Presentation of the French Corpus Parliamentary Debates on Europe at - - PDF document

Naomi Truan 2019 – CC BY 4.0 1

Presentation of the French Corpus

Parliamentary Debates on Europe at the Assemblée nationale (2002-2012) Naomi Truan (Sorbonne Université / Freie Universität Berlin) This document is a slightly revised version from May 2019 of the document released

• n ORTOLANG in November 2016. The title of my doctoral work (submitted in

October 2018, defended in January 2019) has been updated. This corpus is part of my PhD project (Sorbonne Université / Freie Universität Berlin), “Who Are You Talking About?”. The Pragmatics of Third-Person Referring

• Expressions. A Contrastive Corpus-Based Study of British, German, and French

Parliamentary Debates, which was completed in January 2019. The French corpus consists of official transcripts of the Assemblée nationale between 2002 and 2012. The corpus has been manually annotated according to the TEI Guidelines, freely accessible from www.tei-c.org/Guidelines (see document “Corpus Annotation” for further details). One parliamentary debate per year held in the French national parliament about a major European Council meeting (ex ante, ex post or same day) was selected. Scheduled European Councils, informally referred to as EU summits – that is, neither informal nor extraordinary meetings – usually take place four times a year. The European Council is an institution of the European Union comprising heads of state

• r government of EU Member States, which “functions as the principal agenda-setter,

the ultimate arbiter in decision-making, and the motor behind European integration” (van de Steeg 2010:118). Recent research has shown that European Council meetings trigger plenary debates in the EU Member States (European Parliament 2013; van de Steeg 2010; quoted by Auel & Raunio 2014:14), nonetheless in very different proportions depending on each Member State. The German and British corpora (1998-2015), which were assembled and annotated according to the same principles, are also available online. Important notice: The French corpus has been added after the German and British corpora had been collected and annotated. I followed the same protocol to look for the national plenary debates in France, but many debates are missing. Nevertheless, the corresponding European Councils are still in the table (see document “Description of the French Corpus”), so that the comparison with the German and British corpora remains possible.

Naomi Truan 2019 – CC BY 4.0 2

In France, parliamentary debates on European Councils are normally held before (ex ante) the Councils (“déclarations du Gouvernement préalables aux Conseils européens et débats sur ces déclarations”). Since January 2003, the Assemblée nationale committed to systematically organise a plenary debate before each European Council1. And yet, following European Councils did not trigger any plenary debate at the Assemblée nationale:

• European Council from 11-12 December 1998;
• European Council from 3-4 June 1999;
• European Council from 7-9 December 2000 (but there are questions to the

Government);

• European Council from 14-15 December 2001 (but there is a Franco-German

parliamentary meeting on the future of an enlarged Europe);

• European Council from 19-21 June 2003 (but there is a joint declaration);
• European Council from 4-5 November 2004 (there is a debate a debate on 14

October, but it corresponds to the European Council from 16-17 November, and not to the European Council from 4-5 November 2004);

• European Council from 25-26 March 2010 (even though during the same year,

debates on the European Council from June and December are held);

• European Council from 19-20 December 2013 (but there is a debate on the political

future of the European Union on 23 April 2013);

• European Council from 23-24 October 2014;
• European Council from 19-20 March 2015.

In the document entitled “Description of the French Corpus”, the missing debates are indicated as follows: [/]. In order to understand why no debate had been held on these European Councils – especially after 2003 – I had the chance to ask my questions directly to the deputy director and chief of administration of the Commission for European Affairs of the Assemblée nationale since 20092 during a telephone conversation on 19 July 2016. Despite the information found on the website of the Assemblée nationale on the systematic character of plenary debates on European Councils, the interviewee confirmed that European Councils do not systematically trigger plenary debates (neither ex ante nor ex post). The themes of the plenary debates are put on the agenda each week at the Conference of the Presidents of the Assemblée nationale, but there is no obligation to put European themes forward, so that national issues can be privileged. The recurrence of “missing” plenary debates in France deserves further attention. Compared to its German and British counterparts, the French corpus therefore

1 “Ainsi, depuis janvier 2003, un débat en séance publique est systématiquement organisé avant

chaque réunion du Conseil européen.” (http://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/decouvrir-l- assemblee/role-et-pouvoirs-de-l-assemblee-nationale/l-assemblee-nationale-et-l-union-europeenne/la- commission-des-affaires-europeennes, 25.09.2016).

2 Directeur-adjoint, chef du secrétariat de la Commission des affaires européennes de l’Assemblée

nationale.

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consists of only eight TEI-XML files (instead of eighteen). This can be statistically easily resolved, since each country (i.e. each corpus and each language) functions independently as a complete unity. However, the study of the reasons of this distinctive absence goes beyond the scope of my PhD project. The French corpus consists of the XML files annotated according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). For more information on the annotations used for this corpus, please refer to the corresponding document. Please note that the original parliamentary debates are HTML files which can be retrieved directly from http://archives.assemblee-nationale.fr/. All files are from the “Compte rendu intégral” (and not from the “Compte rendu analytique” when it exists). References Auel, Katrin & Tapio Raunio. 2014. Debating the State of the Union? Comparing Parliamentary Debates on EU Issues in Finland, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The Journal of Legislative Studies 20(1). 13–28. doi:10.1080/13572334.2013.871482. European Parliament. 2013. Democratic control in the member states of the European Council and the Euro zone summits. Directorate-General for Internal Policies, Policy Department C, Citizen’s Rights and Constitutional Affairs. Steeg, Marianne van de. 2010. The European Council’s evolving political

• accountability. In Mark Bovens, Deirdre Curtin & Paul ‘t Hart (eds.), The real

world of EU accountability: What deficit?, 117–149. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The French Corpus is at your disposal under the terms of the Licence Creative Commons BY (Attribution) 4.0. Naomi Truan 2016 – CC BY 4.0 How to quote this corpus? Truan, Naomi. 2016. Parliamentary Debates on Europe at the Assemblée nationale (2002-2012) [Corpus]. ORTOLANG (Open Resources and TOols for LANGuage). https://hdl.handle.net/11403/fr-parl