HOW TO SAVE EUROPE FROM ITSELF

Authors: Thomas Piketty (Professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales); Jeremy Adelman (Professor of history and Director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University); Anne-Laure Delatte (Research scholar at France’s National Center for Scientific Research and a visiting lecturer at Princeton University).

“The EU is in trouble. A prolonged economic slump, a debt crisis it can’t shake, malaise in the face of the humanitarian catastrophe generated by waves of asylum-seekers from the Middle East and North Africa, and security institutions seemingly incapable of keeping citizens safe together, they have revealed the crippled state of EU institutions. Europeans are more interdependent than ever, but their system of government is unable to cope with the pileup of crises. A great half-century experiment in integration is on the ropes.

This is bad for everyone. Frailty in Europe means a weak link in the wider interdependent world. As the world’s largest economy, Europe is an engine of global wealth. It is a major front in the fight against terrorism. It is the main hope for terrorism’s first victims  the refugees. With prosperity, security, and humanity at stake, a weak Europe weakens everyone else.

Today, Europe is comprised of disparate states, its economy on the ropes, and plagued by a common enemy in some of its major cities that, rather than uniting them, divides the continent into two separate blocs. Indeed, more than any time in its modern history, the threats to Europe’s common fabric come from within, not from without.

In their reform efforts, those who wish to save the EU must focus on this above all else: If European leaders can’t fix the union’s underlying political foundation, their efforts to tackle the continent’s lethargic economy, ongoing migration crisis, and security weaknesses will be in vain.

Europe badly needs a reset. If there is a central weakness to the union, it is its feeble bicameral system. The system has two chambers: the European Parliament, with its 751 MEPs, and the Council of the European Union, which comprises a rotating cast of ministers from national governments. (Just which ministers turn up for meetings depends on what is being discussed at the time.) The Parliament is supposed to grapple with region-wide concerns. But the scale and heterogeneity of the Union makes it large, ungainly, and immune to the creation of ruling cross-country coalitions. Meanwhile, the Council of the EU has evolved into an important decision-making body. But since it is made up of one single representative from national governments that are looking out for their domestic interests and often blame the Union for the mounting problems, there is little incentive to compromise and come to shared agreements and this leads to deadlock. Meanwhile, a complex latticework of intergovernmental institutions, composed of much-derided “Eurocrats,” has grown over the years to fill in the gaps.

To handle the emergency traffic, what were once occasional summits of European leaders have been repurposed into a European Council. Technically mandated to meet every six months, this group has had to resort to hasty, ad hoc summits to deal with the mounting crises and break regional impasses. Emergency summitry is exhausting. It is also failing. Partly, this is because member countries’ interests no longer align and so leads to endless wrangling as we saw in the handling of Greek debt.

Europeans might be willing to swap a bit of illegitimacy in return for some efficiency. But they don’t even get that. Summitry, as it has become a habit, also allows spoilers to wreck any deal. We saw this dynamic at work in the handling of the migrant crisis: The recent efforts to use a summit to cobble together a deal between Turkey and the EU to stanch the flow and steer payments to Turkey nearly fell apart over the provincial concerns of the government of Cyprus, which wanted Ankara to officially recognize its government and open its ports to Cypriot vessels.

The EU’s complex chains of pluralistic representation are made up, in other words, of many weak links. Finding the way forward requires acknowledging two points. The first is that any resolution to Europe’s various crises has to invent a democratic, public, and deliberative arena so that the decisions are understood. Democracy is more than a method for making collective decisions; it’s a way of legitimating them, which is all the more important when the decisions involve sacrifice.

The second is that Europeans need to see beyond the dichotomies of having national sovereignty or European rule. Old federalists and new isolationists agree on one thing: Both see “integration” as an either-or solution  either leaders surrender national sovereignty to supranational authorities or they defend the homeland. Those who hope to keep the Union together need to find a way out of that deadlock because, right now, it is very hard to make a compelling case for deepening a Union that promises anything more than austerity, more dysfunction, and less control. National leaders are more hesitant than ever to transfer power to a distant European Parliament, at the very time we need coordinated, representative decision-making to make Europe functional again.

We have a proposal. Create a model of Union that transcends the either-or logic of integration or sovereignty, that will provide further decision-making capacity without simply relocating power from democratic nation-states to a less democratic supranational state, and can burnish the democratic and deliberative credentials of European lawmakers.

Our proposal: Scrap the exhausted Council of the EU. Replace it, instead, with a new, second, parliamentary chamber; let’s call it the “European Chamber,” which at least has the merits of not being a council a word now so overused that it has been drained of significance. The original Parliament needs to remain in place, just as congressional systems often rest on large assemblies to express the full diversity of a polity’s membership. But the new body will be not unlike an upper house. Its members would be chosen by and drawn directly from the corps of elected national parliaments. In other words, the assemblies of France or the Netherlands would select their representatives to the Chamber. The selection process for the European Chamber deputies could be left to national parliaments. Importantly, the number of delegates from Member States should be scaled to each country’s population. These chosen national parliamentarians would do double duty for their constituents, representing them in national arenas and in the Europe-wide body.

Unlike the European Council and the Council of Ministers, the European Chamber’s members would be elected to serve European-wide interests rather than just serve as advocates of their national stakes in region-wide affairs. And unlike the sprawling European Parliament, the Chamber’s deputies would be tasked with doing more than just representing local constituents at the pan-European level. (The notoriously low, and sagging, turnouts for MEP elections is an index of how little stock citizens place in the fractured assembly.) Finally, unlike the U.S. Senate, the European Chamber would be composed of a balanced representation of EU Member States by population.

The European Chamber would tackle several challenges at once in the reconstruction of European pluralism. First and foremost, the Chamber would redress the democratic deficit of the current regime: It would be elected and make decisions in open, deliberative fashion. With no end of emergencies in sight, the habit of ad hockery has to be broken to restore confidence in the publicness of Europe’s policies.

Second, it would also solve stubborn coordination problems. The Chamber’s regular meetings and public debate would take some of the burden off emergency summitry and weary national leaders who have one eye trained on their polling data. Regular deliberation would also get around the sense that Germany functions as a Leviathan behind closed doors. It would put the brakes on smaller polities that can act as spoilers when the doors are open. And it would encourage badly needed coalitions across states to legislate in the regional interest. A tighter body of deputies, meeting on a regular basis, would dispense with widespread ad hockery, which favors spoilers and unilateralists.

What is important to underscore is that members of the Chamber would function as bridges between national parliaments and the European Union. Members of the European Chamber would, in effect, be elected not to represent constituents at the national or regional level; their loyalties would not be split but reconnected. Instead of seeing integration and blurred borders as coming at the expense of nations, why not think of models that recombine national and wider notions of sovereignty?

Members of the Chamber would be chosen on the basis of ideology, interests, and style, each step of the representative system working to aggregate the sum of a polity’s diversity. Imagine a national election in France in which French citizens send a gamut of deputies to the National Assembly, including far-right and some fringe left delegates; from the corps of that assembly would be drawn a subset to serve simultaneously in Paris and Brussels. Each step along the way, extremes would tend to get weeded out; remember, few elected assemblies are as diverse as the constituents that choose them.

The subset of national parliamentarians would shuttle back and forth, articulating the national concerns at the European level and regional matters at the National Assembly. It is important to understand that they would not be tasked with any one perspective, either national or regional. Their job would be to represent their voters by finding means to reconcile both and if they are seen to fail, they’ll be deposed. Since they would serve in national parliaments, they would not compete with fellow MPs, but rather serve as their envoys in Brussels. As a smaller group than the lower house of the European Parliament, and thus less prone to fringes, the Chamber would facilitate the forging of new political coalitions.

Combining transparency and accountability with better cross-border coordination between members who have gotten to know each other and formed habits of co-governance would reverse the strong impression among Europeans that region-wide rule has to be autocratic to be effective or dysfunctional if representative. Furthermore, it addresses the underlying contradiction plaguing the union in its current state that representatives are always forced to decide between loyalty to local constituents versus loyalty to a wider project. The European Chamber transcends the either-or logic that inspires massive resistance to more integration. It provides a legitimating response to the turn of anti-elite feelings sweeping the Western world.

How to proceed? This new European Chamber should only include the eurozone countries first. One of the lessons of the debt crisis is that having a common currency without budgetary integration is a recipe for failure; the Chamber would curate revenue and spending rules and design fiscal transfers through democratic deliberation. By making membership contingent on the democratic management of fiscal policy, it would resolve the deadlock produced by having a common currency without a shared budget.

In the long run, the objective may be to convince all EU countries to join the Chamber. But we urge that such a Chamber grow in steps, starting with the four countries Germany, France, Italy, and Spain which together represent more than 75 percent of the combined population and GDP of the eurozone. If these four countries endorse a European Chamber, then the new institution can be put in place very fast and begin to tackle the obstacles to better management of the region’s hobbled economy. Once the rules and norms of democratic deliberation start to work and show their worth, especially in economic affairs, the Chamber can become more inclusive. There remain many important technicalities to be sorted out. Should budgetary decisions be made by majority rule? How to dispense of the veto power which comes as a result of each decision requiring unanimity that has trapped Europe in its current state of paralysis? These important details, however, are more easily tackled within a vision of a stronger Union to come.

Creating new governance institutions from scratch is no easy task. But the alternative is a nightmare of paralysis. The current impasse over economic growth, migration, and the rising tide of Euroskepticism threatens to turn into a rancorous and dysfunctional equilibrium trap, in which countries feel locked in because to leave would be punishing, while other countries feel they are perpetually subsidizing their spendthrift neighbors but can’t kick them out of the neighborhood. We might get the occasional outright Brexit, or even Grexit. But the trend will more likely be a slow gradual degradation a dismantling by stealth of the sort we’re already seeing, as the Schengen agreement falls apart, and as Balkan governments spit at one another over their fences.

Ours is a proposal imagined in the spirit of overcoming what are seen now as the intractable obstacles to integration. It requires fleshing out important details. But we believe that what is intractable is also a matter of perception. Integration was good for democracy and prosperity in the wake of the horrors of World War II. To keep it alive means reinventing the democratic foundations of the Union.

To address Europe’s mounting crisis, the solution is not to retreat from integration. Disintegration panders to defeatists and extremists. What is needed is a campaign to reimagine Europe’s representative institutions and to restore a strong sense of European citizenship. It is time to take a look at the core institutions of the Union and reinvent them. A strong Europe gives ballast to a strong world economy. A strong Europe is better poised to grapple with wider problems of security and the deteriorating humanitarian crisis in the adjacent Middle East. A strong Europe is a counterpoint to nativists and isolationists everywhere.