Alan Dukes: EU
The EU glass is half full but Alan Dukes is impatient for the other half to be filled, especially in view of the fact that the content would be valuable and within our political capacity to attain.
I have long been a convinced advocate of
economic and political integration. The successive stages of European
integration we have witnessed since 1954 have brought substantial and palpable
benefits to the citizens of all the Member States (including the most recent,
since all accept 
and participate in the acquis communautaire). The achievement
of a single market, a common competition policy, common rules on State aid, the
creation of the euro and the (modest) coordination of some areas of foreign
policy are all substantial achievements. Each constitutes a particular
recognition of the extra effectiveness of joint and concerted action over
separate, disparate and often contradictory national action.
All of that has worked so well that I become increasingly disappointed by the fact that the EU, like all political systems, is a chronic under-achiever. The glass is indeed half full but that simply makes me impatient for the things that could fill it up, especially in view of the fact that all of our experience so far shows that the content would be valuable and within our political capacity to attain. Each of the achievements which I have just listed required a major effort of political will - as is always the case when a political system has to choose between rationality and atavism.
The EU has grossly under-achieved in foreign policy. To give only one example, I would suggest that, had the question been put under the rules of Qualified Majority Voting, the UK would not have got agreement to participate in the original invasion of Iraq. The question could not, of course, have been put in this way because we do not have a common foreign policy and any major decisions require unanimity. The other Member States simply had no means of exerting any real pressure on Tony Blair.
We are not quite so bereft of economic policy instruments, but those we have - even in the Eurozone - are far from effective. Thus, in an already difficult global economic and financial environment, we see additional problems being created by policy deficiencies in, successively, Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain. The Eurozone's Stability and Growth Pact (the SGP, frequently criticised by laxist governments as being excessively restrictive) has proved inadequate to ensure generalised stability and growth, even in good times. Even the threat of sanctions under the SGP has not succeeded in rooting out fiscal laxism.
Provisions for the coordination of economic policy and for scrutiny by the Commission of national fiscal policies have only moderately weak comminatory effects. Even while the Irish Government was dutifully "complying" with multi-year Commission recommendations, it was fuelling the fire of unsustainable commitments to ongoing public expenditure increases.
To top it all, we have the absurd limitation of the total EU budget to 1.2% of EU GDP, making it utterly irrelevant as a tool of fiscal policy.
In the areas of foreign and economic policy, the governments of the Member States (whatever their political flavours) seem Hell-bent on ensuring that their joint enterprise is ineffective.
It is against this background that I look at EU2020. It is the successor of the "Lisbon Agenda", the avowed aim of which was to make the EU "...the world's most competitive economy by 2010". The aims of the Lisbon Agenda were to be pursued by means of the "open method of coordination", a system of benchmarking and monitoring. The system failed miserably.
The Commission's intention is that EU2020 will be pursued by more effective coordinated and cohesive action. A majority of Member States (including Ireland) are already putting down markers of their intention to resist this, citing the need for national policies to be sensitive to specific national conditions. As in the past, this is a recipe for ensuring that we never all arrive at the same page together. In the past, national policies sensitive to national conditions have contributed hugely to the mess in which we now find ourselves.
This all reminds me of the old Kerry joke: "If I were going there, I wouldn't start from here". It is undeniably the case that the construction of even a moderately-integrated economic and political union is an extremely complex business. The EU's achievements so far and the currently visible results of uncoordinated national policies surely show that the prize, in terms of economic and political success, is worth the effort.
