The EU’s ‘period of reflection’ is coming to an end. The stalling manoeuvre implemented by the European Council after the rejection of the EU Constitution by France and the Netherlands last year has been marked by scant action and a fair amount of hand-wringing. So one and all will surely be glad to hear that the EU is now moving on from ‘reflection’… to ‘re-assessment.’ Having retreated into a huddle over the weekend, senior EU Commission officials emerged to declare that they were now ready to focus on a ‘positive policy driven agenda’. Do not fear, reader, you are not alone in wondering what this all actually means!
To my ears, there is not a huge difference between ‘reflection’ and ‘reassessment’. The truth is that the period of reflection was meant to give space for someone / anyone to come up with a means of re-launching the EU Constitution. But, one year on, the EU’s leaders have had little success in agreeing on how the treaty should be salvaged. Some, like Nicholas Sarkozy, would like to ‘cherry-pick’ (pushing through the acceptable parts of the treaty while shelving the rest), while others like Angela Merkel insist that it must be all or nothing. So ‘re-assessment’ really means little more than an extension of ‘reflection’. The Constitution is going no-where.
It is their awareness of this that is pushing the EU in the direction of a new ‘policy-led agenda’. Now before you shout “but surely all political agendas are policy-led?!”, I should point out that in the rarefied halls of Brussels, they tend to see things differently. What ‘policy-led’ actually means is not talking about the Constitution anymore and instead trying to regain face by doing ‘things.’ Concrete policy is the new mantra – the EU must demonstrate that it is competent and valuable to Europe’s citizens. Once it does this, then it can return to the Constitution.
The first part of this, at least, does not seem like a bad idea. Indeed, the EU’s new branding guru, Simon Anholt, has said very much the same thing. In an interview with the Financial Times, he pointed out that organisations like the EU, ‘usually get the reputation they deserve.’ In other words, they are judged by their actions and not by their words.
This is all very well, but I cannot help but wonder whether more action on the part of the EU is really the solution. After all, EU citizens are well aware that the EU does ‘things’. What they are not sure of is exactly what 'things' it is that the EU is doing at any given time, or how they effects them and what the constant stream of eurospeak that emanates from Brussels really means. Last weekend, the Danish Parliament (which has a pretty good record of keeping tabs on the EU), engaged in an interesting experiment in popular participation. They gathered together 400 ordinary citizens and asked them what they thought of the EU. Their responses were broadcast on national television.
The overwhelming response from the Danish panel was that EU policies were too complicated and that the EU was making too many decisions that could be made at the national level. A similar message came out of a conference held two weeks ago as part of the Austrian EU presidency. The topic under discussion was the subsidiarity principle, an idea which, since 1992, has sought to limit the scope of EU action and to keep as many decisions as possible at a local level. In the course of the debate, Lord Grenfell made a point very similar to that made by the Danish panel – that EU regulations are too complicated. Another speaker then went on to suggest that a little more attention to detail in the drafting of new laws might stop them from becoming so burdensome.
From all this something of a pattern does emerge. There is a feeling that the EU is doing too much, that what it does is not of a high standard and that much of it does not need to be done at an EU level. The answer to this is not more ‘positive policy’ but a real shake up of how decisions are made and why. The citizens of Europe do not want to be challenged to understand the semantic differences between ‘reflection’ and ‘re-assessment’. They want to know what the EU is doing and why it is a good idea. To this end, subsidiarity is a very neat response. It suggests that the EU should act where common action is the best solution and leave other issues to national or regional governments. A real step forward for the EU would be to genuinely absorb this principle, rather than simple paying lip service to it. A good old scrub down of the Augean stables of EU policy-making might in turn make clearer where ‘constitutional’ reform is really required.