At this stage, the Eurozone—minus weaker countries like Greece—is expected to become a prototype for this core. EU bureaucrats were aware that if they wanted to maintain the pace of integration, then they had to learn to find exceptions to rules and allow certain countries to ignore certain general requirements, and they hoped that the differences would fade with time due to the overall popularity of the European project. By the time the Treaty of Lisbon was ratified in , this kind of flexibility had extended to human rights issues, with the UK, Poland, and Ireland allowed to implement the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union only to the degree at which it would be in line with national legislation: i.
Integration continued until the — crisis, and new integration initiatives were conducted first through a core of ten—fifteen countries and then extended to other states in a milder format. One of the last results of multi-speed European development was the establishment of the European Banking Union in — Despite sporadic successes, the disadvantages of the multi-speed approach are clear and have been described in detail by researchers. The approach runs the risk of the EU disintegrating into two associations under one roof.
It sees the further exacerbation of differences between states, the cessation of positive effects that are traditional for integration such as the spillover effect, when integration reaches a certain level in one sector and promotes integration in neighboring sectors , and the weakening of incentives to make the compromises typical of any multilateral association. A further negative effect for the EU has to do with the rejection of the principle of uniform implementation of laws throughout the territory of the EU, even though initially it was seen as a priority that all countries should equally implement and follow Europe-wide norms.
Mutual advantages from integration are based on a uniform level of responsibility for their implementation. Instead of making exceptions and accumulating contradictions, the EU should wait for a natural alignment of interests and build a harmonious policy. All of the drawbacks can be discerned in the operations of the EU over the past ten years.
Nevertheless, the majority of Western European countries, including Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, support the idea of a multi-speed Europe. The Benelux and Malta are in favor. This harsh rhetoric is quite understandable. Major Western European landowners and multinational supermarkets are pushing local farmers in central Eastern Europe out of the market. The local farmers will therefore call for a version of integration in which the EU focuses more on defense and security and less on the continued harmonization of economic and customs policies.
Brexit has brought that remote dream much closer, but the EU countries that lag behind—for which Macron has no intention of waiting—prevent swift development. The French president sees a special role for a Franco-German center in the future EU, which by would have a single market, common business standards, and—effectively—a combined security space.
In this way, the EU would turn into concentric rings in which France and Germany serve as the core, the modernized Eurozone forms the middle layer, and the other countries remain on the periphery of the integration process. He wants everyone to recognize that EU member states are not united on most matters, and therefore can and should continue to move forward at different tempos, but in the same direction. Even within the Eurozone, there are creditor states and debtor states, and their interests are at odds; it is therefore impossible to achieve unity within the framework of the old rules.
It is better to be different and move forward than to pretend that everyone is the same and tread water. London has always had its own opinions, which hampered the integration initiatives of France and Germany. The UK was more likely than other countries to vote against the majority in the Council of Ministers of the EU, serving as a shield for other Euroskeptics. As delegates assemble from across Europe later this month, there is little doubt that the latter will be weighing much more heavily on them than the former. The intervening period has seen an unabated chain of crises: a proxy war in Ukraine; terrorist attacks in France and Belgium, supposedly facilitated by borderless free movement across the Schengen Area; eurozone deflation and the return of scares over Greek sovereign debt; mass refugee flows from the Middle East and North Africa; the rise of far-Right movements within grasping distance of power in several Member States; and the referendum decision by the United Kingdom to leave the Union altogether.
With the EU locked in a perpetually reactive mode, Juncker has decided to outline clearly and simply the courses of action now available. For that, at least, he should be praised. The White Paper describes five scenarios for Europe in resulting from five different decisions that could now be taken on EU governance. In reality, these amount to three different views on the purpose of the European project as a whole: confederal continuity, national separation and federal integration.
Confederal continuity would broadly preserve the current modus operandi, with sovereignty and competencies shared between the EU institutions and Member States. For instance, given the scale of the global challenges we now face, the White Paper makes a strong argument for consolidating a single EU foreign policy on the supranational level. Conversely, there is no particular reason for the agricultural policy of 28 countries to be centralised in Brussels; indeed, it could be much more socially and environmentally beneficial for Member States to pursue their own policies within an agreed framework.
The function of the EU institutions would be to maintain the four freedoms insofar as this does not impact on Member State sovereignty, and different states would be able to opt in and out of different measures. As the White Paper acknowledges, this would in effect privilege the movement of capital and goods — more easily reconciled with national policymaking — over that of services and labour.
Thirdly, federal integration would mean a concerted drive towards a deeper and closer union. The key elements commonly thought to constitute national sovereignty — control of fiscal, monetary, foreign and security policy — would be consolidated at the supranational level. The White Paper outlines two scenarios in which this could occur.
In either scenario, even if full integration is still a work in progress by , the states involved would be agreed on the eventual conclusion.
Through its five scenarios, the Commission has provided the full menu of options available to the 27 Member States that intend on remaining within the Union. In these matters, Juncker and his team are absolutely right: only federal integration can create a sustainable future for Europe.
Why are the other options not serious possibilities? Because they will both, sooner or later, lead to the collapse of the EU itself. Only the most deluded of onlookers could now believe that the Union will survive the next few years without fundamental reform. A key reason for this is the contradictory structures of governance that, already problematic in more stable circumstances, have paralysed the EU and its Member States to act in times of trouble.
To take one example, our inability to get a grip on the refugee crisis stems from a transnational borderless travel area coexisting with two dozen independent interior ministries, each with its own agenda and accountable to only a small subset of the total European population. A similar argument could be made about monetary union. If the Eurosceptics have one thing right it is that the EU in its present form is unsustainable, and that piecemeal reform will neither solve the root problems nor convince voters that the European project is worth pursuing any further.
So, if confederal continuity is not an option, what about national separation? Granted, there is the possibility that the nations of Europe could reach a state of equilibrium based largely or solely on trade relations; this argument is often heard from moderate Eurosceptics who believe the EU has reached too far in its political ambitions and should be scaled back to a more conventional forum of intergovernmental cooperation.
A favourite claim of Leave campaigners in the UK referendum was that Member States originally only signed up to a trade bloc whose purpose has since been perverted. This, unfortunately, relies on a serious misreading of our history. The European project has always been an essentially political one, first and foremost conceived to end centuries of war and promote peace and reconciliation between rival nations.
In that regard, it remains astoundingly successful. Anyone who hopes to challenge that success must explain what has so fundamentally changed in the sixty years since the Rome Treaty that another intra-European war is now impossible.
Even if this challenge can be met, there remains the question of whether the single market can function properly without a fairly high level of political integration. The free movement of goods and services relies on commonly agreed and enforceable product standards, the free movement of people on a baseline of human rights and labour law.
ESPAS brings together the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Secretariat General of the Council of the European Union and the European External Action Service to strengthen the Union's collective administrative capacity to identify and analyse the key trends and challenges, and the resulting policy choices, which are likely to confront Europe and the wider world in the decades ahead.
Cambridge Core - European Studies - The Future of Europe - by Jean-Claude Chapter 5 - Third option: politically progressing towards a two-speed Europe. Jean-Claude Piris said that Europe has sincere difficulties agreeing on an economic policy. The monetary policy has become European but the economic.
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