Introduction

What role do the Westminster-style parliaments of the Anglo-Commonwealth countries currently play in foreign relations and what role ought they to play? This chapter addresses the function of the central sovereign organ in a constitutional democracy in the external exercise of the public powers of the state. It must immediately confront what one scholar has recently called ‘a very old story about democracies, which is that they can’t do foreign affairs’. In legal terms, traditional doctrine has served largely to exclude Parliament from any role in the conduct of foreign affairs. Yet, in fact, particularly in the last fifteen years, a process described by some as ‘a constitutional revolution’ has taken place, inserting Parliament into the international sphere to an unprecedented extent.

These changes have been largely precipitated by Parliament itself. They have been embraced to different extents in the four states considered in the present study. Their political significance is much contested. But their significance as a matter of foreign relations law should not be doubted. The result of the recent transformation has been that foreign affairs can now properly be analysed as a matter of the distribution of powers between the executive and Parliament, and not a separation of the foreign affairs power from parliamentary involvement. Put another way – consistently with the overall analysis adopted in this work – foreign relations law operates as an allocative principle – determining when and how Parliament may exercise its functions in this field.