THE NEED FOR A NEW EUROPEAN POLITICAL CONTRACT

The European project faces the most difficult period in its post-war history. The Member States of the European Union are grappling with challenges and dangers which have forced them to revisit the principles that have traditionally underpinned thinking about the nature of European integration. In the face of growing crises, many citizens and social groups across Europe feel distant from and even outright hostile to the EU in its current form. The primary condition of rebuilding trust in the EU therefore requires an open discussion of the problems and possible solutions, an honest and self-critical analysis of mistakes and reflection over the future of European integration, free from dogmatism.

Across Europe, citizens’ trust in both national political elites and EU institutions has fallen considerably in recent years. This phenomenon can be observed to varying degrees in different EU Member States but it is universal, as evidenced by the surge in support for populist and fringe parties of both the far-left and far-right across the EU. On one hand, crises require technocratic solutions which Member States delegate to the European level. At the same time, only national politics enables the degree of citizen participation required for decisions to carry democratic legitimacy. The European Parliament cannot be the solution to this problem and attempts to impose supranational democracy have fared poorly.

It is clear that ‘ever closer union’ is no longer the guiding principle behind the entire EU, either in spirit or in deed. The EU must therefore develop a more flexible form of organisation; a compromise between ‘ever closer union’ on one hand and ‘Europe à la carte’ on the other. Assuming the desire of all Member States to maintain the structural integrity of the EU , this means that on one hand we need to accept the tendency of some Member States to pursue further integration within a narrower circle , while on the other taking into account different needs and levels of development of others.

Strategies for reform

The way in which the EU is perceived by its citizens has changed dramatically over the last few years,. No longer seen as an opportunity for further development, instead, the EU is perceived as a source of intensifying, unresolved crises, both internal and external. The EU has also come to exemplify bad crisis management, which in turn has undermined citizens’ trust in it. There are good grounds for this; Member States and EU institutions’ responses to the various crises have been reactive and ad hoc. The EU has adopted a defensive stance in attempting to contain the crises’ negative effects as opposed to drawing up an honest and comprehensive analysis of their costs, benefits and losses. The aim of such an approach is to buy time and shift the cost of unsolved problems onto weaker partners, which only exacerbates the imbalances and disparities between Member States. There is therefore a need for the EU to develop a new way of operating which takes into account lessons learned from the failures of the last few years. This new method of dealing with crises should be systemic and encompass actions that have genuine potential to shape the way in which the EU functions in future. Above all, it needs to be rooted in a desire to confront reality; this in turn requires breaking with the status quo and overcoming the inertia and procedures of the Brussels bureaucracy by appealing directly to decision makers’ sense of responsibility. If we consider the various forms of crises as a state of deepening internal imbalance within the EU, the objective of a strategic counter-response ought to be to restore balance on partially new and revised terms. Such a new balance must find its expression via a new European political contract. This new contract, agreed by the governments and societies of Member States is an essential condition for the restoration of trust in the EU, in the integration project and the EU institutions. The EU is of course a community bound by the rule of law which has to act within the confines of its own Treaties, and as of today, neither their interpretation nor potential amendment offer the basis for conducting such necessary changes and rebuilding trust. The societies of Member States expect their governments to ensure a stronger link between European integration and their real needs and concerns.

When considering reform of the EU, it is worth taking a step back and asking what the EU is for, what purpose it serves, and what its Member States have in common? Broadly speaking, the rationale of the EU can be boiled down to two key issues – prosperity and security. However, the EU is characterised by differentiated levels of integration between its national democracies – some countries are members of the Eurozone, some of Schengen and some of NATO. Membership of the single market is the only circle of membership common to all. It is therefore the single market, along with a shared commitment to loosely defined ‘European values’, such as democracy, the rule of law and human rights, which is the glue that can hold all the EU’s Member States together. For the past few years the EU has been preoccupied with dealing with the fallout from the ongoing Eurozone crisis as well the refugee and migration crisis which has placed the EU’s other flagship project, the border-free Schengen area, under unprecedented strain. Despite the EU’s economic challenges, the development of its greatest economic asset, the single market, has been painfully slow.

The logic of the Eurozone is in the direction of deeper integration, although its members do not all agree on precisely what this should entail in practice. This poses a democratic challenge to those countries which may wish to pool their sovereignty further but also offers the opportunity to more fundamentally reassess the rights and responsibilities of all states in the EU.

Strengthening the EU’s legitimacy requires common responses which inevitably involves a degree of compromise. However, decisions which involve sacrifice, whether economic or social, require democratic assent, and the common thread running through most of the EU’s biggest problems is a lack of democratic legitimacy – put simply, voters feel their ability to hold decision makers to account has been compromised. This in turn has boosted support for populist parties across Europe. The majority of Member States have experienced surges in support for a variety of anti-EU, anti-Euro or anti-establishment parties from the far-left to the far-right, rocking the political system to its core. There are of course different factors behind the rise of these parties, but all of them share a suspicion either towards the EU itself or towards key EU policies, and they represent the growing dissatisfaction amongst voters with the status quo in Europe. In many cases these parties have prospered by pledging to either maintain or restore a degree of national sovereignty.

The way to address the EU’s legitimacy crisis is to boost the powers available to national parliaments to shape EU laws as part of a wider rebalancing away from the EU institutions back towards nation states. The best way to address the EU’s democratic legitimacy is for the EU to do less. This means returning powers to Member States in areas where it is not necessary for the EU to be involved. This in turn necessitates the establishment of a new flexible framework which is able to accommodate both groups of countries and does not consign the latter to a de-facto second-class membership. There is increasing recognition that such an arrangement is likely to be required. The way to reconcile different visions of the EU among the Member States is to embrace a new model of its functioning, based on the flexibility to manage greater or lesser integration.

The emergence of a flexible, ‘multi-form’ EU is the best hope of reconciling the inevitable comprises of national sovereignty entailed in European cooperation with national democratic consent. Not only does the integrity of the single market have to be protected, more needs to be done to exploit its full potential in areas like energy, digital, and above all in services.  At the same time, it is important to remember the single market is built on a range of national economic and social models. There should be no attempts to force one-size-fits-all policies in areas like labour market regulation. Such an approach would not only recognise national democratic preferences, it would also facilitate innovation and allow examples of best practice to spread throughout the EU naturally through national competition. This European Commission has made some progress in reining in the flow of new regulations, however more needs to be done to remove unnecessary red tape and there needs to be an even greater focus on rolling back growth-hampering regulations on SMEs and microenterprises.