The EU of today is the result of a process that began over half a century ago with the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community. Those 2 industries then still provided the industrial muscle for military power; and Robert Schuman, the French FM, affirmed in his declaration which launched the project that “any war between France and Germany” would become “not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.”
For France the prospect of a completely independent Germany, with its formidable industrial potential, was alarming. The attempt to keep Germany down, as the French had tried to do after WW1, had failed disastrously. The idea of binding Germany within strong institutions, which would equally bind France and other European countries and thus be acceptable to Germans over the longer term, seemed more promising.
The decision to consolidate it by introducing the single currency, seen as a way to reinforce the safe anchorage of the potentially more powerful Germany after its unification.
The EEC was also, thanks to French insistence on surrounding the common market with a common external tariff, able to enter trade negotiations on level terms with the US; and this demonstrated the potential of the Community to become a major actor in the international system when it has a common instrument with which to conduct an external policy.
Most of the former, belonging to the “realist” or “neo-realist” schools of thought, hold that the Community and the Union have not wrought any fundamental change in the relationships among the member states, whose governments continue to pursue their national interests and seek to maximize their power within the EU as elsewhere.
“Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single, general plan. It will be built through concrete achievements, which first create a de facto solidarity.” The institutions and powers have been developed step by step, following the confidence gained through the success of preceding steps, to deal with matters that appeared to be best handled by common action.
The association of colonial territories on favorable terms; and equal pay for women throughout the Community, without which French industry, already required by French law to pay it, would in some sectors have been at a competitive disadvantage. The Italians for their part, who had the weakest economy among the six, secured the European Investment Bank, the Social Fund, and free movement of labor.
With the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, which opened up the prospect of enlarging the Community to the East, German unification also became possible. But Kohl needed Mitterrand’s support: both for formal reasons because France, as an occupying power, had the right to veto German unification; and, pursuing the policy initiated by Brandt, to ensure that new eastern relationships did not undermine the EC and the Franco-German partnership. Mitterrand saw the single currency as the way to anchor Germany irrevocably in the Community system, and hence as a condition for German reunification; and this ensured for Kohl the necessary support in Germany to proceed with the project.
How is this power used and controlled? How is the Union governed?
The answer, according to many intergovernmentalists, is through cooperation among the governments of member states: the other institutions are peripheral to the Council in which the governments are represented, and this fact will not go away. But while the Council is still the most powerful institution, federalists regard the Parliament, Commission, and Court of Justice not only as sufficiently independent of the states to have changed the nature of the relationships among them, but also as major actors in a process that may, and should, result in the Union becoming a federal polity.
This model will apply from 2014, and requires 55% of states and 65% of population to reach the threshold: this decouples the system from the previous squabbles over voting weights, while protecting both large and small states from being structurally marginalized.
While QMV is designed to ensure that laws wanted by a substantial majority can be passed, the Council still tries to avoid overriding a minority of one government about something it regards as important.
The remaining handful to which unanimity applies come under a variety of headings. These typically relate to structural issues, such as membership of the Union, enhanced cooperation, and citizenship, or to policy areas of particular sensitivity. Most notably for the daily operation of the Union, much of foreign policy has retained unanimity.
While the Parliament’s share of powers to determine the budget is an essential element of democratic control, its role in supervising how the money is spent has had the greatest impact. As well as its power of scrutiny over the Commission’s administrative and financial activities, the Parliament has the right to grant “discharge”: to approve — or not — the Commission’s implementation of the previous year’s budget, on the basis of a report from the Court of Auditors. If not satisfied, the Parliament withholds discharge until the Commission has undertaken to do what is required. Thus in 1998, after the Parliament had withheld discharge for the 1996 accounts and was not satisfied with the Commission’s response, it appointed a high-level expert committee to investigate in more detail. They produced a devastating report on mismanagement and some cases of corruption; and the Commission, anticipating the Parliament’s use of its power of dismissal, resigned in March 1999.
It has proved much better able than the Council to control the Commission. So it can be said that the Parliament is more than halfway towards fulfilling the functions of enacting legislation and controlling the executive, which a house of the citizens in a federal legislature would perform. The Council for its part would be akin to a house of the states, save that the unanimity procedure still applies to some legislation, only its legislative sessions are held in public, and it has retained executive powers that ill accord with its legislative role.
While the Commission, as it stands today, is not the federal executive that Monnet envisaged, it is, with its right of “legislative initiative” and its functions in executing Union policies and as “watchdog of the Treaty,” a great deal more than the secretariat of an international organization.
The Commission has also been called the “watchdog” because it has to ensure that the Union’s treaty and laws are applied, notably by the member states. If it has evidence of an infringement, it has to issue a “reasoned opinion” to the state in question. Should the latter fail to comply, the Commission can take it to the Court of Justice. The Commission is also responsible for executing Union law and policy, though much of it is delegated to member state governments and other agencies.
The Commission’s executive role is constrained by the Council and the difficulties of implementation but is otherwise not, in principle, far different from that of the German federal government, apart from the German’s government’s more effective means of enforcing proper implementation by the Lander. A crucial distinction between the Commission and a government is, indeed, that the Commission does not control any physical means of enforcement. It has moreover only a minor role in general foreign policy, and very little in defense. Along with the differences, however, there are significant similarities.
While litigants can appeal from the lower Courts, there is no appeal beyond the Court of Justice, which is the final judicial authority on matters within Union competence. To enforce its judgment, however, it depends on the enforcement agencies of the member states. The fact that the large majority of judgments under Union law are made by the states’ own courts has instilled the habit of enforcing it; and there has been no refusal to enforce the judgments of the Court itself, even if there have sometimes been quite long delays before member states have complied with judgments that went against them.
Whatever the outcome, it should remind us that the Union reflects the needs of its citizens, and these change over time, so it is only right that there remains an air of contingency over the form of its organization.
They were both economic and political motives for each of the 3 projects: the benefits of economic rationality; and the consolidation of the Community system as a framework for peaceful relations among the member states. Economics and politics were also both involved in the substance and outcomes of the projects, because the integration of modern economies requires a framework of law, and hence common political and judicial institutions. Nor would success in either the economic or the political field alone have been enough to sustain the Community. There had to be success in both, which the customs union and then single market each achieved. It was also a combination of economic and political motives that secured the launch of the single currency, thought not yet the participation of all member states.
Almost all governments supported the single currency project, on political grounds even more than economic ones. The most powerful commitment was in France, where a tradition of support for exchange-rate stability was bolstered by the desire to share in the control of a European central bank and thus recover some of the monetary autonomy that had in practice been lost to the Bundesbank. Other member states, apart from Denmark and the UK, accepted such arguments, especially in the context of a newly unified Germany. For Germany, however, while the political motive for accepting the single currency as a French condition of unification was decisive, there were still reservations about replacing the Deutschmark, with its well-earned strength and stability, by an unproven currency. However, the possibility of building a similar system across the Union was clearly an important motivating factor for an export-driven economy such as Germany’s; if other states would accept the logic of macroeconomic coordination alongside the currency itself, then this would ultimately serve Germany’s interests.
Eurozone membership certainly played a key role in this, as states that had previously had weaker fiscal management were able to benefit from the perceived extension of German rectitude across the Eurozone when issuing new debt, which could be sold at much lower rates than before. This encouraged a relaxing of fiscal management by those states, after their earlier efforts to meet then entry requirements to the single currency.
But tariff and quota disarmament was only a small part of the problem of creating an agricultural common market. All European countries managed their agricultural markets with complex devices such as subsidies and price supports to ensure adequate incomes for farmers and security of food supplies. So a common market for agriculture would have to be a complicated managed market for the Community, to replace those of the member states. It would have been simpler to confine the common market to industry. But the French feared the prospect of German industrial competition and, having a competitive agricultural sector, insisted that the Community market be opened to agriculture too.
The result was the common agricultural policy, with prices of the main products supported at levels decided by the Council of agriculture ministers, through variable levies on imports from outside the Community and purchase of surplus production into storage at the support level. Farmers’ incomes were bolstered by high prices paid by the consumer, together with subsidies from the Community’s taxpayers to finance the surpluses that the high prices evoked. While this was tenable in the Community’s early years, once the UK became a member new tensions arose.
The cost of the CAP remained a heavy burden for the Community, with half the budget going to support a sector that employ less than 5% of the working population, much of it for a small minority of the bigger and richer farmers. By the end of the 1990s, moreover, the twin pressures of enlargement to the East and negotiation in the newly established WTO were forcing the EU into a more structural reform process. New member states, with their large agricultural sectors, were set to drive up costs very significantly, while the need to secure agreement in the WTO trade liberalization negotiations was placing increasing pressure on reductions in levels of agricultural support.
Meanwhile, the world has been becoming a more dangerous place, with sources of instability such as climate change, environmental degradation, cross-border crime, poverty, consequent mass migration, and terrorism, alongside the military forms of insecurity. The relative simplicity of the confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union has been replaced by American supremacy, and with the perspective of an emergent multipolar world in which the US i sin the process of being joined by China and, probably latter, India as giant powers, while Russia along with other, rising powers must also be taken into account; and the balance of bipolar economic power, with the predominance of the US and the EU, is being rapidly transformed, likewise with the BRIC economies, into a multipolar world economy. This is the world in which the EU has to find its place; and as the impact of the Iraq War and the gridlocked Doha Round of trade negotiations have demonstrated, it is no simple task.
Following Europe’s poor showing in the Gulf War, defense was mentioned in the treaty, but in ambiguous terms to accommodate both the French desires for an autonomous European defense capacity and British opposition to any such thing, for fear it could weaken NATO.
This agreement over NATO’s role was hard won, in the face of those countries that wished to keep the US out of the picture, the most notable exponent of which was France. It took the difficult experiences of the conflicts in the Balkans, especially in Kosovo, to demonstrate that Europeans, though their defense expenditure amounted to two-thirds that of the Americans, were capable of delivering only one-tenth of the firepower; and their influence over the conduct of the action was correspondingly limited.
While NATO’s system is also inter-governmental, American hegemonial leadership has caused it to work. There is no hegemon among the member states; and while this makes it more feasible to develop the Union as a working democracy, it will at the same time make an intergovernmental system in the field of defense hard to operate.
While publicly proclaiming the historic mission of the Union to reunite Europe peacefully, many politicians were concerned about the admission of a large number of relatively poor, relatively small, and relatively unstable new members, whose populations might move en masse to the West to find employment.
While political union meant different things in different member states, the significance of “the obligations of membership” was clear enough, including the huge task of applying not far short of 100K pages of legislation, mostly concerning the single market.