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PDF FormatYet it would be an exaggeration to say that these ministers are actually setting policy. British journalists Christopher Booker and Richard North report on the plight of a British minister attending his first Council of Ministers, who discovered that “the item heading the agenda was ‘the communiqué’ to be issued after the meeting. When he expressed surprise to his officials, saying that surely the communiqué should come last, after they had settled all the other matters on the agenda, he was condescendingly told, ‘Oh no, Minister, all the other items have already been agreed on at last week’s Coreper.’” “Coreper” is the Committee of Permanent Representatives, senior officials from each member state who reside permanently in the EU’s capital, Brussels. Each layer of junior bureaucrats had already decided what measures should be implemented, Coreper had ironed out the details, and it was up to the ministers to agree on how to word the press release.9 Put somewhat obliquely by one reference work, “officials from the national representations meet together regularly to prepare the various decisions to be taken by ministers in full Council... Coreper’s influence is often greater than that of the formal meetings of the Council which it prepares.”10
Under Coreper’s guidance, the Council issues some “300 regulations, 50 directives and 160 decisions” a year, to be implemented by the European Commission, the EU’s equivalent of a cabinet. The twenty commissioners, who divide up the portfolios of government among them, are appointed for five-year terms by their national governments. But lest anyone mistake the Commission for a representative body, the EU demands that commissioners swear their sole allegiance to the EU, “be completely independent in the performance of their duties… [and] neither seek nor take instructions from any government or any other body.” Formally the Commission is the head of the EU’s civil service, but, along with its 20,000 bureaucrats, it is “unique amongst international bureaucracies by virtue of its combination of administrative, executive, legislative and judicial activities.”11 It is involved with every stage of the legislative process, even empowered to dismiss amendments passed by the European Parliament, and it is also responsible for implementing the laws. It negotiates with foreign governments, maintains foreign relations, and oversees corporate mergers and competition law. Even the EU doesn’t pretend the Commission is democratic, saying only that its “democratic legitimacy is being increasingly strengthened….”12
The Commission multiplies the Councilױs output, turning the few hundred Council resolutions into several thousand Commission Regulations. These are issued directly by bureaucrats with no political accountability.13 The legal systems of individual member nations can cope with this volume of regulatory edicts only by automating the process. In Britain, they are implemented via “statutory instruments” drafted by anonymous civil servants, and enter into law without parliamentary scrutiny, requiring only the formality of a ministerial signature. As the independent regulatory authority of the civil service grows, parliamentary legislation within each country correspondingly shrinks, shifting power from elected officials to unaccountable bureaucrats.14
Not surprisingly, one consequence of immunizing Europe’s bureaucracy from political accountability has been a disregard for some of the basic liberties and traditions to which many Europeans had grown accustomed, in the form of an interminable chain of regulations governing industry and commerce. The absurdity of the edicts emerging from Brussels has become a trademark of EU governance: Decisions have covered "limiting the granting of production aid for Williams pears preserved in syrup,” “laws of the Member States relating to the windscreen wipers and washer systems of motor vehicles,” “a reference method for the detection of cows’ milk casein in cheese made from ewes’ milk,” and an “anti-dumping duty on imports into the Community of photo-albums in book form originating in the People’s Republic of China.”15 One EU law deemed British acorns insufficiently pure, requiring commercial oak growers to import acorns less well-adapted to British ecosystems. Similarly, an agricultural seed control scheme required official approval for any variety of plant seed to be marketed, with registration fees of thousands of dollars. This made it uneconomical to keep less popular varieties of seeds on the market, effectively banning, for example, over 95 percent of the 2,500 varieties of tomato. Aside from placing heavy burdens on small farmers and amateur gardeners, such regulations needlessly restrict consumer choice.16
Likewise, EU regulations have defined the allowable shapes of strawberries, cucumbers and bananas. Britain’s most famous apple, the small Cox’s orange pippin, is illegal, since apples must be at least fifty-five millimeters in diameter. Under the rubric of health and safety, exit signs in buildings across the continent must be replaced, at a cost of millions of dollars, with Brussels-approved green signs depicting a running man—even though safety experts warn that in case of fire one should never, under any circumstance, run. Similarly, Britain recently introduced a new telephone emergency line, 112, in addition to its traditional 999 emergency line, to conform with European standards. In its first year of operation, only 500 of the two million calls to the unfamiliar number proved to be genuine emergencies; the rest were wrong numbers.17
While the vast apparatus of the European Commission subverts the self-rule of member states and the freedom of citizens, other EU institutions are designed to run interference, giving Europeans the false impression that they have a substantial say in their continent’s governance. The presidency of the EU rotates among the heads of government of the member states every six months, ensuring that nothing constructive can ever be accomplished by any given president. In practice, the presidency answers to an agenda set out by the civil service. The European “Parliament”—the only democratically elected body in the entire morass—can neither initiate legislation nor effectively oversee government decisions, and can only rarely even amend EU laws. As one study put it, its powers “are severely restricted; it is not the legislative authority of the Community….”18
Neither does this brave new Europe take kindly to criticism. Officials are expected to promote enthusiastically and without reservation the project of European integration with all of its components. Bernard Connolly, the senior European Commission economist responsible for analyzing the EU’s Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and plans for monetary union, published a highly acclaimed book in 1995 entitled The Rotten Heart of Europe, which presented his “fears that the European Monetary Union project was not quite the Heavenly City that relentless propaganda had made it out to be.”19 Connolly was promptly suspended from his job and targeted by a Commission smear campaign; five months later he was fired. The book was motivated, he wrote, by “incredulity at the hundreds of ‘black is white’ statements made about the ERM, and… anger at the treatment given to anyone who tried to point out the lies.” Instead of presenting balanced, professional analysis, Commission staff are expected to be “missionaries, soldiers in the crusade for a European superstate.”20
Connolly’s criticisms touched a raw nerve, since monetary union lay at the heart of efforts to create a European superstate: The launching of the euro on January 1 will surely be the most important step Europe has taken yet toward integration, a point-of-no-return for member states, which will no longer be able to conduct independent monetary or fiscal policy, or maintain control of their foreign currency reserves, national deficits or debts. To mitigate the effects of centralizing interest rate decisions, massive funds will be transferred from economically stronger regions to weaker ones, threatening growth among the former while inculcating dependency among the latter. Furthermore, to prevent “harmful” competition among governments for investment, greater uniformity will be imposed on tax laws and labor regulations (apparently in an effort to shield French and German industry from competition from more dynamic economies such as those of Britain and Ireland). According to Jean-Claude Trichet, governor of the Bank of France and aspiring EU central banker, “the Council [of Ministers] will have more power over the budgets of member states than the central federal institutions have in the U.S. or in Germany.”21
A recent example of the sharp divide between the European bureaucracy and the peoples it represents centered on a decision of the European Commission earlier this year to slap tariffs on products manufactured by Israeli companies in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, despite its free trade agreement with Israel. The announcement evoked harsh criticisms throughout Israel: Not only are the Israeli industries in the West Bank and Gaza perfectly integrated into Israel’s economy, but East Jerusalem and the Golan were both annexed by Israel long ago.22 The incident proved a major embarrassment for European national governments, which apparently did not approve of the Commission’s stance: Within days, Israeli Finance Minister Ya’akov Ne’eman received a visit from the ambassadors from all fifteen EU countries, who assured him that no steps would be taken in the matter. Yet shortly thereafter, the Commission declared it would press forward with the decision anyway, regardless of how Europe’s elected national governments felt about it.23 It was, apparently, beyond their jurisdiction.
This, then, is the European standard which so many other regional and global activists have set for themselves: Unaccountable commissioners, silenced critics, a trivialized parliament, unfathomable procedures, arbitrary rules made in secret by faceless bureaucrats without democratic oversight, and a disregard for the self-determination of peoples as expressed by their elected national leaders. One might even say that the EU looks very little like the dream that Victor Hugo called a “United States of Europe,” and all too much like the recurrence of a nightmare—a Union of European Socialist Republics.
