Abstract
This paper aims to outline a number of concrete proposals in view of providing detailed operational content for the project to create a genuine European political leadership and to strengthen legitimacy and democratic control of the decision-making process. The legal feasibility of each of the proposals set out here is analysed by identifying the type of reform it involves: innovation, using the treaty as it stands; limited changes to the Treaty under the simplified revision procedure; and more important changes to the Treaty under the ordinary revision procedure.
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Notes
Angela Merkel was quite clear in an interview granted to several European daily newspapers on 19 January 2012: ‘After a long process, we shall transfer more competence over to the Commission which will function like a European government for European competences. This implies a strong Parliament. The Council, which brings together the heads of government, will then form the second chamber. Finally we shall have a European Court of Justice as the Supreme Court. This might be the shape of the future European Political Union’ (cited in Robert Schuman Foundation 2012).
‘With 1 year to go until our EU Presidency in the second half of 2014, Italy has renewed its commitment to achieving political union in the framework of a “United States of Europe”. Because there is no alternative to a strong “EU project” if the Union wants to go on playing a leading role on the international stage…. Political union will be the principal goal of the Italian Presidency of the European Union, which begins 1 year from now on 1 July 2014. A year that could be “decisive”, as Prime Minister Enrico Letta underscored on 11 July 2013 at the celebrations for the French National Day at Palazzo Farnese, commenting on President François Hollande’s proposal to achieve political union within 2 years’ (Italy 2013).
An inter-institutional agreement is an act that is adopted jointly by the institutions of the European Union in their area of competence whereby they regulate the way in which they cooperate or commit to respect the basic rules. Inter-institutional agreements are born of a practical need felt by the institutions to define certain measures in the treaties which concern them in order to avoid conflict and adjust their respective competences. Unplanned for in the treaties originally, they were formally introduced in Article 295 of the Lisbon Treaty (the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union).
Except for the EPP–Liberals agreement in 1999 which, for the very first time, introduced a partisan split within the European Parliament.
For more details, see Chopin and Macek (2010).
Article 13 of the new treaty anticipates that the ‘European Parliament and the national Parliaments of the Contracting Parties will together determine the organisation and promotion of a conference of representatives of the relevant committees of the national Parliaments and representatives of the relevant committees of the European Parliament in order to discuss budgetary policies and other issues covered by this Treaty.’ The first session of the Interparliamentary Conference on Economic and Financial Governance of the European Union took place on 16 and 17 October 2013 in Vilnius (Lithuania). The participants discussed the goals and vision of the Conference.
A simple solution would be to have one MP for X (for example, one) million inhabitants, with a minimum of one or two MPs per Member State.
The German Constitutional Court of Karlsruhe’s decision on the Lisbon Treaty stresses that the democratic principle applied to a state means the respect of certain conditions that the Union does not fulfil, notably the fact that the European elections are not undertaken according to the ‘one man one vote’ principle.
Jean Pisani-Ferry pointed to the dangers that go with this merger when he asked ‘can we imagine that a Commissioner would demand sanctions against a State and would then chair the Council during which this proposal would be validated or rejected?’ In reality a similar situation exists in the area of competition: the European Commission investigates and makes a decision under the supervision of the European Union’s Court of Justice. However Jean Pisani-Ferry puts forward another solution which is just as valid: the creation of an independent budgetary committee that would lead to ‘the external supervision of excessive deficits by granting the services of the DG Economic and Financial Affairs (ECOFIN) to a separate authority over which the Commissioner would have no say. The establishment of an independent budgetary committee like this would free the commissioner from his role as prosecutor and enable him to combine his post with that of president of the Eurogroup’ (Pisani-Ferry 2012, author’s translation).
References
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Chopin, T. Political union: legitimacy and efficiency to overcome the crisis. European View 12, 307–315 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12290-013-0280-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12290-013-0280-4