Italy’s Leader Warns EU Needs Better Democracy
Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti called for increasing the power of the European Parliament, the EU’s legislative body, as a way to give the 27-nation bloc more democratic legitimacy-especially at a time when its members are being asked to swallow unpopular austerity measures in the name of greater economic and political integration.
«I think it’s deeply possible to reconcile democracy with greater integration,» Mr. Monti said in a speech during a plenary session of the Strasbourg-based European Parliament.
Mr. Monti gave a simple reason for moving toward what many are calling a «United States of Europe»: National governments may well have popular mandates, but they have been shamefully shortsighted and largely responsible for the continent’s fiscal and debt crisis. This includes not only Greece, he said, but also Germany, France and Italy.
Mr. Monti emphatically dismissed fears that the European Union would become a «super state.» He noted that national governments, rather than bureaucrats in Brussels, had pushed the continent into its current deep economic woes.
Greece, for example, «has been for quite some time the perfect album of the worst kind of politics…with corruption, nepotism, absence of competition and tax evasion,» he said. Germany and France used their «political clout» to ride roughshod over partner nations in 2003 and violate the Stability and Growth Pact-a set of fiscal rules-in an act that lies «at the root of today’s crisis,» Mr. Monti said. Italy held the EU presidency at the time of the violations and was complicit, he added.
The euro-area sovereign-debt crisis has exacerbated the question of democracy in Europe, as harsh measures have been demanded by EU institutions that do much of their business behind closed doors. Moreover, the two countries with the heaviest public debt loads, Greece and Italy, are governed by unelected technocratic governments.
Mr. Monti’s government, which is made up of mainly professors and other experts, came to power in November after Silvio Berlusconi resigned amid pressure over his economic reform plans, which were judged too weak by EU partners.
Currently, the EU’s architecture of power is divided into an ambiguous three-way structure. The Parliament is a 754-member body that has two headquarters yet until recently had the power only to vote down legislation promulgated by the European Commission rather than initiate its own.
There are two executives: the commission-which consists of 27 commissioners appointed by the national governments of each member state-and the European Council, which comprises the heads of state or government of each member state as well as the EC president and a permanent president, currently Belgian official Herman Van Rompuy.
This cumbersome framework has spawned regular battles among national governments, who are boastful of their national electoral mandates, and the commission, which is formally empowered to pass binding rules for all EU member states but in practice lacks the ability to enforce them.
As the euro-zone’s debt crisis has threatened the existence of the continent’s union, some European leaders-including Mr. Monti and German Chancellor Angela Merkel-are embarking on a campaign to shepherd consensus about engineering an «ever-closer union,» as pledged in the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.
The European Commission should act «more and more like a government with all the powers» needed to govern, Ms. Merkel said in a closely watched speech in Davos, Switzerland, last month. The European Parliament, she said, should become more important and national governments should transform into something like a second legislative chamber, not unlike Germany’s Bundesrat.
That will be far from simple. The United Kingdom, which is a member of the European Union though not the common currency, has long viewed the union as a trading bloc, not a political project. Paris has long had a strong instinct to protect the sovereignty of its own, strong state.
In his speech, Mr. Monti, the most vocal «federalist» of any national leader in Europe today, said that nothing really assures that governments won’t ignore the rules again, even those they initially favored.
As the solution, he pointed to the European Parliament, an institution that he said had become a «factor of stability.» Its lawmakers were crucial champions of the EU’s new so-called six-pack rules governing national budgets, which were adopted last year and were «more credible» than what governments themselves had proposed, he said.
For Mr. Monti-a former European commissioner who won international fame as an antitrust regulator-what the Parliament needs is even more powers to oversee its two executive counterparts, just as national assemblies have over their executives. Giving the European Parliament more powers would also counter concerns that the EU’s executive branches are dominated by the largest and strongest nations.
Mr. Monti said there was an implicit unfairness in the fact that Greece is now being asked for harsh fiscal sacrifices in the name of Europe’s common currency, even though some countries have long violated the principles of the bloc’s so-called single-market rules. The claim was implicitly directed at Germany, which-like Italy-hasn’t opened up its economy to competition as much as the European Union’s single-market rules demand.
Mr. Monti’s government has introduced a number of economic overhauls demanded by EU authorities alarmed by the slow economic growth and €1,9 trillion ($2,5 trillion) public debt load of the euro area’s third-largest economy.
Nathan Sheets, an economist at Citigroup in New York, says what European leaders are trying to do by increasing the democratic legitimacy of the European Union is similar to what U.S. politicians like Alexander Hamilton managed in the late 1700s.
Mr. Hamilton unified the colonies’ Revolutionary War debts, which were unequal, and pre-empted a possible bidding war between the early states for foreign investment, he said. But Europe’s situation is different, Mr. Sheets warned, because it isn’t a fledgling country and because it already has its own central bank.
As a result, the national differences will remain, a point that German President Christian Wulff emphasized in a series of speeches he made during a three-day tour of Italy this week. «National parliaments have to be taken seriously,» he said.
01/21/2012
— Filed under: Politics
Tags: democracy, EU, Italy
