COMMENTARY

Summer 2009

by Brendan Donnelly

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Thoughtful politicians will always seek to strike a balance between their long-term vision and the need to operate within current political reality. In many ways Wilfried Martens’ article is wholly persuasive. In the longer term, it may well foreshadow the likely and desirable political evolution of the European Union. But the political and institutional realities of 2009 remind us that the Union still has a long way to go before it corresponds entirely to the template set out so attractively by the EPP’s leader.

Mr. Martens is certainly right to point out that the lack of clear political consequences following from the results of the European elections are an important reason why so few voters participate in these elections. One does not need to be an advocate of the Manichean political choices favoured by the British electoral system to acknowledge the difficulty of convincing the European electorate that the votes they cast in the European elections make a difference to their lives. The close linking of the election of the European Commission’s president to the results of the European elections has for some years been a much-discussed answer to this conundrum. If the European elections of 2009 were “about” extending or terminating Mr. Barroso’s period in office, then that political choice would give an entirely new quality to the elections.

Sadly, this year’s European elections bear only very marginally on the political future of Mr. Barroso. It seems overwhelmingly likely that he will anyway remain at the head of the Commission with the support of a number of non-EPP national governments, notably the British government. It will not be until 2014 at the earliest that the “demos” of the European Union will have a chance to do in European elections that which defines “demoi,” namely to take in common important political decisions, of which the Commission presidency is certainly one.

A similar clash between aspiration and contemporary political reality is evident in the discussion by Wilfried Martens of the financial crisis. If EU citizens could be persuaded that the Union is playing a decisive role in resolving this crisis, and in protecting them from its worst consequences, then that would be politically a much more significant development than the liberalisation of roaming charges. Martens is right to hint that such episodic initiatives by the Commission, however welcome in themselves, should not be overestimated in their long-term political impact.

On balance, it is probably true that the global credit crisis has reinforced Europeans’ sense that the EU is a factor for economic and political stability. The single currency is widely recognised as a bulwark against the competitive devaluations which might otherwise have been national governments’ responses to the crisis. It is wholly possible that in the coming months the EU can develop a specifically European agenda for international financial regulation which sets welcome limits on the “market fundamentalism” against which Martens warns.

But no objective observer could doubt that the primary actors in the European response to the global economic crisis have been the national governments. The architecture of the single European currency allocates to national governments the vital macroeconomic tool of fiscal policy. We have witnessed over the past year legitimate and sometimes vigorous differences of opinion between national governments on how this tool should best be employed. Unless and until the eurozone has something much more nearly akin to an “economic government,” it will be difficult indeed to say in the macroeconomic field Hoc fecit Europa. Public perceptions in our continent will inevitably reflect this reality.