Use of force and democratic scrutiny: The role of parliamentary arenas in France and Germany

In the face of a significant terrorist threat over the last decade and the growing involvement of their armed forces in the fight against this threat, our contemporary democratic states must raise the important question of democratic scrutiny over the use of force not only outside their borders but also on their own national grounds. This growing use of force indeed raises the question of how armed force is scrutinized in contemporary democracies and, more precisely, what the competences and the role of the parliamentary arenas in this process are. The article specifically focuses on parliamentary war powers in France and Germany. Our aim is not only to investigate the parliamentary tools and competences available in both states to exert democratic control over military interventions both inside and outside the national territory, but also to analyze parliamentary practices in this area in France and Germany. The article aims to demonstrate how divergent democratic scrutiny over the use of military force remains in both states, which could be presented as the extremities of an axis ranging from soft parliamentary scrutiny that is not highly formalized in the French case to strict and structured parliamentary scrutiny in the German case. The article relies on historical sociology to analyze the existing divergences.