Professor Richard Rose
University of Aberdeen

The tension created by forces pushing and pulling in opposite directions can lead to equilibrium or disequilibrium. The growth of problems requiring collective action above the level of national governments is creating pressures to upload more decisions to the EU level. Simultaneously, EU institutions face demands to download decisions to national governments and electorates. If these demands cancel each other out, there is a risk that the EU maintains an equilibrium based on all talk but no action. If both forces are strong, the result will not be the end of the EU, but that it can lead to fragmentation into coalitions of the willing and of the unwilling.

 The EU is now but one player interacting with states and markets on other continents. What was once a European Common Market is now a global market. The exchange rate of the euro is established by trading in New York and Tokyo as well as in Frankfurt. While the EU may control trade among member states, it depends on the World Trade Organisation and bilateral agreements with other major economies to regulate global trade. At the international conference on global warming held in Copenhagen the countries that counted most there were the United States and China. Insofar as EU institutions become more engaged with other continents, this adds a level of governance more distant from Europe’s citizens. The appointment of Lady Ashton as the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy is unlikely to alter the EU’s capacity to influence global issues.

Many collective action problems facing the EU divide member-states. On national security, there are not only differences between NATO and non-NATO members but also differences of opinion among EU countries that are members about the desirability of following American leadership in actions outside Europe. More than one-third of the EU’s members are not part of the eurozone and the euro fluctuates against the pound and the kroner as well as against the dollar and the yen. Within the eurozone, fiscal practices vary greatly and so do national interests. On the cultural front, tensions arising from an influx of immigrants from other continents are much stronger in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe.

Within Europe the old idea of integration by stealth or by the accumulation of overspills is no longer adequate. Traditional deference to elites has been replaced by a priority for democratic representation at all levels of politics. Giandomenico Majone argues that the European Central Bank’s Faustian bargain of giving priority to output effectiveness without popular inputs is no longer effective. He asserts, ‘Elected policymakers are able to provide the necessary political counterweight to the central bank’s technocrats; this is impossible in the EU, where the European Central Bank operates in a political vacuum’.

EU enlargement from 6 to 27 members has done more to increase diversity than unity. The failure to achieve major reforms of EU institutions before enlargement has made decision-making more cumbersome. The backsliding of Bulgaria and Romania on intentions for reform illustrates the EU’s inability to enforce acceptable standards of governance on states once they have become members–and this problem can be found with regard to some older member states too.

Differences of opinion within the Council of Ministers rarely involve 26 countries opposed by a single member. They more often reflect differences between groups of states. They can reflect divisions within old and new member states, between financially stronger and more vulnerable states and within the eurozone and between it and those outside it. Rhetoric can provide a political cover to obscure differences, but it is insufficient to justify EU measures on the grounds that one size fits all 27 member states.

 The logic of an EU with members having heterogeneous characteristics and differing policy preferences is a system in which national governments can opt in or opt out of proposed new EU policies according to whether they and their electorates see them as consistent with their national interests. The principle of subsidiarity provides a justification for downloading decisions to national governments that are directly elected and have more resources in relation to their population than do EU institutions. The vagueness of the principle of subsidiarity makes it well suited to an EU discourse in which politics consists of bargaining about what is and is not embraced by terms such as social cohesion and solidarité. The Lisbon Treaty contains formal procedures for national governments to challenge the Commission’s exercise of powers.

 The German Constitutional Court has declared that it would only justify EU measures that it found consistent with German constitutional law, because the EU is not a properly democratic institution. European Court of Justice decisions voiding national regulations about the labour market as obstructing the development of a Single Europe Market have been described by Fritz Scharpf as ‘pushing against the limits of justifiability’ by usurping responsibilities of nationally elected parliaments.

They create, he charges, a situation in which ‘open non-compliance is a present danger’. Scharpf’s remedy is that such contentious decisions should be subject to challenge by the Council of Ministers, because its members are nationally elected.

Bringing the people into debates on policy is an extreme form of downloading policy. Many proposals are regularly brought forward to ‘tighten the reins’ linking European citizens with the EU policy process. Commission efforts to reach out to civil society organizations often embrace Brussels-based ‘astroturf’ organizations rather than grass roots representatives.  The Lisbon Treaty authorizes a European Citizens’ Initiative demanding that the European Commission (2009) give an opinion about a specified policy issue. For the Initiative to be accepted, it must have one million verified signatures from at least one-third of the member states. To file an Initiative will require trans-national organization and activities costing many millions of euros.

The French and Dutch referendums on the European Constitution let out of the bottle the genie of popular legitimation of EU decisions. However, Euro-elites have no policy for constructively dealing with this issue. In the words of the Charlemagne correspondent of The Economist, they are ‘not people who hate democracy but people who equate national democracy with selfishness and populism’. The Irish solution–to tell the electorate to vote again and give the right answer–can hardly be applied to France or Britain. The europhile British Liberals have agreed with anti-EU British Conservatives to an Act of Parliament requiring a national referendum on future EU treaty changes. This is easier to defend in the court of public opinion than Prime Minister Gordon Brown signing the Lisbon Treaty in the absence of the consent of the British people as well of the other 26 European signatories.

The logic of centrifugal pressures is an increase in a la carte policymaking. This permits enhanced collective action among a hard core of member states who see advantages in common policies, unhindered by crippling concessions or vetoes by other member states. It can also satisfy countries where national interest and current EU interests are not fully aligned. For example, David Cameron has already given public support for closer co-operation of Eurozone members to deal with the financial meltdown of Greece–as long as it leaves Britain out.

 The direction in which a la carte policies lead depends on the choice of metaphors. The mathematical metaphor of variable geometry is consistent with the maintenance of a European Union that can accommodate sets of actors heading in different directions according to the issue at hand. The metaphor of a two-speed Europe is about tempo, not direction. It is a leaders-and-laggards model predicting a process of ongoing integration in which member states move at different speeds. There is, of course, a third alternative: a European Union whose members are going nowhere while the rest of the world moves on.