was more and more extended in the 1990s and 2000s to include OSCE-mandated action, UN peace support operations in a wider sense and, today, basically any military operation mandated by an international organisation. Similarly, the Canadian National Defence Act, stipulates that Canadian forces may be activated for nondefence purposes only to participate in missions under the UN Charter or within NATO or similar organisations. Whereas the countries just mentioned consider a regional organisation’s mandate as an additional requirement to ex ante parliamentary approval, other countries have regarded it as a substitute. Surprisingly enough, this concerns especially newly democratised states which had taken so much care to ensure tight parliamentary control over the executive’s use of military force immediately after their transition to democracy. In the context of their accessions to NATO and the EU, many Central and Eastern European states chose to relax these restrictions and to abolish the parliamentary proviso for NATO and EU operations. This move usually was justified with requirements of military efficiency (see also below). In Hungary, for example, parliament enjoys a general veto right over military deployments. Yet parliamentary approval is not needed if troops are deployed to NATO or EU missions. Similar exceptions exist in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia. These are exceptions of major importance, as they exempt probably the largest proportion of operations in which these countries participate from parliamentary veto and hence significantly devalue the institution of parliamentary ex ante control. Variation also exists among those states which do not provide for any form of parliamentary ex ante veto. Not all of these states completely exclude parliament from the decision-making process. To begin with, the executive of course is free to turn to parliament and ask for approval for any planned mission. For example, the government of Tony Blair decided to have the House of Commons vote on a government motion seeking authority for military action and the use of ‘all necessary means’ to disarm Iraq. As the example illustrates, such votes are frequently asked for by governments in order to increase the legitimacy of military operations and to ensure that the efficiency of an operation cannot be undermined by parliamentary opposition to the deployment. This may, in certain cases, give parliamentarians some influence on the operation. But when the involvement of parliament is Between Military Efficiency and Democratic Legitimacy 183 at V ije U nivrsiteit, L irary on D ecem er 0, 2011 http://pardjournals.org/ D ow nladed from exclusively at the government’s discretion, there is a very fine line between meaningful consultation with parliament and the goal of simply having executive decisions rubberstamped. On the other hand, the case of Norway illustrates that consultation may become such a common practice that it develops into a de facto obligation that is acknowledged by both government and parliament even in the absence of any legal obligation. A similar development took place in the Netherlands where the tacit obligation to consult Parliament was eventually formalised in a new constitutional article in 2000. Some countries likewise formalise the involvement of parliament without giving it actual veto power. This can be achieved by requiring government to consult with parliament over military deployments and such consultation procedures may take on a wide variety of forms. In some countries, government must inform parliament about deployment decisions but only after the deployment has been made. Having to notify parliament immediately (Poland), without undue delay (Slovakia), if it is assembled (Ecuador) or within five or seven days (Romania, Canada and South Africa), ensures that the armed forces cannot be sent abroad secretively. Yet it will not do much to increase parliamentary leverage over deployment decisions. The US War Powers Resolution has set yet another standard for balancing military and democratic requirements that has been broadly discussed because its binding character has been contested and because of the frequency of US military interventions. The War Powers Resolution that Congress agreed in 1973 not only obliged government to consult Congress before any deployment but has furthermore given Congress a right to approve any mission ex post. According to section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution, the President shall terminate any deployment within 60 days ‘unless the Congress (1) has declared war or has enacted a specific authorisation for such use of US Armed Forces, (2) has extended by law such 60-day period or (3) is physically unable to meet as a result of an armed attack upon the United States’. This amounts to a right to call back troops that have already been deployed. Congress’s right of ex post approval has inspired the reform of deployment legislation in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Both countries now allow government to decide autonomously about the deployment of troops for 60 days, although this provision only applies to the fulfilment of international treaty obligations. However, given that the public and its representatives in parliament tend to rally behind the executive once hostilities started, the right to call back troops can only be exercised at considerable political costs, rendering ex post approval far less effective than an ex ante veto power. Our map of parliamentary war powers becomes even more complex if we consider that it is not always parliament as a whole, i.e. the plenary, that is granted a say in decision-making over the use of force. In Austria, for example, it is parliament’s ‘main committee’ that 184 Parliamentary Affairs at V ije U nivrsiteit, L irary on D ecem er 0, 2011 http://pardjournals.org/ D ow nladed from discusses and decides on military deployments. In several other states, only individual parliamentarians are involved in decision-making before the deployment decision is made. In Portugal, for example, members of parliament are represented in the Superior Council of National Defence. Although the Council does not have decisionmaking competences on troop deployments and is, moreover, dominated by the executive it may nonetheless provide parliamentarians with a formal channel to influence government decisions at an early stage. Similarly, in Greece, two members of all parties represented in parliament sit on the National Council on Foreign Policy (NCFP) that was established in 2003 to improve democratic oversight by bringing together members of the executive and the legislative. Like the Portuguese Superior Council of National Defence, the NCFP is a purely advisory body with no formal decision-making power. In Mongolia the speaker of parliament is member of the National Security Council. The National Security Council, in turn, makes the deployment decision unanimously so that some representation of parliament in decision-making is guaranteed without giving parliament as such a full-blown veto opportunity. Looking at all these variations beneath the level of broad classifications, it is obvious that parliamentary control rights can be conceived as a continuum, delimited by two extreme points. At one extreme, parliaments have no say whatsoever in any deployment decision. At the other side of the spectrum parliamentary consent is required for all operations. In between these two extremes, there is a dazzling range of options giving parliament a more or less tightly institutionalised consultative role or a say in an increasingly large set of military operations. Towards a parliamentarisation of war powers? With a view to the growing number of UN military missions, Lori Damrosch argued that there was a discernible ‘trend since the Second World War of legislative involvement in decisions to authorise participation’. Whereas our data do not allow mapping developments in war powers over the entire post-WW II period, our examination of the period since the end of the Cold War casts some doubts on this thesis. First, as discussed above, the share of democracies with parliamentary veto powers has not been rising over the period 1989–2004—even though changes in this figure result first and foremost from countries being added and taken out of our sample due to changing scores on POLITY’s democraticness scale. Second, and more importantly, a closer look at cases of rule modification reveals that parliaments usually lose powers when existing provisions are substantially modified. Veto powers that had been in place were abolished in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and the Slovak Republic. On the other hand, a parliamentary veto right was introduced only in Cyprus. Thus, at least since the end of the Cold Between Military Efficiency and Democratic Legitimacy 185 at V ije U nivrsiteit, L irary on D ecem er 0, 2011 http://pardjournals.org/ D ow nladed from War, any trend towards a parliamentarisation of war powers has come to a halt or has even been reversed. On closer inspection, the instances of rule change display another interesting characteristic. Throughout, the cases in which veto powers were abolished concern Central and Eastern European transformation states that prepared for accession to NATO (and the EU), namely Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. Especially NATO accession apparently amplified the trade-off between creating legitimacy through procedures of ex ante parliamentary control and gaining efficiency through lean, executive-centred decision-making. From a NATO perspective, having some member state governments tied to domestic parliamentary veto power must seem highly unattractive. Arriving at unanimous decisions in the North Atlantic Council is difficult already, especially after NATO enlargement. The prospect of having domestic parliaments veto a deployment even after a decision had been arrived at in the North Atlantic Council therefore created some unease on the NATO level. NATO’s efforts to limit national parliaments’ interference in decision-making focused on the states in the accession process and to which conditionality therefore applied. In Hungary, then NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson went as far as publicly naming Hungary as a member state whose constitution would not allow for deployments in NATO missions. In this context, some governments of Central and Eastern European states successfully initiated changes in their domestic deployment rules. The result was that in these states NATO missions or other missions carried out within an international framework were exempted from parliamentary veto. As most military operations that are carried out nowadays are multilateral operations within such a framework, this implied in practice the abolishing of the parliamentary veto. The Bulgarian President Parvanov, for example, was ready to propose a modification of the constitutional text so as to make article 84 (11) applicable only to non-NATO operations, e.g. by adding the words ’except in cases where the Republic of Bulgaria is a party to international treaties and fulfils the obligation specified in them.’ In 2003, the Constitutional Court decided that no changes would be necessary and that article 84 (11) of the constitution would not apply to obligations by an international treaty that has been ratified, promulgated and become effective in the Republic of Bulgaria. Consequently, there would be no need for having the National Assembly’s permission for deployments if they were derived from international treaty obligations. The trend towards a de-parliamentarisation of war powers has been most pronounced in Central and Eastern European democracies where the prospect of NATO accession served as an important incentive. Yet similar debates can be found in the older NATO members as well, even though they did not result in changes in deployment provisions. For example, Germany’s Christian Democrats argued that a parliamentary 186 Parliamentary Affairs at V ije U nivrsiteit, L irary on D ecem er 0, 2011 http://pardjournals.org/ D ow nladed from veto power did not square well with the requirements of integrated multinational rapid response forces such as NATO’s Response Force and the European Union’s Battlegroups. MP Schockenhoff argued that individual parts of an integrated military unit cannot be held under a parliamentary proviso. In a similar vein, Home Secretary Schäuble and Parliamentary Secretary of State Christian Schmidt suggested that parliament should vote on a motion at the beginning of each parliamentary term that would delegate decision-making on the deployment of multinational integrated units to the government. Although the proposals eventually failed to receive the necessary two-thirds majority, they illustrate that democracies with comprehensive parliamentary war powers have come under pressure as a result of the internationalisation of security politics. It is interesting to note that the trend towards de-parliamentarisation is unrelated to the main political event in the period under consideration, namely the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Although ‘9/11’ had a tremendous impact on many aspects of security politics, it left democracies’ deployment regimes by and large intact. Where changes in deployment rules were discussed or implemented after 2001, the challenge of international terrorism did not provide a key rationale. Rather efficiency requirements of multilateral operations in general served as the crucial point of reference. The only exception we are aware of is Japan whose Parliament passed an ‘Anti-Terrorism Special Measures Law’ in October 2001 that allows for sending armed forces without ex ante parliamentary approval if they support the USA and its allies in the combat of terrorism. Instead, parliamentary approval is only required within three weeks after the deployment began. On the basis of this law, Japan has sent maritime units to the Indian Ocean as rear area support to the US troops in Afghanistan and some 550 noncombat troops to Iraq. However, the ‘Anti-Terrorism Special Measures Law’ explicitly provides these military measures ‘must not constitute the threat or use of force’.