FLASH
Shkruar nga Martin Sandbu
To become more determined, the EU may need to become more comfortable with disunity rather than treating it as something to be avoided.
If the EU has a lesson to teach, it is surely how to get once-deadly enemies to work together for common goals, “united in diversity,” as the bloc’s motto puts it. Conversely, a lack of unity is often blamed for the EU’s efforts to be stronger in the geopolitical arena. The unspoken axiom is that for Europe, division breeds indecision. But what if the truth is closer to the opposite? To become more determined, the EU may need to become more comfortable with division, not treat it as something to be avoided.
Take, for example, the new trade deal with the Mercosur bloc, which the European Commission sent to member states and the European Parliament for approval this week, 26 years after the first talks began. That is cause for celebration, perhaps only after the votes are counted. But we don’t have to wait to reflect on how it could have taken so long.
While trade policy is entirely the responsibility of Brussels, the Commission has long been intimidated by some countries with strong agricultural interests, France above all. The fear has been that France would gather a blocking minority of states. The Commission was right to add sweeteners, but many years have been wasted in the hope of improving the agreement so that everyone is happy. Seeking to please everyone is a futile task.
Consider another so-called trade deal on the table: the handshake deal with the US, which is supposed to offer trade deals that will be sustainable and better, Brussels says, than if there were no deal. Few are convinced of this, even within the commission itself: Teresa Ribera, the transition and competition commissioner, has come close to suggesting that a sharp resurgence of pressure against EU technology regulation could mean the deal’s cancellation. It is by no means guaranteed that the European parliament will approve the tariff changes that Brussels has promised the White House.
The commission’s highly competent trade officials could surely have achieved a better result with a more confrontational stance from their political masters. There were early thoughts of bringing out the bazooka of the “anti-coercion instrument” (ACI), which would have allowed Brussels’s broad powers to punish big US technology companies, for example, for punitive tariffs on EU exports. Why did nothing come of this? One explanation is the fear that an exasperated Donald Trump would pull the rug out from under Ukraine. But another is deference to the governments of the big member states, whose priority was to protect national export interests. The moral is that results suffer from deference and fear of opposition.
Another example: Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta complained in influential reports last year that the EU economy is fragmented by too many different national rules. Their solutions included more regulations (which are the same for everyone) instead of directives (which member states adapt into national law) and the creation of a “28th regime” of corporate rules to bypass capital protections against national laws. Both problems stem from a politics of consensus. It is easier to persuade countries to agree to directives, which they know can then be tailored to suit particular domestic interests; and it is harder to get around the country’s long-standing attachment to domestic systems. But the result is stagnation. In practice: more diversity, less unity.
This does not mean repeating the tired call for “variable geometry” – institutional solutions to allow different groups of EU countries to integrate to different degrees in different areas. While important, this replaces institutional reform with a necessary change in political culture: one less concerned with consensus and more focused on moving forward.
This is possible within the existing institutional structure. Some decisions legally require unanimity, but many others can be taken with closer support and a “just do it” attitude: conclude the Mercosur agreement more quickly without worrying about French ties; launch the ACI to strengthen the EU’s influence against the US; or pursue “enhanced cooperation,” where only nine member states can adopt common rules when the others disagree. One alternative is Spain’s “competitiveness laboratory,” a search for coalitions of the willing in integrating financial policies.
Consensus is a wonderful thing. When achieved, as it has with 19 sanctions packages against Russia, it creates a strong political foundation for action. But as the EU’s sanctions policy has shown, the pressure it has exerted to keep Moscow’s European sympathizers on its side, there is a trade-off between seeking consensus and achieving more. If the EU understands that more is required of it in these dangerous times, it must also understand that compromise has gone too far in one direction. An EU with less consensus would also be a stronger actor on the world stage. / Adapted from “Pamphlet” by “FinancialTimes”
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