A BIG step towards a federal Europe? (ft. UEF) | EU Made SIMPLE

tal, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

watches through, jotting down thoughts as I go

Rename Commission to “Executive”

Seems like a generally good idea to me. I think that it makes it more-clear what the role is.

Reduce Commission to 15 commissioners

I don’t think that this is actually a fundamental change.

Rename president to “President of the Union”

My default would be “President of the European Union”, but I suppose that this works. I’m actually more curious what happens to the titles of the other presidents that exist today – I think that the issue is more having three similar titles than the specific title being used by any one.

Grant Parliament ability to propose new laws

I never really understood why the EP didn’t have that ability in the first place. I’m not aware of any countries where the legislature lacks that power, so seems reasonable.

Empower Parliament to nominate the President

That’s an interesting one – it’d shift the structure towards a more parliamentary-looking system than a presidential-looking system; even if there is separation of powers, it means that a majority in parliament is probably in agreement with the President of the Union. I don’t have a strong feeling here.

I do think that a more-out-in-the-open approach is probably preferable than the status quo; from a political standpoint, I don’t think that the process that put von der Leyen in office made many people entirely happy.

Grant Parliament the same power as the Council

I’m a little fuzzy on what exactly winds up getting changed, and the video didn’t go into a lot of details.

Empower Parliament to remove Commissioners

I’ve never really understood why countries – including here the US – have legislatures involved in choosing figures beneath the executive; I’ve always thought that it made rather more sense to just give the executive a free hand to choose and remove figures, absent criminal behavior. I assume that there’s a rationale here, though.

Replace the Council’s ability to veto with QMV

I think that some form of shift away from a veto has to happen at some point. If I were a small state, I would probably want the Council not to shift to QMV, though, which weights population; I’d want power to be allocated on a per-state basis.

Grant EU exclusive competency in environment and biodiversity

Okay, this is the first thing that I have some really serious questions about. If I understand aright what is being done, this is not the way things work in the US; the US approach would be roughly analogous to a shared competency in the EU.

I agree that some things WRT environmental stuff have to be more-centralized. The fishing quotas were a fiasco due to rules being collectively set but enforcement being handled at a member state level; the result was many member states acting on enforcement in ways to favor their own fishing industry. Fine, centralization is needed.

But making this an exclusive EU competency? I’m not sure that this is a good idea. Centralizing that would produce a more-homogenous set of rules across the EU, okay, but making it an exclusive rather than shared competency would mean that member states couldn’t legislate on environmental matters. That seems like it’d make it really difficult to get issues that may only be substantial issues for individual member states addressed. Like, if an EU member state wants to, say, pass laws to protect sand dunes in their state – probably not an issue of much interest to many EU members – it seems to me that it shouldn’t have to go to Brussels to get such a restriction put in place. The bulk of the impact is on that member state and the people in that member state.

When it comes to something like, say, carbon dioxide emissions, that’s an EU-wide – heck, global, really – issue. No member is affected in isolation by policy here, and every member’s policy affects all others. I agree that it makes sense to push that up to the highest level possible.

It’s not at all clear to me why having these be shared competencies, as they are today, is a problem.

Give EU shared competency in public health, civil protection, industry, and education

Having some kind of disaster response mechanism probably makes a lot of sense; EU member states already cooperate outside of EU auspices.

In the US, the federal government has responsibility for funding (some) education, but does not have authority to set curriculum. I assume that this would let Brussels set curriculum. My understanding is that there are some very politically controversial – moreso than in the US – issues regarding history involving multiple EU states and how things are presented to children. I think that it is likely that if this extends power to set curriculum to Brussels, it may be a significant sticking point.

Frankly, I think that it’d make more sense for the federal government to do more funding of education in the US than is the case today. For the EU, it’s one of the significant concerns I have about the EU given larger inter-state wealth differences (like, poor EU state pays for education of people, people move to wealthier state, wealthier EU state gets economic benefit of education, result is that poor EU state has economically-inefficient misincentive to underfund education), so I do think that there is a strong argument for funding at a central level.

Similar for public health. A lot of that amounts to subsidies to the elderly, for whom healthcare spending is much higher. If a generation moves to another EU member state rather than staying in an EU member state and covering healthcare costs, it kind of guts the healthcare system in the source member state.

I notice that pensions are not on that list, and are something that I think legitimately should be done at the EU level, for the same reasons – unless done at an EU level, as people migrate across EU member state bounds, intergenerational wealth transfers like that can move a lot of money from state to state otherwise.

Expand EU role in energy, foreign affairs, defense, border mgt, and cross-border infrastructure.

There aren’t any details here, and the devil’s in the details, but, guessing as to impact:

Strong agree on cross-border infrastructure. I’ve seen several cases where I think suboptimal-for-the-EU decisions are being made because of national interests preventing cross-border infrastructure from being built. The Iberian energy island is a big one.

Foreign affairs I very much think is a necessary precondition to doing defense at an EU level. I’m not going to opine on whether the EU is ready to do that at a central level, but I will repeat something that I’ve written before: I think that attempts to create an “EU army” without creating a common foreign policy are putting the cart before the horse. Militaries aren’t generic, interchangeable things – they are crafted around achieving specific foreign policy goals. Whether one has an aircraft carrier or tanks or ballistic missiles depends a very great deal on what ones’ goals are in foreign policy. If there is no agreement on common foreign policy goals, it’s hard for me to see much of an EU military.

I don’t know what the expanded EU role in border management might be. My understanding from past reading is that as things that, Frontex is – somewhat surprisingly – actually not really under Commission control, but more under Council control. If this is about that, might make sense.

For energy…I think that the events surrounding Ukraine make a very strong argument that, whether the EU should handle energy policy or not, energy policy affects all member states, and is tied in with national and collective security concerns, and that as things stand, issues related to that have not sufficiently made it through to energy policy decisions. I’m not saying that the EU necessarily should be handling everything, but I think that one way or another, national security concerns have to affect energy policy more than they have. I realize that that’s a thorny bush – there are undoubtedly going to be deep disagreements on what is a reasonable national security concern. Poland doesn’t want NS2 going to Germany, Hungary is convinced that it requires gas from Russia, Germany will probably have people say that terrorists might blow up a nuclear power plant, France probably will complain about LNG from the US – but energy is just too critical of a resource for a modern state and the EU energy market is too interconnected to just let states go off and craft energy policy completely disconnected from national security issues of other EU member states. I don’t know if this is what is being addressed, but if so, I think that it’s overdue.

[continued in child]

Bjornir, 6 months ago

In France, the parliament can’t propose new laws except for 1 day a year for each parliamentary group (essentially one group per political party with more than a certain amount of seats).

Only the government can, and it is the government that sets the order of the day. The parliament can however modify the law proposed, but thanks to the famous article 49.3 the government can just ignore those.

aurelian, 6 months ago

Thanks for this summary it was super useful.

tal, 6 months ago

[continued from parent]

Shift authority to use Article 7 from the Council to the ECJ

Hoo boy.

I don’t think that Article 7 being used at all is a good idea, and I think that the earlier threats to use it were a really bad idea from a political standpoint; whether or not someone agrees with something that their political leadership is doing, I think that virtually nobody in a state likes being threatened with having their political power stripped. I think that a lever to strip political power from a member state in a federation is an extraordinary power – normally a federation ensures some powers to a member state, and thus cuts right through that. I am not actually sold that the EU should have Article 7 at all, and I think that one could make a very serious argument that shifting away from the veto in one way or another may simply eliminate the need for Article 7.

I think that, in general, the power to remove political power from individuals or member states is extremely ripe for abuse, and also think that the bar for which it has been threatened so far is much too low. I think that it should not have been attempted short of an existential threat to the EU, and I do not believe that anything so far has met that bar.

I also think that moving it from the Council to the ECJ probably makes it considerably more likely that Article 7 is used, which I think is the opposite of the direction that things should go.

All of that being said, from a purely-technical standpoint, the question of whether-or-not a member state is in violation of elements of the treaty is probably a legal question, and as such, probably the ECJ is a better place to put that decision than a political body; as written, this should be a technical legal call, not a political decision.

Overall thoughts

I think that overall, it’s not an unreasonable summary to say that it weakens the individual member states, weakens the EU executive, and strengthens the European Parliament.

There are some things that I think are definitely good ideas, and some things that I’m skeptical about in there. Some things that I think are going to be very hard to get agreement on.

It seems like a pretty large package of changes, and many of these don’t have much direct connection. I do wonder whether it might be easier to put them through as individual changes. For example, I think that renaming the President of the European Commission to be the President of the Union is probably a relatively-uncontroversial change; having that sit around in limbo while discussions over much-more-momentous and fundamental changes are made to the power structure of the EU seems like it might not be such a great idea.