#intergovernmentalism

I don’t think myself as an apologetic European Union supranationalist or even federalist. What I am is a fierce opponent of intergovernmentalism. And the creation of the EUNAVFOR med mission is the EU – and EU intergovernmentalism – at its worst.

The EUNAVFOR med is a mission “to disrupt human smugglers in the Mediterranean” instead of a mission to save humans, and it is the child of the intergovernmental method:

(1) It is an act of traditional nation states. Those states define themselves as military and economic powers first who cooperate against a common enemy instead of starting from the premise of humanist democracy in which all people are created equal.

(2) It is an act of minimal compromise. Instead of creating a complex mission to help refugees that would require a bold agreement and philosophical reasoning about the future of the EU, intergovernmental negotiations lead to the minimalist option: If we destroy the boats, the problem will disappear. As if!

(3) It is an act of intransparency. It is the nature of EU intergovernmental negotiations with their diplomatic codes of secrecy that we, the European public are not supposed to understand the reasoning that led to this horrible compromise. We will learn about the detailed preparations and real goals of the EUNAVFOR mission only through pseudo-public press conferences and not through public deliberations, leaving us in the dark why our militaries are going to war against refugees.

(4) It is an act we cannot vote against. Yes, you can question the legitimacy of a supranational Parliament or Commission. But at least there would be a realistic chance to run a Europe-wide campaign against an anti-human, non-ambitious, and intransparent EP – and against the Commission elected by the EP’s majority – to get rid of them on a single European election day. Try to do this over a period of 4-5 years to change each and every national government represented in the Council through national elections, when negotiations in the intergovernmental method, different to those in the European Parliament, aren’t even public. Intransparency in the intergovernmental method and the staggered membership in the Council thus prevent democratic accountability.

Today, conflicting headlines have responded to the European Union’s emerging rules over biofuels and the amount of biofuel generation capacity that should be allowable in meeting renewable energy targets that we’ve all agreed on. Some say the Parliament has lost out as member states reverse its decisions, others claim that the Parliament is pushing for stronger regulation over and above what states would do.

There’s a lot to say about biofuels and the tradeoff between generating renewable energy and losing agricultural productivity while hunger remains a problem in the world. There’s also the point about democratic systems and how Europe actually operates to consider. Yesterday I mentioned the failing intergovernmental approach to European cooperation. This is an example of that, with a policy going into the ‘trilogue’ process and coming out confused and unrecognisable at the other end.

Trilogue is what often happens when an idea isn’t universally approved of. It goes into a three way discussion between the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council. The Parliament and the Commission, I get. The citizens elect the Parliament, it then picks a president for the Commission based on who was the leading parliamentary party’s nominee for the job, and takes applications for the rest. It’s not perfect, and the Commission President is very powerful considering that the general electorate has no real power of veto over the appointment. But it has democracy there. As much as exists behind the appointment of a British Prime Minister, anyway.

The trouble comes when the Council gets involved. It is collectively much harder to hold to account, and once proposals go into the black box that is the trilogue, all bets are off. It would probably be fine if you could refer to the Council’s position and not be euphemistically speaking of whatever arrangements the largest few countries have come to. So the Council’s role in the trilogue ends up being to allow for larger countries running by one set of rules while imposing another very much stricter set on smaller ones. And doing so largely without oversight.

A lot of the problems Europe has made for itself come down to the way that it tries to run an intergovernmental alliance and bloc using the language of a federalist union. The outcomes don’t match the expectations because the storytelling doesn’t match with reality, and the system is blamed. Then, because we’ve all been using optimistically federalist terms to describe what we’re trying to do, people decide that federal union is the problem and that they’d much rather have an intergovernmental arrangement.

Europe needs to move away from a system where we make rules for governments to follow in this messy trilogue. It isn’t democratic enough and in any case there’s no legitimacy there. Instead, the decisions need to be made from a position of equal shared sovereignty vested in the shared institutions of the European Parliament, a European Commission that is explicitly the executive branch of the Parliament and accountable to it and the European Central Bank serving as lender of last resort to them.