POLITICAL REFLECTION ON THE FUTURE OF EU

The EU27 need to address the fact that too many people in Europe are unhappy with the current state of affairs and expect their leaders to do better on providing security, jobs and growth, especially for the young.

Overarching priorities

• Stronger economies with more jobs;
• Societies able to empower and protect citizens through education;
• Fighting tax fraud and providing social safety nets;
• A secure energy and climate future;
• Effective joint action in the world;
• A trusted area of freedom, security and justice, with the emphasis on better management of migration, combating crime and terrorism, and judicial cooperation between Member States.

Huge differences of opinion exist over how to create a more legitimate EU. Some Member States advocate more direct involvement of citizens in the European Union, for instance, while the Visegrad 4 (Poland, Hungary, Czechia and Slovakia), in particular, are pushing for the repatriation of powers to governments. The need for further integration is perceived differently too, with ‘old’ Member States like France, Germany and Italy wishing to proceed on issues such as youth unemployment, security and defence, while some of the ‘newer’ Member States resist the idea of more supranationalism. Likewise, there is no consensus on whether or not treaty change is needed to reform the EU. The European Parliament and the Visegrad countries argue for treaty change, while the Council and Commission plead for reform on the basis of the existing treaties.

There are also competing interests over the question of how to refit the EU for purpose. The raft of tricky national referenda (in Hungary and Italy) and major elections (in France, Germany and others) scheduled for the coming months will keep that burning question alive until the end of 2017.

Will the members of the EU27 will be outward- and forward-looking? Will they want to have a say in how an open and fair international economic system is crafted, with sustainable access to Global Commons? Will they rally round the European flag to save the integration project, or will they follow the example of the UK and become a gravedigger of the EU?

If ever there was a time for bold ideas to regenerate political momentum for European integration, it is now. The leaders of the EU27 would do well to translate that message into action when they meet in Bratislava in September.

Some thoughts

Europe is facing a transparency problem in its decision-making process. This is closely related to the EU’s democratic failure. In the absence of a powerful European Parliament capable of representing and protecting the interests of its constituents, knowledge of the exact functioning and political work of the European institutions will remain low among the general population. Not only does the current disinterest lead to misunderstandings and myths that are happily exploited by Europe’s far-right leaders, but it also contributes to a lack of what can be called accountability.

The European press and European voters seem to pay little attention when it comes to the intricacies of political culture and practice in Brussels. In addition, because the European Commission is incapable of creating binding policy without the support from the EU Member States, it often has no choice but to overlook some of the more unpleasant traits of Member States’ leaders when this is in the interest of finding a consensus on important (or what the Commission perceives to be important) policy goals.

Increasing transparency in the absence of giving further legitimacy to the European level hence works counter to the ultimate objective of any such attempt. For example, it is only by providing the European Parliament with the power to mandate the European executive for negotiations and to ratify the outcome that a true debate on Europe’s best interest in trade negotiations can occur.

The claim that the EU’s system is not efficient is actually quite laughable. One of the reasons this claim comes up repeatedly is because the general public vastly overestimates the resources at its disposal. Member States collectively only spend little more than one percent of their GDP on the EU, and the EU itself has no means to increase revenue on its own as it lacks the power to levy taxes. At the same time, the size of the public sector accounts to total expenditures of between 40 to 55 percent of their GDP. These numbers hardly support the fantasy of a mighty bureaucracy that is capable of squashing states’ interests.

What is true however is that the EU’s current model is not effective, and the lack of financial resources is precisely the reason why. In absence of a common unemployment insurance all attempts to manage the continent’s workforce efficiently must fail. It also means that important automatic transfers between Member States that would safeguard the single currency are not in place. Lacking a common army, it furthermore becomes pointless to devise a military strategy that is meant to ensure the safety of all Europeans.

At the same time diverging national interests continue to hamper the formulation of joint policy responses. For this, Europe’s failure to collectively react to the refugee crisis has become a case in point.

Furthermore, the structural problems and the continent’s inability to give itself the kind of political structure that would enable efficient and effective governance has also lead to severe imbalances within the European Union itself. Despite the fact that no country can respond to Europe’s problems on its own, national sovereignty continues as the chief organising principle of Europe’s political system. Given the nature of this system the EU does not deserve to be called a Union, it should be called the European Confederation. The failure to realise this has led to a dangerous situation in which mainly Germany is expected to make up for the structural deficiencies. This in turn cannot work, because in the cases where Germany does decide to fill this role, it does so in a manner that follows the very same rationality of statist interests that have caused the problems in the first place.

A divided confederal Europe will not be able to positively integrate Germany, nor will Germany be able or willing to take responsibility for the continent’s problems as a whole. The continuation of a Europe without effective joint European governance, in short, is a deeply disturbing one.

The trouble with reforms ever since the inception of the European Union’s predecessors is that they tend to take a lot of time and only react to new realities, rather than anticipating them. All attempts to reform the Union have followed the same gradualist approach. Today finding consensus among 27 heads of state is an arduous task and therefore policymakers have arrived at the consensus that for all matters European it is best to continue with a strategy of tiny steps. This, however, is doomed to fail if the ultimate goal is to make European politics more transparent, efficient and democratic.

If one only aims to tackle the democratic deficit by giving the European Parliament the power to introduce legislation, for instance, then nothing would change. Absent giving more powers to the European level and introducing proper budgetary powers for the European Parliament there would be no way to actually translate its legislative initiative into political action. This would only create further frustration amongst Europe’s population: instead of elevating the European Parliament into a position of actual power it would now become even easier to blame it for the dismal situation Europe and Europeans find themselves in. Solving procedures without also be shifting the balance of political power and giving the Parliament the ability to translate democratic deliberation into political action, could hence be highly counter-productive.

The same can be argued for the introduction of transparency into the system without changing any of the other two variables. At the moment much of the effectiveness of the European system relies precisely on the absence of transparency. Legislation that emanates from the EU’s bureaucracy is often very specific and does not have to stand up to much public scrutiny. While this situation is of course less than ideal from the perspective of democratic theory, the current modus operandi has enabled the European institutions to regulate Europe’s single market without some of the publically played out back-and-forth of domestic political systems. In areas as diverse as product quality standards, workers’ protection to environmental legislation, progress could be reached without a lengthy debate as Member States could claim that they had to implement these measures originating at the European, rather than national level, hence elevating European standards further than would have otherwise been the case.

Despite the apparent flaws of this system, such as a potential to over-regulate or micromanage issues better left to a lower level of governance, it has worked quite well overall. Nevertheless, introducing further transparency into this system will have no effect whatsoever as the issues that are being decided on remain far too removed from the interests of most Europeans. This would in turn give even more space to lobbyists who would now know exactly where to target their activities.

As long as central political issues such as taxation, foreign policy, social policy and education are not decided at the European level, there will not be sufficient momentum for true public scrutiny. Echoes of discussions going on within today’s Brussels Bubble seldom reach one of Europe’s segregated civil societies and almost never inspire cross-border conversations. The reason for this cannot be found in the failure to construct a united European civil society as many argue. Civil society cannot be constructed artificially. Rather it grows out of common interests, common ideas and a common frame of reference. For this to occur people from different national, cultural and social backgrounds have to care about the same kind of things at the same point in time. The problem with the EU’s institutions today is that they simply cannot decide on anything that average Europeans sufficiently care about. While the need for a new EU and the model that could be followed hence appears clear, the question remains as to how this can come about. Given the current sceptical climate of Europe’s population, any attempt to forge a coalition for a new Europe will not be an easy effort.

The first element to consider is how to communicate the need for such a new Union. Here it will become readily apparent that for no one but an idealistic few will this be a marriage of love. Rather, any kind of message on a new Europe will have to be based on the fact that the need for it is merely a grim reality. We hence need to do away with the universal wisdom that politicians utter at every possible occasion, namely that Europe is a peace project that has kept war from happening on the continent since the end of World War II and ultimately won the EU a Nobel Prize. While this may still strike a chord with Europe’s older population, the prospect of a war between the likes of Germany and France seems too far removed to warrant any kind of serious consideration today.

Rather, we need to ensure that Europeans across the continent who live very different realities at the moment are aware of the different benefits that a new Europe would bring to them. The list of such individual reasons for a truly united Europe can be extended and will look somewhat different depending on which Europeans are being addressed. The key point that remains, however, is to create a symphony of messages that will make it apparent to Europeans that they all stand to benefit from a united Europe.

At the same time, the fears of Europe’s population ought to be addressed. It needs to be made very clear that rather than dismantling people’s own identity, Europe would complement it and help diversity survive. After all, what the European Union is already striving for is to create ‘unity in diversity’.

Given the diversity of Europeans it will also become readily apparent that a coalition to build this future Europe cannot emerge on one side of the political spectrum only. The argument here needs to be clear: even when at present political contestation occurs at the national level, the discernible impact of any kind of decision made will remain negligible in absence of decisions made at the continental scale. In short, what needs to be communicated about a future Union in Europe is that it will not pre-empt political contestation, but rather re-create the space for it. In a nutshell, building a coalition for a true European Union will give the discontented youths across Europe’s periphery a new goal of political participation to strive for, while it will challenge European corporations who already transcend our political boundaries for the benefits that this has brought to them.

Building such a coalition will be a tedious and sometimes counterintuitive task. Nevertheless building a more democratic, transparent and efficient Europe is the only option we have. In absence of such efforts ‘less Europe’ is not an alternative, but rather a bleak outlook for a continent left behind.