Tag Archives: eu

The Deep State of Europe: Welcome to Hell, by Basil Coronakis

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The Peloponnesian War was the first real world war in human history. It lasted 29 years and was fought on three continents, Europe, Africa and Asia, involving the biggest part of the then-known western world. The war was fought between two city-states, Athens and Sparta (Lacedaemon) and it was also the first civil war in history. All combatant parties were speaking Greek.

I knew Basil Coronakis from his work as founder of the eccentric Brussels newspaper New Europe, no longer what it once was; Basil himself died in 2021 at the age of 82, but he had given me this book in 2016, soon after publication. Unfortunately I then mislaid it, and only recently found it (literally) at the back of an inaccessible shelf.

Rather like Basil himself, the book eloquently and discursively describes what he thinks is wrong with the EU. Like a lot of us, he did not see Brexit coming, and this book published two months before the referendum assumes that the UK / France / Germany axis will continue to run the EU in perpetuity. He reckoned that the EU was deeply damaged by the Eastern enlargements of 2004 and after, but does not really explain why.

He goes into quite intense detail on some of the cases of maladministration and outright corruption that he uncovered as a journalist. His central point, that EU officials enjoy the comforts of a privileged lifestyle where their decisions affect hundreds of millions, and could perhaps be more helpful to those who question it, surely goes without saying.

I’m not as thoroughly convinced as Basil was that the EU is fatally wounded or unreformable, but I’ve come across enough troubling cases in my own work to feel that he had a good point about continued vigilance. I feel that this would be a useful read for supporters of the European project, to see the criticisms of a former insider and check against their own gut feelings. The second (2017) edition has no doubt been improved; you can get it here.

Could the European Parliament elections be more European? Perhaps not.

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This is a response to How to make the European elections more European, a paper published last week by Sophia Russack and Nicolai von Ondarza of the Centre for European policy Studies (CEPS). In their paper, the authors bemoan “the elections’ low visibility (mainly due to a largely unharmonised electoral framework) and their perceived low stakes (mainly due to lacking a link between the elections to the legislature and the head of the EU’s executive arm, the Commission)”. They make some recommendations as to how things could be improved:

  • the EU should “fully honour” the election result, which seems to mean involving the European Parliament at an earlier stage in planning the 2024-2029 workplan
  • political parties should pledge to make the European element of future European Parliament elections more visible
  • future elections should have transnational party lists, led by each party’s candidate for President of the European Commission; the winner would get the job.

I know and like CEPS, where I worked from 1999 to 2002, and I know and like Sophia Russack (though I don’t know her co-author). But I disagree with the analysis in the paper, and with the conclusions.

The core issue is not, as Russack and von Ondarza would have it, the weakness of the link between your European Parliament vote and the next President of the European Commission. Much more important is a related but distinct problem: the very weak connection between voting choice and policy outcomes. In most elections in Europe, whether national, regional, provincial or municipal, you are choosing potential players for the executive branch of government. By contrast, European Union policy choices are negotiated between the Commission, the elected Parliament and the elected governments of all 27 members states in a process that is complex but fairly open and well-understood by those inside it (and by close observers like myself). Your vote for an MEP doesn’t very directly impact what the Commission does.

This is not unique to the EU. In the United States, where the divide between the legislative and executive branches is constitutionally entrenched, your vote for Congress is a vote for someone who will scrutinise the executive and hold it to account; meanwhile your vote for President is your vote on government policy. The two are separate things. There are good arguments to be made about the extent to which the USA is really democratic, but the separation of powers is not usually cited as one of them.

I am sure that in any future negotiations over reform of the EU Treaties, the European Parliament will shift the balance of decision-making power further in its own direction, because it has successfully done so in every previous treaty negotiation. But there is only so far that it can go; national governments are not going to be abolished, and the Parliament is in the end a co-legislator and scrutineer, with only a limited ability to propose new policy measures of its own.

EU policy-making is necessarily complex and broad-based, and does not need to be very adversarial. The democratically elected governments of the member states are key elements in the legislative process. The European Parliament elections are far from being the only path through which you as a citizen can influence EU policies. The framing of the problem as one that can be solved by giving the European Parliament more power seems to me to start from the desired conclusion and work backwards.

And this goes even more for the “Spitzenkandidat” concept, the idea that EU democracy will be enhanced if voters know that the largest transnational party’s pre-designated lead candidate will become the new President of the European Commission, as happened in 2019 when Jean-Claude Juncker was chosen, but then did not happen in 2024 when the EPP’s German lead candidate Manfred Weber was dumped by the EPP German Chancellor in favour of her defence minister Ursula von der Leyen. (The right decision, in my own view.)

I always thought that the Spitzenkandidat concept was a bad idea. It is a swizz on voters, because even if it works (as it arguably did in 2019, though in fact the EPP got fewer votes in that election than the Socialists), the policies of the new Commission are not solely determined by the new Commission President; the Berlaymont is not the White House. Instead, as with all EU decisions, the Commission’s work programme is developed by a consensus-building process; the Commission itself is a grand coalition of political ideologies, and so is the Council (the formal gathering of member states).

At a CEPS conference a few years ago, I asked a very senior adviser to the then EPP President of the Commission what difference it would actually have made in terms of policy outcomes if his boss’s Socialist rival had been President instead. The adviser giggled and was unable to answer. Which I think is fair enough. In an alternate universe where the Socialist candidate had won, the ideas going into the Commission’s work programme would have been the same – both EPP and Socialists would have been strongly represented, and anyway did not have very different platforms – the decision-making process would have been the same, and the outcome different only because of the face of the person making the speeches at the end. (The CEPS conference was under the Chatham House rule so I won’t say who my interlocutor was, though you have probably guessed correctly.)

Actually the consensus-building, grindingly deliberative process of EU policy-making is a Good Thing. These are important decisions that affect hundreds of millions of people. It’s absolutely right that, both formally and informally, the system is forced to engaged a broad base of stakeholders to get their buy-in. It’s not clear to me that making this more adversarial will lead to better outcomes, and it seems to me that supporters of the Spitzenkandidat process want to portray it as more adversarial than it actually is. The big gulf in EU policy-making is between those who want to make it work, and those who don’t, and the latter will never nominate a Spitzenkandidat anyway.

There is an additional neglected weakness of the Spitzenkandidat concept. No sensible prime minister or serving government minister will want to put themselves forward. It would mean taking leave of absence (officially or unofficially) from your government duties for weeks or potentially months, in order to front up the EU-wide campaign that would be required, while sending the message to your home country that you consider them to be second best. Prime ministers do not always make the best Commissioners, let alone Commission Presidents, but the Spitzenkandidat system eliminates them from the pool of potential candidates immediately.

And it’s not clear to me (having attended a couple of them) that an assembly of a couple of hundred European party delegates choosing their Spitzenkandidat has greater democratic legitimacy to determine Europe’s future leadership than do the 27 democratically elected governments.

Looking at the United States, would it really be such a good idea to shift the EU political process to be more like that of our American friends? The low turnout at European Parliament elections is disappointing from the democratic purist point of view; but has anyone considered that it may also indicate a level of trust in the system and confidence in the outcome, so that your vote is not really needed to nudge policies in the right direction? Which is why anti-system parties do comparatively well – their voters are less satisfied with the EU, and therefore more inclined to turn out.

So, how could the European Parliament elections be more European? My provocative answer is that they are already a good reflection of what the EU actually is, rather than what some people may want it to be: twenty-seven (or more) different campaigns, adapted to local circumstances but with a European flavour (both pro and anti EU). I don’t think it is fair to criticise political parties for the lack of European-ness in their campaigns. They need votes and they must adapt to local circumstances, and if making their campaigns “more European” was likely to increase their vote, you can bet that they would be doing it already.

Anyway, thanks to Sophia Russack and Nicolai von Ondarza for helping me to crystallize these thoughts, even if I have ended up disagreeing with them.

Normally when I review books on this blog, I quote the second paragraph of the third chapter to give my reader a flavour of the writing. This paper has only a few sections, but the second paragraph of the third one is:

Subsequently, citizens often vote in EP elections less strategically (‘with their head’) or according to their ideological preferences (‘with their heart’), but rather as a form of protest (‘with their boot’). Since voters do not generally perceive their votes as having to decide between rival policy programmes, the EP electoral contest fails to significantly incentivise political parties to develop competing policy ideas that would encourage political debate and lead to genuine attempts to influence public opinion. In short, the less that’s at stake, the less likely that people are motivated to show up and if they do show up, they’re more likely to vote against their current government as a clear sign of unhappiness with its performance.

How many European Commissioners have died in office?

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A grim question for the next time you are setting a general knowledge quiz: How many European Commissioners have died in office?

The answer is three, in 1958, 1981 and 1987.

Michel Rasquin was the very first European Commissioner for Transport and the first Commissioner from Luxembourg, appointed to the Walter Hallstein Commission in 1958. He lasted less than four months, dying on 27 April aged 58. Born in 1899, he was a journalist before the Second World War and the first leader of the Luxembourg Socialist Workers’ Party after the war. He was Luxembourg’s minister for the economy from 1951 until he became a European Commissioner.

Finn Olav Gundelach was the very first Danish Commissioner, appointed in 1973 under François-Xavier Ortoli as Commissioner for the Internal Market and the Customs Union, re-appointed as Vice-President for Agriculture and Fisheries in the Roy Jenkins Commission, and demoted to mere Commissioner for Agriculture under Gaston Thorn. However he lived only a week into his third term, dying aged 55 on 13 January 1981. Born in 1925, he was a career diplomat who had served as Danish ambassador to the UN and the EU, and also vice-president of GATT.

Finally (and let’s hope it stays that way), Alois Pfeiffer was appointed as Commissioner for Economic Affairs and Employment in the first Jacques Delors Commission in 1985, as one of the two German commissioners. He died on 1 August 1987 aged 62. Born in 1924, he was a forester and then a trade unionist, and was nominated by the SPD. He never held elected public office, and was seen by some in Germany as a bit too European and not sufficiently German.

All three of them were simply replaced by nomination by their home government. These days a new Commissioner has to go through hearings in the European Parliament as well. (We’ve had four resignations out of 27 from the current crew, all replaced in that way.)

There is a much more recent case with some similarities: the most recent President of the European Parliament, David Sassoli, died a week before the end of his term in January 2022 aged 65. Born in 1956, he was a print and TV journalist in Italy until becoming an MEP for the centre-left Democratic Party in 2009. When he emerged as a front-runner to head the Parliament in 2019, there was a lot of head-scratching. He performed perfectly well in office, however, until falling ill in 2021. His immediate successor in an acting capacity was the First Vice-President, Roberta Metsola, who was then elected to the job at the scheduled election a week later, and is still there until the elections this summer. Presumably if a vacancy occurs a bit earlier in the term, there would need to be a full election process, but it was hardly worth it for seven days.

iLobby.eu, by Caroline de Cock

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

In order to ensure that you adopt the most effective strategy, it is therefore critical to understand and master the EU legislative process. It is part of your 3Ps (People-Power-Procedures) and I have known several brilliant lobbying strategies failing because the intricacies of procedure were poorly addressed.

This is a book about lobbying in Brussels, published in 2010. As such it is somewhat out of date; the institutional rules have not changed much in that time, but the way things really operate has moved on a bit; and about a quarter of the book is dedicated to kindly explaining that social media actually matters and giving guidance on how you might dip your toe into it. Those were innocent days, in retrospect! (My good friend Jon Worth is mentioned, in the context of the doomed Citzalia project.)

I’m not sure why I got it when I did; I once had aspirations to write such a book myself, but I must say that seeing how quickly such a project could be overcome by events is a bit of a disincentive. Still, the description of the legislative and policy-making process is accurate and useful, and made me realise how much of it I have internalised in my 25 years working here. You can still get the book here.

This was the shorter of the two remaining books on my shelves acquired in 2017. Next is the last of those books, Rule of Law: A Memoir, by Glynnis Breytenbach. This was also the last book that I finished in 2023, so I’m two and a half weeks behind at the moment.

The Popes and Sixty Years of European Integration

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Second paragraph of third papal document (Paul VI’s Apostolic letter Pacis Nuntius of 1964, proclaiming St Benedict as the Principal Patron of Europe):

Sic igitur spiritualem illam unitatem Europae coagmentavit, qua quidem nationes, sermone, genere, ingenio diversae, unum populum Dei se esse sentiebant. Quae unitas, fideliter annitentibus monachis, disciplinae tanti parentis alumnis, peculiaris nota facta est mediae, quam vocant, aetatis. Illam, quae, ut ait Sanctus Augustinus, «ommis pulchritudinis forma» est, lugenda rerum vicissitudine discissam, quotquot sunt bona praediti voluntate, restituere temporibus nostris conantur. Libro, seu ingenii cultu, idem venerabilis patriarcha, a quo tot monasteria nomen vigoremque traxerunt, vetera litterarum monumenta, cum liberales disciplinae artesque obruebantur caligine, diligenti cura servavit et ad posteros transmisit, atque doctrinas studiose excoluit. Aratro demum, seu re rustica, aliisque subsidiis loca vasta et horrida in agros frugum feraces et hortos amemos mutavit; et precationibus fabrilia iungens, secundum verba illa «ora et labora», humano operi excellentiam addidit. Haud immerito ergo Pius PP. XII Sanctum Benedictum «Europae patrem» appellavit, cuius quidem terme continentis populis ille amorem et studium recti ordinis inspiravit, in quo socialis vita eorum inniteretur.It was in this way that he cemented that spiritual unity in Europe, whereby peoples divided on the level of language, ethnicity and culture, perceived that they constituted the one People of God – a unity that, thanks to the constant efforts of those monks who followed so illustrious a teacher, became the distinctive hallmark of the Middle Ages. It is this unity, which St. Augustine calls the “exemplar and model of absolute beauty”, but which regrettably has been fragmented through a maze of historical events, that all men of good will even in our own day seek to rebuild. With the book, then, i.e. with culture, the same St Benedict, – from whom so many monasteries derive their name and vigour – with provident concern, saved the classical tradition of the ancients at a time when the humanistic patrimony was being lost, by transmitting it intact to posterity, and by restoring the cult of knowledge. Lastly, it was with the plough, i.e. with the cultivation of the fields and with other similar initiatives, that he succeeded in transforming abandoned and overgrown lands into fertile fields and greaceful gardens; and by uniting prayer with manual labour, according to his famous motto “ora et labora,” he ennobled and elevated human work. Rightly, therefore, Pius XII hailed Saint Benedict XII as “the father of Europe”; for he inspired the peoples of this Continent that loving care of order and justice that forms the foundation of true society.

This is an old-fashioned little publication (108 pages), lent to me by a colleague, pulling together fifteen major statements by the popes on European integration from 1957 to 2017. It is nicely illustrated, the photograph of the EU leaders meeting the current Pope in the Sistine chapel is particularly striking.

There’s nothing very surprising here for anyone familiar with the EU and the Vatican. Successive popes have been opposed to war and to Communism, and the EU was constructed as a bulwark against both. More recent themes include an emphasis on social justice and on environmental protection, with the Church’s own particular wrinkles on those themes. There’s not much here that anyone could object to, frankly.

There was a time when the relationship looked closer. Of the six founding mamebr states of the EU, four are largely Catholic by religious tradition and the other two (the Natherlands and West Germany, as it then was) were balanced between Catholicism and Protestantism. Now things are vey different; of the 27 current member states, you’d have to put at least four in the Orthodox column, three in the firmly Protestant tradition, and anyway most of them are part of the rising tide of secularism. The European People’s Party, Europe’s largest political grouping, came from the post-war Christian Democrat tradition, but has moved firmly away from anything too church-oriented (though often gets tempted by anti-wokeness, which is not quite the same thing).

I do remember attending a conference for Northern Ireland party activists in the early 1990s, at which a Unionist participant informed us that Pope John XXIII had endorsed European integration in order to ensure Catholic domination in Europe. One of the others present snorted that not many of John XXIII’s plans for the church had worked out in the end. The EU’s two openly gay prime ministers are both from traditionally Catholic countries. Pius XII would not have approved.

Anyway, this is co-published by the EU External Action Service and L’Osservatore Romano, and you can get it from their websites, here and here.

Representing Europeans: A Pragmatic Approach, by Richard Rose

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Europe has always been a continent of diverse peoples but diversity has never been an obstacle to political union. To strengthen alliances or gain territory, monarchies arranged dynastic marriages that created the multi-national empires that dominated Europe before 1914. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was an extreme example of diversity, for the majority of peoples living under the Habsburg crown were neither Austrians nor Hungarians. However, nationalist movements led to the break-up of multi-national empires. After the First World War, new nation-states were created that emphasized ethnic exclusivity, even when they had large minority populations and Germany under Adolf Hitler sought continental domination claiming to represent a Herrenvolk (master race). The Second World War discredited claims to national superiority while the Holocaust and the displacement of minorities increased the ethnic homogeneity of European states.

Richard Rose will turn 90 in April this year; his first two books, co-authored in 1960, were an analysis of the 1959 election and an investigation of why the Labour Party kept losing. He also carried out a very important analysis of public sentiment about politics and government in Northern Ireland just before the Troubles broke out, which has become an essential baseline for understanding what happened last century. My father greatly respected him, and when he came to Brussels in between the Brexit referendum and the pandemic, I made contact and we had a couple of very friendly dinners on the Grand’ Place.

He was kind enough to give me a copy of this short book about the political system of the EU, and its democratic deficits. It’s a lucid guide to how the structures actually work – too many such guides are hypnotised by the institutions’ own accounts of themselves – and makes a lot of the points on the dangers of disconnection between the EU decision-making process and the citizens who are affected by it. The book came out before Brexit (and assumes that it won’t happen) and before the pandemic, both of which have changed things a bit but maybe not all that much.

I’m going to disagree, however, with a couple of the points he makes. He spends an entire chapter criticising the allocation of seats between countries in the European Parliament, which (as you know, Bob) varies between Malta’s six (one MEP per 80,000 population) to Germany’s ninety-six (one MEP per 800,000 population). I don’t really think that this is a problem. Divergences from proportionality are tolerated in a lot of democratic electoral systems for different reasons, usually in order to give extra representation to groups who need it. The large member states already have a massive amount of soft power within the EU system, and I don’t find it outrageous that they shave a couple of the MEPs that they would have been entitled to on a strict population ratio, in order that the diversity of voices from smaller states is not completely extinguished. I think Rose’s argument also faces an issue about differential turnout between different countries, which he doesn’t address.

He also has a solution that I disagree with – holding EU-wide referendums on crucial issues. Here I think he unrealistically discounts the practical and political difficulties of doing this; election laws and procedures are very different across the 27 member states, referendum laws even more so; and how do you explain to, say, Slovaks that the democratic choice they make nationally can be over-ridden by French and German voters? My own feeling is that we should not try too hard to erode the extent to which the EU is a union of member states, since that’s an important element of its legitimacy.

Anyway, these are debating points surrounded by thorough and lean analysis. You can get it here.