It is a summary of each chapter of the book, Sintesi del corso di Politiche dell'Unione Europea

Scarica It is a summary of each chapter of the book e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Politiche dell'Unione Europea solo su Docsity! EU POLITICS AND POLICIES IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD - B026821 XII Reflecting on the EU as a political system Deepening the EU: towards ‘ever closer Union’? Article 1 of the Treaty on European Union speaks of ‘the process of creating an ever closer union’ that underlies the objectives of the EU. These words go back to the Treaty of Rome establishing the European Economic Community, whose preamble opened with the stated ambition ‘to establish the foundations of an ever closer union among the European peoples’. he history of the EU has been far from an uninterrupted development towards ever closer union. Rather, the EU has developed in fits and starts, alternating periods of quick expansion with periods in which the project seemed to be caught in gridlock. The sources of these developments have been both internal and external. 1. Internal sources of institutional and policy developments: - As internal sources of development, the EU institutions have used the opportunities offered in the EU treaties to build up policies and new institutions where they did not exist before. Some examples: 1. In the early 1960s, the Court of Justice established the doctrines of direct effect and supremacy of EU law, which considerably strengthened the legal status of EU law and have defined the relationship between EU and member state law ever since; 2. On the basis of a few provisions on competition policy in the initial EEC Treaty, the European Commission sought to develop a system of merger control, which was later formalised by a Regulation in 1989; 3. Formally, the EP can only reject a new European Commission as a whole but not individual Commissioners. Nevertheless, since the 1990s, the EP has used this power as a leverage to demand the removal of individual Commissioners that it did not approve of, threatening to reject the entire Commission otherwise. Thus, both in 2004 and 2009 individual Commissioners were replaced after EP objections. - The internal developments depend on the activism of EU supranational institutions. They have been taking advantage of the room which EU treaties offer in order to strengthen their own position within the EU’s institutional framework as well as in case of specific policy areas. - The implicit, but crucial, necessary condition for this activity has been the acquiescence of member state governments in the face of the faits accomplish that the supranational institutions sought to present them with. For example, after the Court of Justice developed the doctrine of direct effect, the member states could have included an explicit provision in the treaties stating that EU law does not automatically have direct effect in national legal orders (as is the case for ‘regular’ international law). But they did not. Likewise, the member state governments (and the Commission itself) have accepted as a fact of life that the EP uses its powers of approving the European Commission to demand the removal of individual commissioners. 2. External sources of institutional and policy development: - The EU has been held back or propelled forward by crises such as the financial crisis, 9/11 (this helped in the development of joint policies in the field of terrorism and crime fighting) and the fall of communism in ’89 (this led to the member state governments and the EU institutions to redefine the role of the EU, which provided an important push towards the Treaty of Maastricht). - There is a pattern after such events: initially, MS governments take the help, particularly Heads of state and government assembled in the European Council and the EU institutions were bypassed and had lost control. In the longer run however, crises leads to the strengthening of the EU’s institutional framework. - Example: the financial crisis. The major initiatives were taken by member state governments. It was national governments that put unprecedented amounts of money into supporting banks and other sectors of the economy and that deliberately violated the EMU’s Stability and Growth Pact by letting government debt rise far beyond the ceilings contained in it. At the time, it seemed as if the EU institutions were simply bypassed and had lost control. Then, the European Commission played an important role in the financial stabilisation mechanism created in 2010. Likewise, the EP played an important role in strengthening the powers of the new European financial market authorities. Only after the EP had amended the proposal during the ordinary legislative procedure did the Council agree to giving the authorities the power to intervene directly in financial institutions. - Other examples: After the fall of communism, it was politicians such as Germany’s Helmut Kohl and France’s François Mitterand who decided on German unification. After 9/11, the European Council took the initiative to formulate an EU response in a series of meetings in the last four months of 2001. But here, too, the EU institutions in the end came out stronger, with new policy initiatives being incorporated into existing institutions and decision-making procedures. - Another reason is the need for specific expertise on some tasks. Thus, that expertise is possessed only by trained professionals, whose (expert) judgement cannot be properly evaluated by non-professionals. Hence, democratic control (which is almost by definition control by laymen) is not compatible with expert-based decision-making. The application of the law by judges is, yet again, an example of this. - Right now, it is permissible to place a governmental task outside of democratic control if that task 1. requires independence and 2. does not concern fundamental trade-offs but only the attainment of one well-specified objective. Example: central banks are tasked with a set of relatively straightforward objectives such as preventing inflation and safeguarding the stability of the financial system. They do not have to weigh these goals against other objectives, such as reducing unemployment or redistributing wealth among citizens. These trade-offs are made elsewhere; central banks just need to make sure their tasks are fulfilled properly. The same is true for competition authorities. They just need to make sure firms do not violate competition law. Although a whole range of other values may be affected by their decisions (employment, protection of vulnerable groups in society, environmental protection, etc.), in principle they do not have to (indeed often are not allowed to) take these other consequences into account. - These trade-offs are made by parliaments, who determine broad economic priorities as well as the content of competition law itself. This is why it is believed governments should be democratic but independent agencies should not. An important thing here is input legitimacy and output legitimacy. The prior depends on the extent to which political systems succeed in translating the preferences of their citizens into policies. The latter refers to the capacity of governments to effectively solve collective problems. - The most controversial issues in politics (those relating to the welfare state and cultural identity, and those closest to citizens) are exactly the issues that have remained (almost) exclusively at the member state level. The issues that the EU deals with most intensively are further removed from citizens, such as competition policy and harmonisation of technical requirements. Hence, the key question to be asked of the EU is whether it does this job well and efficiently. In this line of reasoning, there is no need for further democratisation of the EU. (this is related to input legitimacy and output legitimacy). Others believe that the EU has evolved to deal with a much wider range of issues now. Now it is interested in determining the content and application of criminal law in its MS (this touches upon civil liberties directly) and in guiding basic economic policy choices. This is what it is expected of democratic bodies in domestic political systems. How democratic is the EU? - There is a “democratic deficit” thesis in which it is argued that the EU falls short of the basic democratic standards which may be required of a political system. According to proponents of the democratic deficit thesis, the EU should become much more democratic if it is to live up to the standards we may require of it given the wide range of tasks it performs. This would include the further expansion of EP powers, an improvement in the accountability of the Council and European Council and a full politicisation of the European Commission by basing it on a parliamentary majority in the EP 1. Compared with national parliaments, the EP has a limited role. It is excluded from a number of important policy areas, most notably foreign policy. 2. Decision-making in the Council of Ministers and in lower-level committees that prepare decisions or check the Commission is often rather secretive and the bodies themselves are not subject to direct accountability to the EP or national parliaments. 3. The accountability of individual ministers in the Council (or of individual heads of state and government in the European Council) to their national parliaments is often quite weak because they can hide behind the fact that they had to compromise with 26 other colleagues. In those circumstances, it is impossible to hold an individual (prime) minister accountable for the outcomes of a (European) Council meeting. As a result, the Council and the European Council suffer from what accountability scholars have called ‘the problem of many hands’: when many individuals are jointly responsible for the outcome of a process, no single individual can be held accountable for that outcome, which implies that in the end no one is held accountable. 4. In domestic parliamentary systems, parties try to form coalitions after the elections with a view to forming the government. As a result, parliamentary elections in practice evolve around the question of who will be in government and who will become the next prime minister. This gives voters a clear choice, because their vote helps determine who will be in power after the elections. This is not the case in the EU, because the European Commission, which can be seen as the EU ‘government’, is not formed directly on the basis of EP elections. - As we have seen throughout this book, many aspects of how the EU works are subject to ongoing (scholarly) debate. In addition, and more fundamentally, different positions can be taken on what constitutes ‘true’ democracy. Obviously, which conception of democracy one chooses is crucial for determining whether or not one will find fault with the way the EU works. Whatever one’s final assessment of the EU’s democratic qualities, it is important to keep two points in mind. First, one should be aware that there are two aspects to democracy: institutions and practices. Institutions are important for democracy because they determine the formal roles that citizens play in politics or at least in determining who will govern them. Indeed, for some people democracy is synonymous with a set of institutions (e.g. the powers of the EP), most notably free and fair elections. Yet, democracy is more than institutions. It is also a set of practices that determine how the political ‘game’ is actually played (e.g. the behaviour of political groups in the EP). It is important to keep both aspects in mind when assessing the democratic quality of the EU. Second, it is important to compare the EU to other political systems and not just to some abstract ideal of democracy. Useful as ideals are for maintaining a critical stance towards politics, they may easily lead to judgements that are not placed within a proper context. If, for instance, EU decision-making is criticised for being insufficiently transparent, one should also take into account that domestic politics is often far from transparent. How much do citizens see of what goes on in Whitehall, the German Bundeskanzleramt or the French Elysée? For a fair and balanced assessment of the EU, as well as for a well-founded analysis of the background to how the EU works, comparisons with other political systems are therefore essential. In an absolute sense, no political system is fully democratic but another question is how it fares when compared with other, reasonably democratic systems. Between state and international organization: the EU in comparative perspective: - The uniqueness of the EU stems from the fact that it seeks to marry the characteristics of a ‘traditional’ international organisation with many of the tasks and institutions that have always been characteristic of ‘states’. Formally speaking, the EU is an international organisation. It has been created on the basis of an international treaty, under international law, by sovereign states. However, in its institutions and the tasks it undertakes, the EU has also developed a number of characteristics that are typical of a state. 1. The scope of policies: The EU is more like a state (and very much unlike other international organisations) in the sense that it covers a broad range of policy areas. International organisations typically only deal with one policy or issue area: NATO does defence, the WHO does health, the IAEA atomic energy, the WTO trade, and so on. The EU, by contrast, does all these things plus a lot more. In that regard, the scope of its activities is more like that of a state than like that of an international organisation. At the same time, the EU lacks three capabilities that are seen as the corner- stones of state sovereignty: it does not levy its own taxes, its does not have an army, and it does not have its own police force. 2. The role of the EU’s supranational institutions: The EU’s supranational institutions (Commission, EP, Court of Justice) play important roles, much more so than the secretariats and adjudication bodies of other international organisations. Nevertheless, member state governments remain crucial actors in EU decision-making, involved as they are in almost every decision through the European Council and the Council of • The answer to the question whether the EU should be democratic depends on one’s perspective on the tasks of the EU: does it execute a number of relatively technical and clearly predefined tasks or does it make policies that imply trade-offs between important values? • The answer to the question whether the EU is in fact democratic depends on one’s assessment of the democratic credentials of both institutions and practices in the EU. •  In comparison with other political systems, the EU shows characteristics of both a state and an international organisation. It is this ambiguity that makes the EU unique. CEE e TED PIT e + In Chapter 3, it was noted that about 80% of all decisions in the Council of Ministers are in reality taken at lower levels of preparatory bodies, be it Coreper or Council working parties. Proceedings in these bodies are + The EU's institutional set-up has evolved enormously over the past dec- ades. Whereas the EP had no real decision-making powers until the late 19805, it has now acquired the power to amend and veto legislation in the vast majority of issue areas. After the Treaty of Lisbon, the number ofareas in which the EP has no say at all has diminished even further and these areas are now limited primarily to foreign and defence policy. + In Chapter, we argued that a shift has taken place from a “permissive con- sensus' on the EU among citizens towards a ‘constraining dissensus’. The picture in this regard is not the same in all member states. In some public RE II © 2 opinion has moved from (implicit) support for the EU to Euroscepticism, in others the trend has been the other way around. In general, however, there seems to be a shift in which political elites need to take public opin- ion more into account when making choices regarding the EU. This hints at a move towards a more ‘democratic’ public debate. 289 REFLECTING ON THE EU AS A POLITICAL SYSTEM largely hidden from public view and accountability mechanisms are all but absent. In Chapter 5, EP elections were characterized as ‘second-order’ elections. Because citizens feel little is at stake in these elections, voter turnout is low and voting behaviour tends to be determined by domestic political considerations rather than EUlevel issues. This lends credence to the claim that the composition of the EP does not reflect preferences on EU policy choices. Moreover, it ties in well with the argument that too little is at stake in EP elections because they do not determine the composition of the EU ‘government’. Also in Chapter 5, it became clear that there is a gap în opinions between citizens and domestic political elites regarding the EU and European inte- gration. Citizens tend to be more sceptical of the EU than political elites, but it is the latter who take the decisions in and on the EU. In Chapter 6, We saw that political protest is much less common at the EU level than at the domestic level. Insofar as groups mount political protests against EU policies, they overwhelmingly direct those protests against their national governments, not the EU institutions. An important part of Between state and international organization: the EU în comparative perspective * The EP itself functions increasingly like domestic parliaments, with its political groups being the key players in parliamentary decision-making. In Chapter 7, it was shown that the voting cohesion of these groups has steadily increased over the past decades. This is an important precondi- tion for a democratic parliament because it allows voters a real and clear choice among a limited set of alternative parties. Similarly, although European political parties do not perform the same functions as domestic political parties, they have developed more in that direction recently, with some parties even opening up membership to individual citizens. the explanation for this pattern is that the political opportunity structure offered by EU institutions is unfavourable to political protest because EU policy-makers are less vulnerable to public opinion. This is another indica- tion that citizens play a smaller role within the EU than within domestic politics, which makes the EU less democratic. Finally, in Chapter 7, it was argued that European political parties do not perform the same set of functions as their domestic counterparts. Most notably, they do not provide the types of links between citizens and the political system that domestic political parties have traditionally provided.