FOR A REFOUNDATION OF THE PROJECT OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION

Article written by : Bruno Amoroso and Jesper Jespersen Roskilde University, Denmark.

The article has been edited.

Much of the debate about the causes of the ongoing economic and political crisis in Europe has been derailed by the dominant participants. On the one hand we find the European Elites (which broadly speaking consists of the EU Commission, the bureaucrats in Brussels, the European Court, the Central Bank, the Presidency of the EU-Council, the Parliament, and a number of Brussels-based newspaper correspondents, think-tanks and European colleges) which unanimously pursue the idea that greater economic integration and increased centralization of the political system are necessary to advance European cooperation and therefore are a "good thing for Europe ". Hence, these Elites has only one answer to the current crisis: more centralization and further acceleration of the march towards a federal political structure of the EU; the ‘United States of Europe’ is the ultimate goal. This representation can prove fatal for the future of Europe, because it is not rooted in the perception, aspiration and everyday life of most European people. On the opposite side in this debate we find the EU skeptics who are so ‘tired’ of Brussels and ongoing centralization that they have turned their back towards Europe. These rather nationally inspired movements think that European countries can do better and cooperate better without Brussels on an intergovernmental basis. This divide in opinions on European cooperation between the pro’s and the contra’s has accelerated in particular in the wake of the economic crises. Developments since 2008 have highlighted the weakness of political and economic structures that increasingly take the form of excessive centralization, one-sidedness to the benefit of finance and reduced national market regulations. Developments which, since the ‘fall of the wall’, have built increasingly on neoliberal ideas of a self regulating market system and on the postulated need to reduce the welfare states. Hereby, the solidarity between EU countries has been weakened – the message coming from Brussels and Berlin, and repeated by the EU Elites, contains a clear warning that each country has to first of all to 'put its own house in order', and if they cannot find out themselves, Bruxelles (supported by Berlin and the IMF) will help. The policies followed by the Brussels Elites, which have imposed a sharply accelerated centralization and marketization in the wake of globalization, have undermined the bonds of solidarity between nations and social groups and produced the steady economic marginalization and social exclusion in a growing number of European countries and regions. The revolt of the citizens of Europe, as manifested in the 2014 European Parliament elections, is not, as some would have us believe, an expression of xenophobia and anti-European sentiment, but its precise opposite: a protest against the Elite, the lack of democracy in decision making and the drive towards federalism, which is institutionalized in Brussels and supported by Berlin (and Frankfurt). It is the speedy deregulation of the labour and capital markets and the imposing of the single currency, which have undermined the social contract previously embodied in European social welfare systems and enacting measures that are discriminatory against the weaker European citizens. This skepticism with respect to the intentions of the Brussels Elite is aggravated by the lack of any real, effective democratic control over the actions of the European institutions.  The member country governments’ right under the Treaty of Maastricht to exercise sovereign power over economic policy was abolished by means of regulations. In this way the EU transformed the objective of European policies for growth – which was assigned to the Member States, which were to attain it each enacting its own economic policy and borrowing needs – into the obligation upon the Member States to achieve budgetary balance in the medium term (under the Stability and Growth Pact).  Where the Brussels Elite has betrayed its commitments is in the degree, scope and nature of the transfer of sovereignty from the Member State. The contradiction between the critical zeal for integration and the transfer of sovereign powers to the EU and the historical, cultural, political and economic differences among 28 member countries is now the Achilles’ heel of European cooperation. The sound argument, that the increased national differences within the Union should have induced a slowdown in the process of integration towards a “United States of Europe”, has gone unheeded in Brussels. On the contrary, the reply is that the current crisis demands further acceleration and centralization to bring individual countries “up to speed.” The logic of the Elite – the crisis is best overcome by greater integration and policy standardization – runs in the teeth of the facts. Perfectly consistent with the Elite’s position has been the institution of the Stability Pact and later the Fiscal Compact, which were supposedly to resolve the crisis of the Euro-zone. The paradox, behind which lie strategies quite different from those proclaimed for the benefit of the public, is that faced with the undeniable failure of these measures, which the peoples of Europe have experienced, while the President of the Commission can assert that “it is not the euro but the national states that have aggravated and prolonged the crisis.” The mounting popular mistrust of the Brussels Elite was made abundantly clear by the 2014 European parliamentary elections. This mistrust was greeted with headshaking in Brussels and interpreted as “nationalism,” when the proper response would have been some form of self-criticism: why is the original broad popular support for the European project now being transformed into its contrary? There can be no doubt that unless the course of events is changed, nationalistic tendencies will strengthen. So, bringing European cooperation back onto the path of a project for peace and European solidarity is urgent. The EU’s future lies in a return to more regional and less pan-European cooperation As we have long maintained in various forums, the way out of a situation that has sparked growing opposition on the part of the peoples of Europe can only be found by reorganizing the forms of cooperation, restoring the sovereignty of European parliaments in the fields where it has been unjustifiably taken from them. This requires greater observance of the Treaty’s principle of subsidiarity.

Today’s 28 Member States do not need to march at the same pace in all sectors, as the advocates of the centralist approach currently argue. This is what has provoked Britain’s reaction. It took 40 years to introduce the single European market for goods without excessive conflict and with accompanying measures providing for protracted transitional phases for new members. There are other sectors in which regional cooperation can develop gradually and spread to an ever-increasing number of countries: energy, electricity generation, the reduction of CO2 emissions, coordination of energy saving, transportation systems, higher education,  telecommunications, and more. But experience shows that when it comes to the macroeconomic variables of money supply, currency, capital and labour, the differences between countries constitute an obstacle to common rules and the renunciation of sovereignty. The Commission’s “one size fits all” approach to economic policy and institutional reform has certainly been a gigantic error, given national diversities. The rapid introduction of free movement of workers and capital between countries, combined with the single currency, destabilized a number of member countries economically, socially and politically. These measures must be undone as soon as possible if we want to ease future tensions between members. Only countries with reasonably similar work organization and wage levels can integrate their labour markets without making unduly tentions.

In the 2014 European Parliamentary elections, the voice of the people could not be stifled. The results certainly do not represent a vote of confidence in the Brussels elite, and this can be ascribed to the latter’s active role in provoking massive unemployment, deepening poverty and the bleak prospects of young people. The elite have betrayed the expectations of the citizens of Europe by their insistence of new common rules and ever-greater transfers of sovereignty, and they are finding it increasingly difficult to legitimize as “European” economic policies that are actually dictated by the international centers of financial and military power. What we need today are  “heroes of retreat” in Brussels who are strong enough to say that the integration of the European Union has been too fast and too sweeping, that the democratic deficit has jeopardized cooperation, and that the ambiguous relationship between the EU and globalization threatens to unravel the entire European project. The exigency is to devise a radical new set of points of equilibrium between the common decisions of the Union and regional self-organization: a proposal intermediate between “one size fits all” and “EU à la carte.” The courage of heroes of retreat is required to pare back centralism and replace it with regional cooperation among countries with true common interests.

In conclusion, we must resume discussion of a plan for a variable-geometry form of cooperation in Europe (macro and mega- regions) as regards labour, capital, money, tax systems, energy, welfare systems, education, defense, law enforcement, and so on. This kind of regional cooperation would modify today’s strained relations between individual countries and the Union. Europe urgently needs “heroes of retreat” with the courage to shoulder their responsibilities and devise a new strategy consistent with the project for a Europe of peace and solidarity. Without these heroes, there can only be the mounting risk that the entire European project will find itself at a dead end.