<<<	articles
It is time to put Europe on hold Samuel Brittan Financial Times 12/06/09 The 43 per cent of the European Union electorate who bothered to vote for the European parliament clearly did so on national issues. We still need to reflect on the EU itself. The view of the European political and official establishment is that the effort of "deepening" the EU must continue and that priority should be given to ratifying the so-called Lisbon treaty before a British Conservative government can put a spanner in the works. We even have the curious spectacle of Labour and Social Democrat politicians pleading with the British Tories to stay aligned with continental Christian Democrats to maintain a more effective centre-right bloc. There is also the refusal to recognise that parties such as the UK Independence party serve a useful function in siphoning off a mixed bag of populist discontent, which might otherwise have given more seats to the British National party. I certainly do not wish to denigrate the EU's positive achievements. Its early great success, when it was known as the common market, was in locking together the French and German economies, so that another war between them became almost inconceivable. It has since provided former communist countries with the badge of political responsibility they desired to be accepted as bona fide members of the west. The EU has also established an area of free trade, and to a lesser extent free capital movements, more deeply than any other organisation. Unfortunately, but perhaps inevitably, the institutions of the EU have become dedicated to the centralisation of more and more power at the EU level. How this has happened has been analysed by Roland Vaubel, a neoliberal German economist, for the Institute of Economic Affairs*. The EU has been over many years inching its way forward to what it calls "ever closer union" and Prof Vaubel calls "ever greater centralisation". The latest example is the constitutional treaty, rejected by French and Dutch referenda but then revamped with modest amendments to counter specific national concerns - and to enable the British government to renege on its referendum pledge. Prof Vaubel's basic thesis is that EU institutions such as the Commission, parliament, court and council have a vested interest in centralised decisions: it enhances their own power and prestige. In the current political atmosphere I cannot help noting that EU officials, especially expatriate ones, earn far more than their nearest equivalents in national governments. Just as tellingly, there is a self-selection bias. As Prof Vaubel says: "Euromantics are more likely to work for the EU than Eurocritics." He further points out, that partly because of member countries' reluctance to expand the EU budget, the main activity of the EU institutions has been regulation. Since majority voting has applied in this field since 1987 more than 50 labour regulations have been introduced, reflecting the attempts of the corporatist majority "to impose their high levels of regulation on the more liberal minority". Prof Vaubel has some telling tables showing that top Commission officials and MEPs are also far more in favour of EU military power and an EU foreign minister than the European public. Prof Vaubel does miss out one point. This is the regulations and procedures that require smaller parties in the parliament to cohere into larger groups to make full use of its quite expensive facilities. This more than anything else accounts for the temptation of the British Conservatives to coalesce with some dubious Continental populist groups. More important, he falls for the common practice of holding up "democracy" as the ideal method of making political decisions. Democracy, in common political parlance, means decision by popular voting. Now suppose that either the proposed new president of the EU Council of Ministers, or the president of the Commission, were chosen by a European electorate, would that be a great triumph? It would be hailed as such by many Europhiles. Suppose that some Christian Democrat bureaucrat were elected by 21 per cent of the first preferences in a poll with 40 per cent turnout. Would that enthuse people from Lapland to the Algarve to follow his lead? Legitimacy, not merely some form of democracy, is what is needed. Prof Vaubel's own proposals are more modest. He would like obligatory popular referenda for all EU treaty amendments and the Commission to be an ordinary civil service subordinated to the Council of Ministers. He also advocates a second chamber for the European parliament composed of members of national parliaments chosen by lot and a rather complex reform of the court of justice so that it is "no longer a motor of centralisation". Needless to say, this will not happen. The best practical proposal would be to call a halt to further institutional deepening and concentrate on making the existing EU work better. This is what Eurocrats say will happen after each new expansion of EU powers. It never does, of course. * The European Institutions as an Interest Group, £10
<<<	articles
Published on www.samuelbrittan.co.uk Contact - samuel dot brittan at ft dot com