Which role parliaments will fulfill in the 21st century is hard to foretell. Compared to parliamentarism in the nation state, European parliamentarism seems almost necessarily deficient when focusing on the European Parliament only. What is still missing is an orginal, a truly European concept of parliamentarism that is neither construed analogously to the nation state model in the sense of a traditional parliamentary government system, nor a diluted international form of parliamentarism. This volume tackles such questions as: How is the European Parliament positioned within the overall institutional structure of the EU and how do national parliaments deal with supranational challenges? But it is also concerned with the question of cross-level models of parliamentarism.