Curing Brussels of its ‘centralising fever’

The centralisation of political power by the EU is one of the main reasons that people mistrust it, argue former German President Roman Herzog and Lüder Gerken in an article for Europe’s World magazine. They put forward several measures to “cure the ailment”.

The authors claim that people are increasingly sceptical about the EU, and that one of the main reasons for this is that they cannot shake off the sense of an ever-stronger and inappropriate centralisation of its competences. 

They believe that there are four reasons for such centralisation:  

• Politicians and civil servants at EU level have striven for more influence; 
• Brussels is frequently used as a back-door for introducing legislation that national ministries fear would meet too much resistance at home; 
• member states’ representatives in the Council of Ministers frequently bundle together totally unrelated projects and forge alliances to make up a voting majority, and; 
• the European Court of Justice’s verdicts on competence issues reveal a systematic tendency to decide in favour of the EU in this area “wherever it can find any justification at all”. 

To counter the centralising trend, the authors make a number of suggestions:  

• They insist that a list must be drawn up that stipulates the precise scope and limits of EU competences; 
• they call for the “discontinuity principle” to be introduced at EU level, entailing the automatic expiry of prospective legislation if it has not been adopted within a legislative period, and meaning that the procedure would have to start anew in the next period; 
• member states must be given the right – through the Council – to withdraw competency for a particular policy area from European level and restore it to the national level;  
• it is in the interests of both the Commission and the European Parliament to exercise – with reservation and without excess – the powers that have been granted them to prevent any risk of their being completely withdrawn, and; 
• an independent Court for Competence Issues be set up to deal solely with questions of distinguishing between competences that belong at European level and those that belong at national level, they demand – thus bringing to an end the increasing centralisation of powers in the EU through legal practice that is determined by the European Court of Justice. 

Herzog and Gerken conclude that the above-mentioned institutional measures should be incorporated into the new Treaty if the centralising trend is to be checked.