Alphen,
Netherlands. 19 December. One of America’s Founding Fathers Alexander Hamilton said,
“It is not tyranny we desire; it’s a just, limited, federal government”. He could well have been speaking for 2014
Brussels. 2014 has been another bad year
for the EU nation-state. Federalism is
creeping forward via the back-door at an inexorable rate and national leaders
with the exception of Angela Merkel look ever more like powerless puppets
trying to mask the extent of their own impotence. The EU leadership vacuum emboldened
federalists sufficiently to hijack the May 22 European Parliament elections and
seize the European Commission. The false
legitimacy upon which Jean-Claude Juncker based his coup d’états was both impressive and dangerous and frames the
central question for this coming year; who rules Europe?
Two
reports this week demonstrate just how hard it will be to answer that question.
The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) this week published the last
seven of the so-called Balance of Competences reports. The previous batch of reports on a whole host
of issue pertaining to the impact of the EU on British governance all reflected
the FCO’s assumption that more Europe is better. However, these final reports sneaked out cynically
before Christmas to avoid too much debate implied something else: an EU engaged
in an existential struggle with the member-states and a Brussels that uses
maximalist interpretations of treaties to interfere ever more deeply into
national governance and life. Moreover, the
‘subsidiarity’ that David Cameron keeps hopelessly banging on about as critical
to EU reform is seen by the Brussels institutions as a bit of a joke and a form
of lip service to increasingly irrelevant national legislatures and executives.
The
second report was scribed by Sonia Bekker, a respected, Dutch left-of-centre
academic at Tilburg University. Entitled
“Revitalising Europe 2020 to strengthen the Social Dimension” the paper
appeared on the web-site of the think-tank Policy Network and warned against
the drift towards an ever more bureaucratic union.
Bekker
is no Euro-sceptic, far from it. She applauds the aim of the Europe 2020 strategy
to ensure 20 million fewer Europeans are at risk of poverty and many more actively
participate in the European labour market.
However, she highlights what she calls the growing contradictions in EU “socio-economic
governance” and suggests ever more EU regulation is more a curse than a solution.
Specifically,
Bekker questions whether taken together the Stability and Growth Pact,
macroeconomic imbalances procedure, budgetary co-ordination, the so-called
euro-plus pact and the Europe 2020 strategy itself actually amount to coherent
policy. She points out that these
initiatives emerge from a range of different treaty areas and implies that the
EU is in effect trying to enmesh the member-states in a giant spider’s web of
over-regulation. She also points to the growing
gap between the rules imposed on Eurozone and non-Eurozone members.
Critically,
she also concurs with the FCO’s concerns about EU mission creep. Specifically, she highlights the European
Commission’s “Country-specific Recommendations”. In the past such
recommendations were broad suggestions for actions that a member-state might
take at the most macro-economic of macro-economic levels. However, the Commission is now ‘instructing’
member-states in areas such as healthcare and social security and using social
funds to discipline member-states. This tendency
reflects a maximalist, back-door federalist approach that was seen to good/bad
effect by the judgement this week by the European Court of Justice instructing Britain
over its use of visas for non-EU citizens.
The aim: not to solve Europe’s manifold problems but to extend EU
competences. Bekker states, “National challenges are often far too complex to
formulate feasible and effective solutions at EU level”. She also calls for more not less
subsidiarity. “The key targets are the Europe 2020 goals and countries should
have enough space to find their own way towards these over-arching goals”.
Now,
I am a pro-European, EU-sceptic who like Abraham Lincoln and John Locke has a
profound mistrust of distant, effectively unaccountable power, which is what the
EU is fast-becoming. Equally, I am not
prepared to press the Armageddon button and call for the dismantling of the EU
just yet. Indeed, it is still my firm
belief that a reformed EU can play a vital role in building a stable Europe and
aggregating and exerting European influence in the world. The tragedy for Europe is that the endless back-door,
functionalist power grab by federalists far from helping Europeans solve its
manifold problems is causing political paralysis.
However,
for such a vision to be realised back-door federalism must be stopped. In its place a new political settlement is
needed that preserves the primacy of the nation-state, establishes clear rights
and protections for those member-states not in the Eurozone, and properly embeds
state power in a legitimate but subordinate institutional framework with
accountability first and foremost guaranteed by national parliaments working in
harness. THAT would represent a true balance
of competences.
Sensible
members of the European elite know full well that a European super-state can
only come with time and a profound shift in political identity. If they try and rush it millions of us would
struggle to prevent it. My grandfather did not fight for liberty and democracy
in World War Two to see it emaciated and strangled by a distant, super-bureaucracy
overseen by a sham parliament in which I do not believe.
In
reality what Jean-Claude Juncker and his ilk seek is a twenty-first century
European realisation of Hamilton’s just, limited federal government. Unfortunately, no-one actually knows what
precisely ‘just’, ‘limited’ and ‘federal’ mean in twenty-first century
Europe. In other words the EU is a
political experiment and as such it is not one that is working. Today, the EU is political paralysed as
weakening states no longer sure of their sovereignty tussle with a powerful but
as yet insufficiently strong Brussels probing to extend its competences.
It
is political paralysis more than any other fissure or friction that is preventing
Europeans from addressing the root causes of its many problems. Moreover, it is political paralysis that sooner
or later will trigger a social, economic and political explosion if not
addressed.
Who rules Europe 2015? Who knows.
Merry
Christmas!
Julian
Lindley-French
