Chapter 7 Framing activism in the EP: the politicization of Visa Code and Copyright reforms

Résumé En

Two surprisingly long reform processes marked the last mandate of the European Parliament (EP): the Visa Code recast and the Copyright directive. Both had been discussed since 2014, with final versions of the texts only adopted in spring 2019, just a few weeks before the new elections. Caught up in the institutional constraints of the ordinary legislative procedure (OLP), these two reforms also saw clashes between actors and between values. In particular, the EP was the scene of many twists and turns: death threats against the copyright directive’s rapporteur, 2 the unexpected rejection of the humanitarian visa resolution because MEPs had left for lunch, 3 which were widely reported in the media. How to explain such a dramaturgy? Although they addressed very different issues, these reforms serve as examples of the politicization of the EU, understood by de Wilde et al.(2016) as a growing salience of EU affairs, polarization of opinions and increase in the number of actors involved in the political process. While many scholars recently studied EU politicization by focusing on Juncker’s ‘Political Commission’(Kassim et al., 2017; Mérand, 2021), we choose to address in this chapter the role of EP actors in the politicization of the Visa Code and Copyright Directive. How do EP actors drive the politicization of the legislative process? More precisely, how do they create room for agency within the institutional constraints of the ordinary legislative procedure?