EU: is it useful?
The EU isn’t just a threat to national independence, it’s very little help to its troubled member states
Three weeks ago, when the fate of the Lisbon Treaty was still in the hands of the Czech President, I received a circulating petition addressed to him. An eminent bunch of Czech scholars and artists were asking their head of state to kindly stop embarrassing the country Europe-wide, and, if only for his own good, promptly sign the document. I supported the initiative, though I doubted President Klaus would let it interrupt his moment of glory in the spotlight of European politics. Postponing the process of ratification was the last thing the EU needed. Not because the superstate’s constitution is in any way desirable, but simply because the hopeless fight against it directs our attention away from the EU’s real flaws.
The case of Ireland proved that opposing Lisbon was futile. So generous is EU democracy, that when a country rejects a document in a referendum, Brussels gives it another chance to answer correctly; and even if it fails again, there will be another chance; as many chances as needed, until everyone gets it right. The exceptions the Irish gained by their second go – taxation, family issues and state neutrality – as well as Britain’s, Poland’s, and the Czech Republic’s partial opt-outs from the Charter of Fundamental Rights in themselves show that, despite local objections, ratification of the Treaty was deemed inevitable by Brussels. The argument about loss of national sovereignty simply proved an ineffective one.
Of course the threat of accumulation of power in Brussels is justified. The Treaty creates over fifty new competencies for the European Commission, European Parliament and European Court of Justice; it replaces the unanimous consensus-based voting system with the qualified majority one, based on a ‘double majority’ of 55% of member states; even worse, it removes the national vetoes in areas such as ‘fighting climate change’, energy security and emergency aid.
In practice, however, this is not nearly as revolutionary as joining the EU in the first place. It has been clear since Maastricht that the EU project aims beyond the post-war ‘free internal market’ ambition, and that the logic of eastward expansion would have to bring either wider compromises or a tighter alliance. In 2001 a declaration issued at the EU’s Laeken summit called for a ‘Convention on the future of Europe to look into the simplification and reorganization of the EU treaties’, and when two-and-half years later the Convention signed a constitution in Rome, it was clear that a constitutional treaty in one form or another would eventually have to be ratified.
Yet the countries joining in 2004 paid little attention to this. EU membership was a sign of recognition by the West; a promise of democracy, transparency and legal protection against the authoritarianism to which they had been historically fragile. In July 1997, when the EU was opening its entry negotiations with Central Europe, the European Commission reported a whole catalogue of human rights abuses and democratic deficit committed by Slovakia’s government. As a result, the country was made to sit at the back of the class in the Balkan B-stream until the government was replaced in 1998. If within the EU such post-communist excesses were not to be tolerated, it seemed worth compromising ‘national sovereignty’ with the Brussels leadership.
But the EU’s competence was badly overrated. In 2006, when Hungary rioted to demand PM Gyurcsány’s resignation after his leaked-tape confession that his government had “screwed up. Not a little, a lot”, Brussels did nothing to support the rioters. Gyurcsány did not resign until March this year.
The EU is hardly a check to domestic malaise. In June this year, Slovakia’s former Minister of Justice Štefan Harabin was elected the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. An unsavoury character with alleged connections to the Albanian mafia, Harabin does not seem very concerned with EU standards of transparency. Slovak NGOs expressed hope that Brussels would not allow this appointment; yet, five months in office, Harabin is following his usual practices. Brussels does not mind.
The EU clearly knows little about the politics at its fringes, and has little ambition to affect it. Encroaching on countries’ national sovereignty is a key aspect of Brussels logic, and Lisbon is only the most recent example. But there is another question apart from whether Brussels is dangerous: whether it is at all useful. The EU has been highly ineffective in issues beyond the megalomaniac ‘fighting climate change’ projects. So thanks to the Czechs for ending the Lisbon negotiating saga: it finally gives us time to consider if we want to remain a part of this over-ambitious European Commonwealth.
