Writers from six leading newspapers in the six largest countries suggest six ideas to help redefine the union.
The European parliament in Strasbourg. The French city gains about €20m a year from the monthly invasion of MEPs.
Stop the
Strasbourg shuttle
In a different week, of course, they could have done exactly
the same by taking a 10-minute stroll from their Brussels office. But last week
the parliament building in the EU capital lay semi-vacant because of the
wearying regime known as the Strasbourg shuttle, whereby MEPs have to spend 12
four-day sessions a year in the French city.
"Such a ludicrous, wasteful and inefficient
process," said Edward McMillan-Scott, the UK MEP who has long campaigned
to end the shuttle.
Reform of the EU, its structures, institutions, pay and
perks is an idea that naturally resonates with a public weary of enduring their
own austerities and eager to see their officials swallow some of the same
medicine. In total, 56,000 people work for the EU, and its administration costs
about €9bn (£8bn) every year.
David Cameron has made it his mission to shake up the EU. If
he plays his cards astutely, he will win plenty of allies in the Netherlands,
Scandinavia and Germany for a streamlining agenda, provided his strategy is
aimed at future reform rather than retroactive unpicking of what is already
established. Reopening the past is a pandora's box.
The parliamentary circus is an easy target and, predictably,
the British are spearheading the Stop the Shuttle campaign. There is talk, for
example, of using the premises to move the European court of justice in
Luxembourg and the international criminal court in The Hague to Strasbourg and
turning the city into "Europe's city of justice".
More substantive and meaningful reform is on the cards from
next year, though, following European parliament elections and the creation of
a new European commission, the Brussels-based EU executive, which employs about
30,000 staff.
The commission has 27 commissioners, each in charge of a
policy area, from trade to humanitarian aid. But there are 27 not because there
are 27 policy areas that need to be staffed, but because there are 27 countries
in the EU, each needing to have its own man or woman in one of the top jobs.
Next year, in all likelihood, brings the end of
ex-Portuguese prime minister, José Manuel Barroso's, 10-year reign as head of
the commission, offering the opportunity for a big shakeup. The Germans are
keen to go there.
"Ideas about having junior commissioners are being
discussed in Berlin," said a German official. "But no one must feel
that they are being made second or third rank."
It is difficult to shake up the Brussels bureaucracy, but a
consensus is building that next year might offer an opportunity of a kind that
only arises once in a decade. The last time was under Neil Kinnock between 1999
and 2004.
"There is change in the air. It could be a big
one," said the senior official. "There is an expectation that there
will be lots of pressure from the member states on the new commission to shake
things up. Recent years were about absorbing new member states into the system
(12 since 2004). Now it's time to rethink the commission."
But not necessarily the shuttle parliament. Strasbourg gains
about €20m a year from the monthly invasion of eurocrats, which leaves an
annual carbon footprint on the city of 19,000 tonnes from the trains, planes,
cars, and lorryloads of paperwork needed to oil the European legislative
machine, costing about €180m a year.
Most MEPs want to scrap the travelling circus and stay in
the vast modern parliament building in Brussels. Three out of four of them
voted last October for a single venue. But the Lisbon treaty obliges them to
sit in France 12 times a year. Only national governments can change that. They
all have a veto. And President François Hollande says exactly the same as his
predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, if a bit less stridently: "Non."
"The French will never give it up, unless that is, they
were given something major as part of a big reform package," said a senior
EU official.
Ian Traynor in Brussels
Catherine Ashton, high representative for foreign affiars,
holds a news conference after an EU emergency foreign ministers meeting to
discuss the crisis in Mali.
A European army
Troops, unite! What if the key to relaunching the European
project were foreign policy and defence? What if Europeans organised themselves
so that they were no longer the "political dwarves" of world affairs?
Public opinion is often surprised to see different European
countries, members of the same union, acting without a common line or any real
common front. And yet, Europe is still sought out as an actor on the world
stage and often called on to intervene where the US and Nato don't want to, or
cannot, such as in Africa. The 20 missions run by the EU are valuable
experiences, even if not always efficient or visible. Mostly, they have a civil
rather than military vocation. Operation Atalanta, the first naval operation of
the EU, in which warships from several countries restored maritime security off
the Horn of Africa, is a success that is too little celebrated. Europeans can
take part in operations in Congo, or Kosovo for example, according to their
means and interests: one could even imagine them chipping in to help another
European country act in everyone's name.
Of course, there's no question of playing at being
all-powerful. "A priority for the Europeans should be to order their …
priorities," warns Arnaud Danjean, vice-president of the European
parliament's defence sub-committee. Eventually, it would mean – as the US would
like to see – Europe at least acting together in its immediate backyard: the
Mediterranean basin, or on the eastern region from Ukraine to Belarus, via
Georgia. Tightening ranks with regards to China, rather than each country alone
trying to play its own game, would also allow Europe to have more clout in
Beijing and the developing world.
A European diplomacy does exist, in theory. In Brussels, the
seed of a common diplomacy was planted with the European external action
service run by Catherine Ashton, high representative for foreign affairs and
security policy, in the more or less benevolent shadow of national diplomatic
missions. On paper, its potential is vast, just as its start was laborious,
essentially due to differences in culture and interests between Brussels and
the various European capitals. Ashton has certainly sought to make her mark,
with great difficulty, on two key dossiers: negotiations with Iran over its
nuclear programme and in the Balkans, arbitrating between Serbia and Kosovo.
But what is a diplomacy without a military arm? As a good
English person, Ashton will have done everything to nip in the bud any vague
impulse towards European defence. She believes, like the British and German
leaders, that the protection of the continent should be ensured by Nato. And
therefore that, beyond the bilateral co-operation between France and the UK,
there is no need to do more, especially at a moment when member states balk at
sharing sovereignty in this most regalian area. In Libya, then in Mali, Europe
shone by its collective absence, while first the British and the French, then
the French alone, took their responsibilities and decided to intervene.
Reticent, Germany put on the brakes.
However, after three years of crisis and debt, one could
find a certain logic in a rapprochement of military forces, to at least avoid
duplication. In total, European military defence spending represents half that
of the US. Unable to spend more in these times of austerity, the 27 European
nations could at least try to spend better, by mutualising their efforts and
organising their defence industry around their collective needs. Today
aircraft, fighter helicopter or sub-marine programmes are in fierce
competition. A rapprochement of EADs and BAE to create a European defence and
aviation giant would clearly make sense in the eyes of European citizens. It
almost happened in 2012, but Angela Merkel vetoed it.
Philippe Ricard, Le Monde in Brussels
A Eur-app
The EU needs an app. Everyone else has one. Call it Eur-app.
A little tool with a big mission: to tell 500 million people how things are
better being inside the tent rather than outside.
And make it fun. Not just a dull, clunky conduit for press
releases and cautious diplo-initiatives. But something designed, something
game-like that can make the EU relevant to the new 21st-century digital
generation. Buying a car? The app will tell you how much cheaper it is because
it was built in Europe, for Europeans. And how many European jobs that created.
Trading with a Czech counterpart? The app will calculate the single-market
benefit to your bottom line. Swimming in the sea? This beach is 8% cleaner
today because of EU environmental standards. Walking in the park? Here's how it
might have looked if EU waste directives hadn't been implemented, plastic bags
fluttering in the trees, dead batteries in the rhododendrons. Worried about
jobs for your kids? The EU boosted employment by (insert variable here) this
month because of its open borders. Using your mobile abroad? The EU has saved
you £lots by slashing roaming charges.
OK, so some of these examples might be hypothetical. But the
serious point in this: that Europe perennially fails to make its case to the
public because it struggles to quantify and specify the subtle ways in which it
touches our lives. And so the public just doesn't get it any more.
Wake up, Europe. Tell your people not what they can do for
the EU, but what the EU does for them.
Mark Rice-Oxley, the Guardian
A leading idea
"Europe did something for the Poles" is the
message I see every day on my way to work. The road sign tells me that the
electronic traffic management system on the route I use to get to the Gazeta
Wyborcza office was created with EU money from the EU. There are numerous such signs
in Poland, on new roads, in front of new schools and beside swimming pools.
Dozens of old historic buildings have been renovated, libraries have been
built, new culture centres have opened.
More than 5.9 million Poles, constituting 15% of the
population, have received support from the European social fund – the EU has
invested in their professional qualifications. No wonder that before the crisis
the level of support for the country's membership in the EU declared in surveys
was as high as 80%.
But the crisis has demonstrated that something is missing.
We have stopped talking about European solidarity and now talk only about
money. As the Greeks went to the streets, we watched endless meetings of
European bureaucrats in Brussels on TV. There was no mention of an idea that
would unify Europe – apart from the idea of common market.
The language of ideas has been replaced by technical
language, and nowhere has this been more visible than in the offices of
European institutions. People who work there, as well as the buildings
themselves, seem to be expressions of the same idea: boring technocracy,
focused on its own regulations, written in a language nobody understands.
I know a few Eurocrats personally – they are nice,
intelligent, educated and well-meaning people. In their suits, however, they
seem to form an anonymous, impersonal apparatus.
Europe is founded on the opposition to a powerful idea that
had led the continent to the brink of self-destruction: nationalism. In the
name of national states the most horrible crime was perpetrated, but also
sacrifice offered for the sake of communities. Is anyone able to sacrifice
anything for the sake of Europe? For the sake of the European commission? Is it
possible to have feelings towards these institutions – apart from being bored
by them? Europe needs a leading idea that could provide Europeans with symbols
and aims evoking emotions, attachment and solidarity. No, I do not know what
such an idea could be, but if we do not find it, every crisis will threaten
this impressive building with destruction.
Adam Leszczyński, of Gazeta Wyborcza, in Warsaw
Europe FC United
The Uefa Euro 2012 semi-final match between Germany and
Italy.
It's common knowledge that sport is a quick way of bringing
people together, but in reality it has trouble overcoming national boundaries.
In short, Europeans rarely play sport together as team Europe. If they did so
more often, perhaps it would help engender a greater feeling of pride in the continent.
In 1977, there was an early attempt: the IAAF World Cup in
athletics, an international track and field event, was a contest initially held
every two years (and then as of 1994 every four years) that pitted five
continents against each other, as well as the two countries that had placed
best in the most recent European Cup.
It was a formula that seemed to have taken root. But the
proliferation of big fixtures such as the world championships (which first took
place in 1983) ended up sapping the interest that it had initially aroused. The
IAAF Continental Cup in 2010 attempted to revive the formula, but did not
attract a very big audience.
Since then, it has been left to golf's Ryder Cup to provide
a biennial chance to cheer for Europe. And when it comes along it is noticeable
how ardent Europeans can get: in 2012, the US were defeated on the green at
Medinah, the concept of a united Europe crossed the Atlantic and elicited
unprecedented applause on the benches of the European parliament in Strasbourg.
Football's governing authorities have clearly been thinking
about this. After France hosts the 2016 European championships, the tournament
will change radically, with 13 cities in 13 nations hosting matches in an
attempt to make the competition more pan-European. But even Uefa's general
secretary, Gianni Infantino, admits: "There is a common concept, but the
concept of nationality endures." A soccer team Europe seems a long way
off.
And yet Europeans are ever more bound together by football,
Infantino argues. "You know what people do all over Europe on a Tuesday
and Wednesday evening? They watch the Champions League on TV. Could you get
more united?"
Paolo Brusorio of La Stampa
A new democracy
Cypriot president Nicos Anastasiades.
In the middle of a recent meeting of eurozone finance
ministers, Germany's Wolfgang Schäuble called his French colleague Pierre
Moscovici, the Cypriot president, Nicos Anastasiades, and the representatives
of the European commission, the European Central Bank and the International
Monetary Fund to one side. There, far from the other ministers, the most
controversial of bailouts was decided on.
Minutes later, the entire Eurogroup approved the Cyprus
package unanimously.
This reconstruction of the Cyprus deal highlights not just
the fiscal crisis rocking the EU, but the lack of democratic legitimacy in
resolving it. The trio formed by the European parliament, the European
commission and the European council create a black hole into which the thing we
call democracy risks disappearing. A weak parliament is incapable of
controlling the commission and the council. The council lacks transparency and
does not have to justify itself to anyone. Now an invisible commission –
despite having more competences than ever before – seems determined to turn its
back on the people. Its policy of absolute austerity has sparked social
reaction in Spain and the naming of technocrat prime ministers in Greece (the
birthplace of democracy) and Italy (which took its revenge at the last
elections). The policy has received blows from judges in Portugal and from the
Cypriot parliament after that first grotesque bailout agreement. Three years
after the crisis began, Euroscepticism and worries about the democratic deficit
are growing both in the core countries – tired of emptying their pockets to
fund bailouts – and on a periphery fed up with cuts that have not brought the
end of the tunnel into sight.
"You cannot accuse Europe of being undemocratic. You
might say it is an imperfect democracy, but with the crisis one has to
recognise that there is an extraordinary sensation of democratic deficit,"
said a European source.
So is it time to invent a new division of power, competences
and above all democratic levers? The German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen
Habermas thinks so. "These models of a special kind of 'executive
federalism' currently reflect the reluctance of the political elites to
contemplate replacing the established mode of pursuing the European project
behind closed doors with the shirt-sleeve mode of a vociferous, argumentative
conflict of opinions within the broad public," he argues.
Claudi Pérez of El País in Brussels
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