The Strasbourg seat is not an EU problem
The European Parliament's monthly 'travelling circus' between Belgium and France is not by design. It's an accidental byproduct of petty nationalism. More Europe would stop things like this.
When I talk to people outside the bubble about their negative impressions of the European Union, one theme comes up consistently: the European Parliament’s back-and-forth each month between Brussels and Strasbourg, which comes with an estimated cost of €114 million per year. People either regard it as an obscene example of what they assume is typically wasteful EU spending of taxpayers’ money or, very occasionally, as a great idea by the EU to bring the institutions to different locations to bring it closer to the people. But they’re both wrong. The ‘travelling circus’, as it’s known in the EU bubble, was not purposefully designed by anyone. And federal EU is not responsible for this bizarre practice.
As we approach the June European Parliament election and this issue once again raises its head as an example of EU waste, its worth laying out the facts of why the Parliament spends three days a month in a charming little Alsatian town. The first thing to know is that nobody wants to do this. Strasbourg is a lovely place, and at my old job I volunteered to be the one to go once a month because it was nice to get a little beauty break away from dreary Brussels. But anyone with two eyes can see that this ten-hour roundtrip journey by MEPs, their staff and their documents once a month is an obscene waste of time and money. The Parliament itself has voted multiple times to end this practice. But the parliament doesn’t get to decide where it meets, that’s up to the national governments. And MEPs are court-ordered to go to Strasbourg once a month because of legal actions by France. But here’s the thing: France doesn’t want them to be going back and forth either. So what’s going on?
The story begins in 1951, when the six countries founding the European Coal and Steel Community couldn’t agree which city should host its institutions. Brussels was widely preferred, but was strangely vetoed by Belgium itself because they were insisting on Liège. Because of the impasse, Luxembourg City was chosen as a provisional choice for all but the parliament (called the Assembly at the time), which was to share facilities with the Council of Europe (a non-EU body) whose seat had already been designated as Strasbourg. In 1957 this was amended to say that the EU’s high court would be based in Luxembourg, the parliament in Strasbourg, while the Commission and Council would be based in both Brussels and Luxembourg.
But in the ensuing years, both the Commission and Council started gravitating toward Brussels and shunning Luxembourg. There was a simple reason for this: Belgium’s language wars of the 1960s and subsequent unsettled status for the government of Brussels meant it was a lawless place for about a decade where you could basically knock down any building you wanted and build new ones. This was when the residential Leopold Quarter was razed and the EU Quarter was created. In Luxembourg, where planning permissions and heritage protections were much stricter, the EU institutions couldn’t build their buildings. By the 1980s, the Commission and Council had pretty much moved out of Luxembourg to be entirely based in Brussels, a reality which was eventually recognised by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty (though as a compromise, to this day they make the Council’s ministerial meetings happen in Luxembourg if they fall in April, June or October).
So you then had the situation where the parliament, the least-powerful of the three EU institutions, was stuck meeting five hours away from where the real power was. Ever since it converted into a directly-elected institution in 1979, the parliament has had to fight for its power and relevance. And in the 1990s, they decided to do that by building themselves a headquarters in the seat of power in Brussels.
The problem was that the parliament was treaty-bound to have its headquarters in the political Siberia that is Strasbourg, where they were still being forced to share facilities with the Council of Europe in a humiliating arrangement. France was refusing to budge, with Paris making clear that over its dead body would the French ever allow the parliament to move itself to the real EU capital. It was, in short, a question of national prestige. So, the parliament decided to engage in some chicanery. In the late 80s, they started building an “international conference center” around the old Gare de Luxembourg train station in Brussels’ EU Quarter. They insisted that it was simply a satellite meeting place that they could use to hold meetings with the other institutions. But within a few years, while France wasn’t looking, oops - they had accidentally build a whole European Parliament headquarters with offices for each MEP. To this day, the parliament’s Brussels headquarters maintains the fiction that it is simply the “Espace Leopold office complex”.
But when the parliament tried to move in to its new digs, France stepped in and said “not so fast”. France insisted that the move was illegal, and in 1992 Paris strong-armed the other EU member states to set a binding requirement in the treaties that the Parliament must base itself in Strasbourg, where it would be obliged to hold "twelve periods of monthly plenary sessions.” However, additional sessions and committee meetings could be held in Brussels. The Parliament lodged a legal challenge, saying that forcing them to meet in Strasbourg was against the original treaties and the natural prerogatives of a Parliament elected by direct universal sufferage, claiming the right to decide its own workings. Pushed by France, the 12 national governments doubled down, enshrining their decision to the Treaty of Amsterdam and saying it was inviolable.
The following decades have been a constant battle between the EU parliament and France over where they hold their sessions. MEPs decided to interpret the new treaty language as meaning that they only had to be in Strasbourg for the monthly plenary sessions themselves, which last three days. France challenged this but lost - they had made the mistake of making the treaty seat language too vague. It wasn’t all stick from Paris though, they did offer a carrot - finally building the European Parliament it’s own building in 1999 (from then on they no longer had to use the Council of Europe’s hemicycle). It was a €470 million building that the parliament itself had not asked for, but is now used by France as a reason for why the parliament can’t leave Strasbourg. If the parliament left, what would they do with this expensive building (which sits empty three weeks out of the month)?
Since then, the parliament has repeatedly tried to escape Strasbourg only to be dragged into court by France and forced back. In 2008 the nine-year-old ceiling of that €470 million plenary chamber in Strasbourg collapsed, and plenary sessions had to be held in Brussels while it was being repaired. Once the repairs were complete, MEPs were dragging their feet about going back to Strasbourg until France stepped in and forced them back. In 2011 they voted to combine the plenary sessions so that two could happen at the same time. The idea was that they were still having 12 sessions in Strasbourg as mandated by the treaty, but they could double up so they only had to go to Strasbourg six times a year. But the European Court of Justice sided with France and said the world monthly in the treaty meant just that. France took them to court again in 1996 when they just tried to reduce the number of sessions from 12 to 11 in order to take an August recess (the compromise was two sessions in September).
During the pandemic when cross-border travel wasn’t allowed, MEPs used it as an excuse to base plenary sessions out of Brussels with remote participation allowed by MEPs (but not their staff, who are Brussels-based). After more than a year of this, France became alarmed that this was being used as a ruse to establish a new normal. At first they tried to entice the MEPs back with wine and cheese. When that didn’t work, it was no more Mr Nice guy. MEPs were forced to be back in person in Strasbourg whether they liked it or not. In 2022, MEPs tried to use the energy crisis resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukaine as a reason to stop the treks to Strasbourg. Spoiler alert: France won again.
So, how you feel about the EU parliament seat issue depends on your nationality. If you’re a French MEP (and this unites almost all of them, across the spectrum from far left to far right) you feel that the parliament illegally built itself a headquarters in Brussels and it should be forced to end the travelling circus and be based in Strasbourg all the time - anything less is a violation of the rule of law. If you’re a non-French MEP, you feel that the parliament should be able to decide on its own location and the travelling circus should be ended with the parliament only meeting in Brussels, the seat it has chosen for itself.
A 2007 survey of MEPs found that 89% of them want to be based only in Brussels. They have noted that Luxembourg accepted the loss of (most of) the Council and Commission by being given the European Investment Bank. Suggestions for a future use of the Strasbourg headquarters have included a European University, the headquarters of the EU Medicines Agency after it left London following Brexit, or a new parliament for the Eurozone. France has never been willing to entertain any of these alternative uses for the building, which currently sits empty three-quarters of the time. An added complication has been the establishment of Frankfurt as the seat of the European Central Bank since 2009. Since then France has said it would be unacceptable for Germany to host an EU institution and not France. Nevermind the other 23 countries which don’t host EU institutions but are content with having EU agencies. C’est la France. There’s only one word to describe Paris’ behavior on this subject over all these years: petty.
So the travelling circus isn’t a problem of ‘too much Europe’, it’s a problem of too much nationalism. It’s a classic intergovernmental model fudge, a compromise that in the end makes no sense and makes nobody happy. This is what happens when you give every country a veto on decision-making rather than allowing for majority up-or-down votes. In short, a more federal Europe where the parliament and citizens were given more power and national governments in the Council were given less power would avoid situations like this. If you like the travelling circus, then by all means vote for the parties who want to maintain the entrenched power of national capitals and keep the EU in an intergovernmental model. But if you want wasteful, obscene things like this to end, then vote for a federal Europe on 9 June.