Tribune
| 06/06/2007
Renaud Dehousse and Stephen Boucher comment on an article written by Lüder Gerken and Roman Herzog in the Summer 2007 issue of Europe's World.
Eighteenth century medicine was founded on the notion of "humours" − sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholic. Treatments would aim to bring humours back into balance through diet, changes of climate and bloodletting. The treatment often made the patient worse, and the viewpoint proposed by Roman Herzog and Lüder Gerken indicates a similar disconnection between the ailment of discontent with the EU, the diagnosis of "inappropriate centralisation" and the proposed cure.
First, the diagnosis is flawed. The causes of citizens' distrust are many, and cannot be reduced to a feeling of excessive "centralisation". More fundamentally, does such "inappropriate centralisation" exist at all? By international standards, the EU is not a whale, it is a minnow. The European Commission staff, with 19,370 agents in 2007, is equivalent to the administration of any middle-sized city. And it is not a fast-growing minnow; the size of its staff has been very stable. The EU budget accounts for barely 1% of European GDP, whereas the US federal budget is about 20% and in federal Germany the proportion is even higher. Unlike the position in its member states, the EU's legislative output is actually decreasing. From 1999-2003, 194 legislative acts were on average adopted every year, but in 2005 that figure dropped to 130. The Commission's focus today is on codification and "better regulation".
The "centralisation" argument is also incorrect. It suggests that "the EU" is some out-of-control form of Frankenstein organism. Calling "centralisation" a process by which member states willingly share elements of sovereignty is misleading − it is not something happening through the will of a handful of unaccountable civil servants in Brussels, but through the explicit approval of EU governments. The notion is also biased. When is centralisation "inappropriate"? When citizens reject it? If so, what is appropriate centralisation? The authors' argument invites us to reject the process of EU integration as a whole.
Second, are the proposed cures useful? The notion that a possible centralising trend needs to be checked was first tackled in Maastricht, where subsidiarity found its way into the Treaty, then in Nice, and recently by the Convention. Spanish MEP Inigo Mendez de Vigo drafted a consensual report for the Convention identifying two main avenues to give flesh to the subsidiarity principle: a judicial one, and a political one. He correctly insisted on the latter because evaluating an opportunity to take action at EU level is primarily a political issue, far beyond any judicial body's legitimacy or technical skills.
Listing competences has never prevented trends toward centralisation developing in federal systems − not even in Germany. It is generally acknowledged that courts have not been successful in countering centralisation. Adequate representation of the entities forming the federation is the best solution, and in this respect the EU is well protected, considering that, through the Council, states have a voice in legislative procedures.
The "discontinuity principle" ignores the fact that long legislative procedures are the product of the unanimity rule. For this reason, 30 years went by before the Europeas Societae statute was approved. Today, the Commission gives priority to retrieving out-of-date proposals.
As for giving member states the right to withdraw legislation, it is incompatible with the objective of ensuring legal certainty. It also addresses a problem that does not exist. Legislation today is almost always accepted by consensus. Voting occurs in only 20% of the cases where it is allowed, and in half of those cases it is because of the need to vote down a single dissenting government. The risk of seeing decisions reached without an appropriate majority of states approving is slim.
Finding a cure to citizen's mistrust of the EU means we must start addressing real issues, not chimeras that only reinforce the ailment.
Articles by Stephen Boucher :
Articles by
Renaud Dehousse :
