Six ideas to save the EU

The EU is facing greater hostility from within than perhaps at any time since its incarnation. 

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

It was a 10-hour round trip last Wednesday for two of the European commission's big-hitters, Olli Rehn of Finland and Viviane Reding of Luxembourg, as they made the trek to Strasbourg from Brussels to report on recent policy-making and be grilled in one of the French city's biggest buildings, the European parliament.

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