A new EU debate culture requires systemic changes

2024-08-28

Writing for Project Syndicate, Professor Harold James wonders Who Will Create a New European Culture of Debate?:

Although Europe desperately needs a new strategic outlook, it remains obsessed with a politics of consensus, and thus is stuck with a stultifying orthodoxy propagated by official circles in Berlin and Paris. That means its future may depend on Britain, Italy, and Poland creating a new political center of gravity.

The thurst of the professor’s argument is that the Franco-German tandem that has been driving the European integration process hitherto is ill suited to meet the challenges of our times. The United Kingdom, Italy, and Poland are instead presented as likely partners that can provide leadership for the continent.

In the article much talk is about democracy, yet the professor does not pause to question how exactly would some new coalition of states be representative of the wider interests of Europeans. It is not that the Franco-Germans are no longer good enough for “our” purposes: they were never suitable for a Europe-wide democracy to begin with.

The central problem of the European Union is its intergovernmentalist design. There is no Union-wide administration with fully fledged fiscal and military competences, for example. The governance of the EU is driven by the European Council, which brings together the heads of state or government of the member states. The member states remain sovereign in their own right, making the EU a dubious federation at best with glaring gaps in its democratic legitimation.

It is not that France and Germany do not have a European outlook in their policies, but rather that the role of their respective governments is to first promote their national interests and only then tend to the needs of the EU as a whole. This is what has always been the case and why no crisis can ever be addressed in the optimal way from the interest of the Union as such.

Shifting from one group of national governments to another will only refashion the points of contention while preserving the underlying constraints of intergovernmentalism. Because there will be no European government, we will continue to rely on inter-state bargaining for all key issues. As such, we can expect acrimonious negotiations unfolding behind closed doors whenever the stakes are high, like what is happening ever so often at the European Council.

European leaders failed to seize the chances presented by previous crises, such as during the 2008+ financial meltdown, to introduce new institutions that would eventually legitimise the EU as a federal republic. We could have had a European treasury, for example, to provide a counterpart to the European Central Bank. This would, in turn, engender the need for a ministry of financial affairs and, down the line, a government with the familiar executive functions and processes for its election/formation. Instead, we got more intergovernmentalism, as in the form of the European Semester for economic governance. The Union thus remains a coalition of nation-states, each of which promotes its parochial agenda.

Against this backdrop, consensus building is not the legacy of old elites who are out of touch with reality. It is the necessary condition for the preservation of the EU as we know it. With things as they are, if a small group of countries can decide for the rest what the policies will be, then tensions will naturally rise as the underrepresented voices will rightly point out that their national interests are ignored. The principle of consensus is a shrewd compromise with the realities of European affairs and must therefore be understood as one of the Union’s redeeming qualities, however awkward it may be in practice.

This is all without even considering the specifics of such a new coalition. Georgia Meloni was a neofascist until recently and is now superficially Europeanist perhaps because the EU is itself more aggressive on the migration front. The UK went through the whole “Brexit means Brexit” shadow play and has its own share of massive internal problems. As for Poland, it had an anti-EU government until recently… That these countries have some supposed “strong traditions of debate”, as Harold James puts it, is a dangerously complacent narrative for policy-making. We cannot rely on “traditions” as substitutes for strong democratic institutions. The EU has had enough of the former and it is high time it develops the latter.

Fundamentally, the notion that we need new Franco-Germans to take the baton from the old ones does nothing to undo the violation of the principle of “no taxation without representation”. We will be dragged into wars because, say, the Brits and the Poles are eager to fight the Russians, and we will not have the means to participate meaningfully in those decisions. Sure, we may no longer have to deal with Germany’s insistence on austerity, but we will be introducing a whole new range of similar problems. Whatever supposed gains are of dubious quality.

The European Union will continue to go from one crisis to the next and to develop policies on an ad-hoc basis. This has been its modus operandi and there is no sign it will change course. What remains to be determined is whether such a method is suitable for the challenges ahead. I think that in critical moments European leaders will be focused enough to adopt bold decisions. Though I am not sure those will be in the longer-term interest of democracy at the EU level.

The question then for us citizens is whether we care about European democracy or not. If we do, then we have to campaign for thoroughgoing institutional reforms with the end goal of replacing intergovernmentalism with participatory EU procedures. If we do not care though, then we might as well go ahead with whatever coalition of states works best in the present moment. But let us at least do so with honesty and not pontificate about our lofty “traditions of debate” because, apparently, we do not care about them in practice.