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The literature on parliamentary war powers has focused on the veto rights of legislatures. This case study on the Finnish Eduskunta adopts a more comprehensive approach. Based on parliamentary documents and statistics, it reconstructs parliamentary involvement in decision-making on individual crisis management operations, laws on crisis management, and 'grand strategy' documents since the mid-1990s. The findings underscore the importance of politicisation, with conflicts over legislation and the Government Security and Defence Policy Reports enabling political parties and the Eduskunta to set parameters for subsequent decisions on individual operations. The politicisation of crisis management facilitated stronger participation rights for the Eduskunta and created 'ownership' of troop deployments among members of parliament (MPs). Debates have nonetheless become less intense, with broader cross-party support for participation in crisis management and for European Union (EU)-led operations in particular.

It is often argued that foreign and security policy is dominated by the executive, with parliaments wielding marginal influence. However, as legislative‐executive relations in the realm of foreign and security policy have attracted remarkably little scholarly attention, there is a demand for subjecting the alleged executive drift in foreign affairs to careful empirical scrutiny. There is also a need to examine whether and how parliamentary politics in foreign affairs differs from domestic or European matters, both regarding control mechanisms and party competition. The notions of 'executive dominance' and 'politics stopping at the water's edge' certainly point in the direction of less active control and casting aside public partisan differences in favour of providing domestic support for the government. A case study of the Finnish Eduskunta forces us to reconsider such arguments. This article examines the multiple instruments members of parliament (MPs) have for becoming involved in foreign affairs, from participating in the formulation of the national 'grand strategy' document to ministerial hearings in the committees. It also provides strong evidence of the Europeanization of national foreign policies, with matters relating to the foreign policy and external relations of the European Union (EU) in a central role in the Foreign Affairs Committee. Parliamentary culture is consensual, especially in security policy, but there is nonetheless greater room and willingness for party‐political contestation in foreign affairs.