Читать книгу The New Totalitarian Temptation - Todd Huizinga - Страница 8
ОглавлениеSOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
If you spend any time at all in Brussels, the de facto capital city of the European Union, you are bound to hear that the EU is sui generis, Latin for “the only one of its kind.” The EU is unlike anything that came before it, and most definitely not to be understood as anything like an international organization in the usual sense of the term.
The uniqueness of the EU lies primarily in the degree of supranationalism it exhibits.** In fact, supranationalism has been its primary distinguishing feature and the overriding ideal of its acolytes ever since the creation of the EU’s first direct institutional forerunner, the European Coal and Steel Community. In their joint declaration upon signing the Treaty of Paris to establish the ECSC on April 18, 1951, the six signatory ministers said:
It is important to distinguish the terms “international,” “transnational” and “supranational.” To quote John Fonte, “The term international is used mainly to denote relations among sovereign nation-states. . . . On the other hand, transnational means ‘across’ or ‘beyond’ nations . . . the term signifies legal action and authority beyond national laws, constitutions, and officials. Transnational politics is activity directed at the internal political affairs of nation-states, undertaken by both foreign and domestic non-state actors and by foreign states. . . . Supranational means ‘above’ or ‘over’ the nation-state. While advocates of transnational law are sometimes ambiguous about respect for national sovereignty, those who champion supranational law are more explicit about their aim to transfer decision-making authority (sovereign self-government) from the nation-state to global institutions, superior to any national institution.” Fonte, Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others? (New York: Encounter Books, 2011), xxiii–xxiv. The EU could be characterized as either a transnational or a supranational organization, depending on the context. The vision of the global governance advocates in the EU is a supranational future for the EU and the world.
In signing the Treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Pool . . . the Contracting Parties have given proof of their determination to set up the first supra-national institution and thus to lay the real foundations of an organized Europe.
All European countries are free to participate in such an organized Europe. We sincerely hope that other nations will associate themselves with our efforts.1
WHAT THE EU IS NOT
The EU’s uniqueness comes out in sharp relief when one compares it with other international organizations that might seem at first glance to be similar. What sets the EU apart is the ceding of significant sovereign powers of the member states to the EU itself, as embodied in its institutions.
Take the Organization of American States (OAS), for example. Like the EU, the OAS is a regional organization. Its member states span the Americas, from Chile and Argentina in the south to Canada in the north. Similarly, the EU’s member states span most of Europe, from Spain and Cyprus in the south to Sweden and Finland in the north. The EU boasts twenty-eight member states and the OAS includes thirty-five member states. Both have common institutions, and the OAS member states, like the EU member states, make declarations and cooperate on economic and political affairs.
But after that, the differences begin to outweigh the similarities. The OAS is an international organization of sovereign member states, in which national governments of the Western Hemisphere come together to discuss issues and solve problems in their mutual national interests. OAS members do not give up any sovereignty when they join. In fact, Article 1 of the OAS Charter explicitly stresses the member states’ sovereignty and expressly forbids the organization from intervening in their internal affairs.2 Of course, there are inevitable attempts to hijack the OAS in the service of political agendas that cannot be achieved in the member states by democratic means, notably having to do with LGBT rights and “sexual and reproductive health,”3 but this does not change the basic nature of the OAS as an international organization of sovereign member states, rather than a supranational organization like the EU in which member states pool their sovereignty.
Many people think of the EU as essentially an economic entity based on a free-trade agreement, perhaps like the United States, Canada and Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This impression may derive from the name of the predecessor organization of the EU, the European Economic Community (EEC), or from concepts such as the single market and the European Monetary Union, which gave birth to the euro.
Certainly the EU is, in part, an economic entity. Like NAFTA, it is a free-trade bloc. But it is much more than that. The EU is also a customs union. And this entails closer, more restrictive ties than free trade, as Daniel Hannan, a British Conservative member of the European Parliament, explains: “A customs union involves internal free trade, but also a common external tariff. Its members surrender their separate commercial policies, and give up the right to sign trade agreements. Instead, trade negotiations are conducted, and treaties signed, by the bloc as a whole.”4
Beyond this, most of the EU member states are united by a common currency. Nineteen of the twenty-eight member states share the euro. Most of the other nine member states aspire to have it in the future, but they do not yet meet the qualifications for the eurozone. These are mostly countries that were communist satellites of the Soviet Union, with planned economies. They are still developing as free markets and are expected to join the eurozone when they qualify. The only countries in the EU that qualify for the euro but freely choose (for now) not to join are the United Kingdom, Denmark and Sweden.
THE EU INSTITUTIONS
The EU, as we have seen, differs from international organizations such as the OAS and from free-trade areas such as NAFTA mainly in that the member states of the EU have relinquished substantial aspects of their sovereign powers to the EU institutions. In this respect, the EU is not just an economic entity but also a profoundly political one. It is better described not as an international organization, but as a supranational or at least a transnational organization, with “managing” institutions to which the member states have transferred considerable powers. The principal five EU institutions are the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, the European Parliament, the European Council and the European Court of Justice.
The European Commission is the executive arm of the EU. It administers EU law and policy and enforces its implementation in the member states. It also possesses formidable legislative power, known as the “right of initiative.” Under the EU treaties only the Commission can initiate legislation, other than under certain exceptional conditions.
The Council of the European Union is an institution in which the governments of the member states are represented by cabinet-level ministers, so it is also known as the Council of Ministers. The Council meets in multiple configurations, depending on the issue area. For example, the foreign ministers of EU member states meet once per month as the Foreign Affairs Council; environment ministers meet as the Environmental Affairs Council; economic and finance ministers meet as the ECOFIN Council; and so on. All in all, the Council of Ministers has ten configurations. Thus, while it is referred to in the singular, it is not really one council, but ten councils – a phenomenon that only the impenetrably complex EU could pull off. And although it is made up of ministerial-level officials of the executive branches of the member states, it primarily serves a quasi-legislative function within the European Union. In conjunction with the European Parliament, it reviews, amends and passes EU legislation as drafted by the Commission.
The European Parliament (EP) is a supranational legislature made up of 751 members who are elected by voters in their respective member states. The members of the European Parliament (MEPs) generally belong to a national political party in their respective member states. These parties join forces in EU-wide “political groups.” For example, the center-right political group, the European People’s Party, is made up of national Christian Democratic and Conservative parties from the member states. The center-left political group, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, is composed of Social Democratic and Socialist parties from the member states. There are similar political groups of Green parties, liberal parties, Euroskeptic conservative parties, and others. The European Parliament does not draft legislation; that is the sole prerogative of the European Commission. The EP does not have the power to levy taxes. Neither does the EP have MEPs belonging to a governing coalition and other MEPs representing the opposition, as in the parliaments of the member states, because there is no elected EU government and thus no opposition. So what does the European Parliament do? It amends legislation, along with the Council of Ministers, and its approval of legislation, along with the Council’s, is necessary in most policy areas in order for it to become law. Importantly for the United States, the EP’s assent is needed too for most international agreements that the EU wants to enter into. The EP also helps shape EU policies in areas such as foreign affairs and human rights, by writing reports, issuing declarations and resolutions, and carefully scrutinizing other EU actors’ words and actions on those issues.
The European Council, not to be confused with the Council of the European Union described above nor with the Council of Europe (an organization that is separate and distinct from the European Union), is made up of the presidents and prime ministers of the EU member states. Headed by a president who is appointed by the member states and not a part of any member-state government, the European Council is the top decision-making body in the EU. It meets at least four times per year and sets EU policy at the highest level.
The European Council is the only EU institution that was established in practice rather than in a treaty.5 Its beginning can be traced back to the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the ensuing global energy crisis. In October 1973 a coalition of Arab states invaded territories that had been occupied by Israel since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, thus igniting the Yom Kippur War. In quick succession came the war itself, Soviet threats of intervention, an American-brokered ceasefire, and the reduction of oil deliveries to the West by Arab oil-exporting nations, precipitating a global energy crisis. All of this happened with nary a peep from Europe. Acutely unsettled by their own insignificance, the leaders of the European Economic Community member states decided to meet more often so that Europe “could speak with one voice on important global issues.”6 Approximately a year later, in 1974, the new French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, succeeded in establishing the European Council as a regular meeting of heads of state and government to decide authoritatively on the most important matters of foreign policy and European integration. Since then, the European Council has become the most important embodiment of what Luuk van Middelaar, an EU analyst and philosopher, calls the “in-between sphere.”7 In the European Council, leaders of EU member states do not represent just their own governments nor the EU itself, but become actors “in between” the two.
A final very important EU institution is the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Actually consisting of three distinct courts, the CJEU resembles the U.S. judiciary in that it functions like an independent branch of government, with the highest of its courts, the European Court of Justice (ECJ), analogous to the U.S. Supreme Court. It provides the final interpretation of the treaties and can declare EU legislation or actions in line with the treaties, thus clearing the way for their entry into effect, or out of line with the treaties, thus rendering them null and void. The judiciary has been a true motor of European integration, in having declared EU law to supersede the national law of the member states, and in having introduced the doctrine of direct effect, meaning that citizens of EU member states – since they are directly affected by EU legislation – can, as individuals, dispute the validity of a national law of their member state if they can show that it impinges on their rights under EU legislation. This was a game-changing step in the development of the EU into an organization whose decisions take precedence over member-state policy and law.8
THE EU’S MEMBER STATES
The EU has undergone a series of enlargements ever since the European Coal and Steel Community was established in 1952 with six founding members: Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Now it is easier to name the European countries that are not members of the EU. In Western Europe, the only nonmembers are Norway, Iceland and Switzerland, along with microstates such as Liechtenstein, Monaco and Andorra. In Central and Eastern Europe, west of the former Soviet Union, the only nonmembers are Albania and some of the countries that emerged out of Yugoslavia: Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro. These countries all desire to join, a desire that is shared by the EU but will not be realized for several years, perhaps decades. The former Yugoslav republic of Croatia is the newest member state, having joined on July 1, 2013. All of the former satellite states of the Soviet Union (which constituted the Warsaw Pact) are now EU members. Even three of the countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union itself are now in the EU, namely the Baltic states – Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. EU membership is a distant possibility for other former Soviet republics – Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus; and perhaps even a possibility for Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Turkey is a unique case. It has officially enjoyed the prospect of membership since 1963, but the political and cultural barriers to membership posed by its authoritarian government and its largely Muslim population have so far been insuperable.
The process of joining the EU further illustrates its unique supranationality. In order to accede to the EU, a country must fulfill all of the requirements of the acquis communautaire, a French term roughly translatable as “that which the community has agreed upon.” The acquis contains thirty-five chapters of EU regulation covering subjects as wide-ranging as taxation, education and culture, environmental policy, freedom of movement within the EU of goods, workers, services and capital, and many more. According to an estimate of the think tank Open Europe, the acquis communautaire, which it aptly defines as “the body of EU legislation which European companies, charities and individuals have to comply with,” is more than 170,000 pages long.9
The long negotiations in which agreement is reached on how the aspiring EU member will fulfill all of the acquis’s stipulations are very intrusive. The process involves EU monitoring of whether a country is actually implementing all of the acquis-mandated changes. Only upon unanimous agreement of the member states, and with the support of the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers, is the way cleared for a candidate country to join. In the final steps, the candidate country and all of the EU member states sign and ratify the accession treaty. Clearly, any country that wants to join the EU pays a high price in national sovereignty. In order to be a part of the EU, each member state must fit the EU mold in terms of democracy, the economy, the rule of law, efficiency, and – it must be stressed – values and ideology.
WHAT IS THE EU?
The EU is not like the OAS or NAFTA, or any other international organization. It is a supranational organization exercising significant sovereign powers of its own that often trump the powers of the member states. EU law supersedes member-state national law, for example, and EU edicts and regulation affect everyday life in every member state.
Is the EU therefore comparable to a federal nation-state, such as the United States, with its members roughly equivalent to the fifty states? Some would say so, but the comparison is false. Unlike the United States, the EU cannot claim to have a citizenry with a common understanding of its national history and a sense of belonging to the same nation. “Europeans” persist in thinking of themselves first in national terms – as Italians, Dutchmen, Spaniards, Greeks, etc. – before they think of themselves as Europeans.10 And this is not surprising. There is no European demos. Although ethnicities and languages do not track exactly with national borders, each European nation-state has its own long history, culture and self-understanding. There is no unifying language. The EU has twenty-four official languages. English is now the lingua franca, having replaced French at the latest in 2004, when ten new member states joined, mainly from Eastern Europe, where the second language of elites was generally English.
So what is the EU? To repeat what I said earlier, here is the best definition I can think of: the EU is a constantly evolving union of twenty-eight Western and Central European nation-states in which the governing and intellectual elites, in the interest of realizing an unprecedented degree of global peace, stability and prosperity, are pooling, and thus relinquishing, significant elements of the member states’ national sovereignty, and doing so over the heads of their national electorates.
But as we will see in the following chapter, to try to define the EU is to go out on a limb and risk being sawed off. There is a caveat to everything one could attempt to say about the EU. On the one hand, the essence of the EU is supranationalism. But what does it mean to be supranational in an organization in which the member states jealously but inconsistently and confusedly – sometimes in deed but not in word and sometimes in word but not in deed – guard their national prerogatives? Because of this unresolved conflict, and as a tactical response to it, the essence of the EU is also to have no definable essence: to exist in the “in-between-ness” described earlier. The constant change, uncertainty and flux of postmodernity are integral features of the EU.
To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, the EU is the EU is the EU. It must be understood on its own terms. After you have finished this book, you will know the EU as well as it can be known, and you will understand how the fate of democracy in the EU will affect the transatlantic alliance and the future of liberal democracy in the world.
* It is important to distinguish the terms “international,” “transnational” and “supranational.” To quote John Fonte, “The term international is used mainly to denote relations among sovereign nation-states. . . . On the other hand, transnational means ‘across’ or ‘beyond’ nations . . . the term signifies legal action and authority beyond national laws, constitutions, and officials. Transnational politics is activity directed at the internal political affairs of nation-states, undertaken by both foreign and domestic non-state actors and by foreign states. . . . Supranational means ‘above’ or ‘over’ the nation-state. While advocates of transnational law are sometimes ambiguous about respect for national sovereignty, those who champion supranational law are more explicit about their aim to transfer decision-making authority (sovereign self-government) from the nation-state to global institutions, superior to any national institution.” Fonte, Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or Be Ruled by Others? (New York: Encounter Books, 2011), xxiii–xxiv. The EU could be characterized as either a transnational or a supranational organization, depending on the context. The vision of the global governance advocates in the EU is a supranational future for the EU and the world.
