A cross-cutting theme of today’s EU crisis is divergence. For many decades, convergence has been the cornerstone of European integration: the EU project is designed to channel states and societies towards similar policies, similar rules, similar ideals and similar identities. Undoubtedly, the EU has smoothed the roughest edges of difference and confrontation between European countries. Yet in recent years Europe has become a more diverse political, economic and social space. Preferences, aims and values have pulled apart, among both governments and citizens. While it may be possible to identify very generic common European values, the poly-crisis has widened variation in what different governments and peoples want from EU cooperation. It does not appear that states or citizens will agree any time soon on a standard, uniform set of policies or single EU institutional template. Today’s challenge is to manage a looser bandwidth of European diversity.
Fairly broad agreement has taken shape that cooperation between states and societies in Europe needs to occur on a more flexible basis. Flexible integration is the watchword of many reform proposals. But what would a more flexible EU really look like? Do those who agree on this question also agree on what it would entail? These issues have been debated for many years, and yet the EU has become less rather than better able to deal with divergence.
My aim is to argue that flexibility must be understood in a more innovative way in the future. It should not be equated with a two-speed or multi-speed Europe: this widely touted way forward is another false solution. Rather, an alternative Europe must be flexible in the sense of offering states and citizens the ability to opt in to a cluster of integration choices, where feasible on a reversible basis. The EU should set broad goals and leave states and societies to find their preferred paths to meet these. It should explore the possibility of modest forms of differentiation within and not just between states. And as a broad guiding principle, the flexibility debate must be connected more integrally to the democracy debate; in other words, in the future, the EU’s flexibility must be a fully democratic flexibility. These measures could help European states find a different and common core of solidarity better and more harmoniously able to bind the EU together over the longer term.
The poly-crisis has presented member states with contrasting concerns. The eurozone crisis has hit some states but not others. The refugee crisis hits a different selection of states, while again leaving others relatively untouched. For some, Russian actions in Ukraine and other Eastern countries represent an existential threat, while for others they are no more than a minor annoyance. Conversely, while some states worry more about Middle Eastern challenges, for other governments these southern security problems are a lower priority. One project concludes that in today’s splintered Europe, everyone believes they are shouldering an unfair share of other states’ burdens.1
Some of the foremost commentators on the eurozone crisis speak of an unprecedented divide on economic policy and argue that this is now unbridgeable by standard efforts to reach single, coordinated policies.2 The last big leap forward in European integration, enshrined in the Maastricht Treaty, happened at a moment when national policy preferences had converged. The euro came into existence because member states had clustered around broadly similar ideas about economic and monetary policy. The poly-crisis has corroded this consensus.
A common claim is that the way to save the EU is to move away from orthodox economic policies and develop strongly redistributive measures at the European level. This clearly makes sense, especially from a Greek, Spanish or Portuguese perspective. But in Germany and other parts of Europe, the feelings of grievance and distrust that have arisen undermine support for the idea that large-scale cross-border financial flows can be the European project’s central pillar. Yanis Varoufakis lays out an admirable plan for new rules to combat poverty and debt that would decentralise decisions within a still-common Europeanised policy framework.3 One might concur with the ideas, but it is doubtful that they are capable of gaining universal appeal and legitimacy. Trade unions have mobilised in the crisis to protect their own national workers’ rights but not for pan-European solidarity – indeed, in response to some efforts to get them to do so, they have generally refused. The eurozone crisis has not led to a uniform wave of anti-neo-liberal social democracy across Europe but to a retrenchment into national and local identities and to the appearance of divergent specificities.
On the question of further fiscal integration, polls show a mix of divisions: opinions are divided along national lines, in accordance with individual circumstances and, within countries, between generations as well.4 The European Social Survey reveals that northern Protestant states are more likely to support European integration the less redistribution it entails, while for citizens in southern member states exactly the opposite is true.5 Bertelsmann polls show that citizens in the south and east want an EU that is mainly about economic growth, while citizens in the north favour one dealing primarily with peace and security.6 And differences between self-defined cosmopolitan classes and a working class within each member state are as significant as those between countries.
Another yawning divide is between euro members and those outside the single currency. The former have been caught up in an endogenous dynamic of deeper cooperation just to keep the euro from collapsing. Conversely, those member states that are not members of the euro have not adopted these commitments, making it harder for them to converge in the future.7 Statistical testing confirms that recent steps in political integration are associated with deepening inequalities across Europe.8 Influential theorist Peter Hall observes that the crisis has accentuated the degree to which member states have fundamentally different structures of political economy – a development that renders a uniform set of centralised economic policies less viable than it was before the crisis.9 Member states do not simply follow different policy preferences, but subscribe to quite different models of capitalism.10
Moreover, there are many axes of divergence. Divergence is prevalent in political as well as economic debates. Multiple fault lines now cross the continent: the economic crisis splits northern and southern Europe; the refugee crisis splits a potential inner Schengen core from everyone else; an increasingly non-liberal Eastern Europe seems to diverge from Western European political values. There is no single direction to the bubbling discontent: the eurozone crisis has pulled many angry citizens to the left, while the refugee surge and security fears have enticed them to the right.
The Dutch are dissatisfied because the EU does too much, the Spanish because it does too little. Yet the Dutch want the EU to do more on the environment, while Poles believe the Union already imposes too many green rules. Bail-outs brought down a government in Slovakia for being deemed excessive, and another in Greece for being too miserly. While many in Greece, Spain and Portugal want full fiscal union in order to increase their own European revenues, Ireland sees the prospect of common EU taxes as a risk to the competitive advantage the country gains from its low corporate tax rates. For some, centralised tax resources are the means of restoring the EU’s legitimacy; to others they are even more unthinkable now than before the crisis.11
The crisis has highlighted profound schisms between the historical trajectories that have brought member states to support the European project. One can understand why German politicians might instinctively want to overcome today’s tensions by fleeing even further from the nation state and nationalism. But central European states insist their political journey is quite the opposite: joining the EU was equated with the recovery of national sovereignty. Politicians from these states argue that they never had the chance to complete a process of nation-forming and now need a stronger national identity to weather current challenges.
Even those member states that share an aspiration for political union have divergent views on what this should look like. For instance, in economic terms some assume a political union would be able to exert stricter control over the periphery, while others see its whole rationale as being about drawing resources away from the centre. The French understanding of political union is a confederal and dirigiste political system led by governments, and capable of mobilising state resources. For Germany, it means the strict application of law and rules, and control over price stability. The crisis has pushed Germany towards an even more legalistic view of European integration and a conviction that there is already too much wiggle room for national governments to evade foundational principles. In direct contrast, many in France are now even more convinced that EU integration has to be led by elites with significant political space to manoeuvre. All proponents of political union see it as an instrumental route to their own particular policy preferences. The result is stasis: while German politicians still subscribe to political union, in practice they are holding back because they distrust French intentions and fear full union would leave Germany exposed to be being outvoted on core monetary issues.12
On the other side of the ledger, Euroscepticism is equally varied. Some of today’s growing scepticism is rooted in a kind of soft modern nationalism: a view that the EU contravenes national sovereignty. Some of it is anti-state, against the EU as an unnecessary layer of regulation and intervention. Some is anti-market, uneasy that the EU is too rooted in free-market ideology. Some is democratic, concerned that the EU hollows out democratic legitimacy. Some is localist, unhappy that the EU undermines local self-sufficiency and community identity. To some extent, it was ever thus. But the poly-crisis is so broad that it has intensified fears in all these different ideological strains of doubt simultaneously. This produces a complex web of party preferences across Europe, making it difficult to identify any one set of positions on the EU held by a particular nation or party family.13
The point is not that governments simply have different policy preferences – this much is well known. The crux is that the crisis has widened discrepancies over relegitimising European integration and has sharpened existential dilemmas over what that is fundamentally about. One comprehensive survey explicitly hunted for substantive policy initiatives that would relegitimise the EU project across all countries: it concluded that no such initiatives exist.14 Jan-Werner Müller notes that the crisis may have fostered the long-awaited European public sphere – as EU developments become the staple fare of national media and political debates – but one that seems to be driving a divergence and not convergence in understandings.15 Of course, there have long been divisions at the EU’s core; the difference now is that these appear to have widened beyond what can be mediated through existing political institutions. Europhiles have become more ardent in their convictions, EU-doubters even more hesitant; this pulling apart has shrunk the middle-ground ‘permissive consensus’ that for so long sustained European integration.
There is also a cross-cutting divergence over how to react to Germany’s growing power. Hans Kundnani notes that differences have widened among other member states over what to do about Germany’s rise. He argues that this divergence is amplified by Germany being dominant but not quite preponderant enough to exert absolute control or a shared sense of European order.16 Some analysts believe that Germany has built a non-hegemonic leadership based on networks of consent and ‘willing followership’ from other member states.17 However, many EU governments self-evidently do not willingly follow, but rather resist, Germany’s conceptualisation of European integration. Any acceptance there might have been in the crisis’s early moments of a benign German leadership is now wearing thin. In short, Germany’s changing position at the heart of European affairs adds further diversity among governmental and popular opinions across the continent.
Leaders frequently pay lip service to diversity, suggesting it is now a core aspect of the EU’s future. Yet their policy ideas fail fully to advance this principle. The question is whether a form of EU integration can be fashioned that allows member states greater scope to pursue different policy preferences without completely breaking the ethos, rationale and necessary institutional solidity of the integration project. A form of diversity is required that helps rebuild solidarity, rather than undercutting it. Europe needs to make divergence work to its advantage, and shape a model of integration less dependent on forcing multifarious preferences into homogeneous sameness. Most diversity is benign; some of it is harmful. A flexible Europe would get away from the attempt to quash divergence and be able to guard more tightly against those specific elements of diversity that are malign.
Integration can no longer be based on an assumption that governments and societies will move smoothly along a unilinear path towards similar preferences or similar understandings of what the EU’s core rationale should be. Multiple levels of divergence now appear to be firmly rooted across national borders, as well as between EU elites and citizens. If European integration is to survive, it must find a way of dealing with this. This is more realistic than breezily assuming that the incremental processes of EU cooperation put diversity on a long-term path to disappearing.
For five decades, the working analytical assumption has been that integration moves in one direction, incrementally increasing – more or less quickly, but always onwards. There is no analytical framework for describing, explaining or predicting the path of integration as a more varied and fluid back-and-forth process.18 Member states are constantly exhorted to look beyond their own interests to reduce divergences. Yet if they were willing to look so readily beyond short-term interests, Europe’s current problems would not have arisen in the first place. We need a model of integration that is somehow able to work with rather than against the grain of divergent national and societal preferences.
This must be a more fruitful way of proceeding than assuming that common European constitutionalised norms are imminent, like dormant buds on the cusp of blossoming in the crisis’s wake. The notion of a fully common European political culture is divorced from citizens’ sharply contrasting experiences since the crisis began. It is frequently said that the EU needs to create a new narrative. But given the diversity of views across the EU today, it is unlikely that any one single alternative can replace the ‘EU as a peace project’ narrative. Instead, in the future, European integration will need to be underpinned by a plurality of narratives.19
A profoundly analytical challenge sits at the heart of these debates about flexible integration. The dilemma is that the concept of liberalism – upon which the whole European project rests – is fracturing, and this opens up tensions. Some want to drop economic liberalism but retain social liberalism; others push back mainly against social liberalism, but not economic liberalism; for some less social liberalism means challenging political liberalism too, while for others it does not. The question that arises from all this diversity is whether the EU can be flexible enough to let parts of European society choose their preferred combination of economic, social and cultural liberalism. If not, one wonders how the EU can stifle the ominous creep of all-embracing post-liberalism. In essence, to prevent this from happening a reset Europe will need to shift towards understanding liberalism as self-ownership and mutually tolerated variation.20
The realist view is that diversity and dispersed autonomy underpinned the Westphalian system of rules and statecraft – and that now the EU has got its strategic thinking backwards in seeking to maximise unity through limits to diversity.21 Even if such old-style realism can hardly be the way forward for an alternative Europe, history certainly reinforces the conclusion that diversity is unlikely to evaporate any time soon. Each time there has been a European crisis in the last 500 years, some states have sought to overcome it through deeper centralisation, others through more pluralism.22
Naturally, the fact that the EU crisis has unleashed such dissonant and deviating perspectives presents an enormous challenge. And there will be no easy answer to combining diversity with effectiveness in European cooperation. However, Europe’s diversity can no longer simply be wished away. Doubters point out that too much flexibility encourages states to free-ride, and takes away the incentive to engage in trade-offs or to make sure that decisions taken in one area of policy do not cut across those in others. Yet while it is certainly vital to be aware of the limits to viable and healthy flexibility, a more elastic concept of integration is surely necessary.
To some extent, the EU is already a system of differentiated integration. Policies are centralised at the EU level to different degrees and include different sets of member states. There is both policy and territorial differentiation.23 More than 30 forms of differentiation within areas of EU policies already exist, having developed incrementally over many years.24 Some writers suggest that this very messiness is what makes the EU’s development very different from the more uniform dynamics of history’s other examples of regional integration and policy formation.25
Yet this differentiation has clearly not been enough to avert the poly-crisis. Today’s variation exists where one or two member states have objected to a new area of policy or some states need time to meet entry requirements for a new sphere of integration. This is flexibility by ad hoc tactical necessity, not as a proactive organising principle for EU integration as a whole. It is not a type of flexibility capable of dealing with far-reaching divergence, where states differ in their basic aims and some want to unwind their existing EU commitments.26
The idea of slowly accumulating, pragmatic sector cooperation has been the spirit behind the so-called open model of coordination for over a decade. The results of this have been negligible. The principle of subsidiarity – taking decisions at the closest practicable level to citizens – has been present in EU politics for more than 20 years and has clearly not succeeded in shoring up the Union’s legitimacy. Asymmetrical integration is generally touted as a means of adding to an ‘untouchable core’ of the EU’s existing political system, and is hence a way of preserving rather than rethinking the fundamentals of integration.27 Governments now debate flexibility very much within the parameters of existing treaty provisions, and nothing more radical.28 Far more innovative and original forms of flexibility are needed.
When politicians, policy-makers and analysts talk about flexibility as a response to the current EU crisis, they most commonly advocate different speeds of integration. Calls for a two-speed or multi-speed EU have become common in the wake of the crisis. Foreign ministers of the founding six member states met in 2016 to discuss options for a ‘core Europe’.29 The illiberal and confrontational tone of the Polish and Hungarian governments has intensified interest in a smaller ‘core Europe’ – the mood among many politicians in Spain and France is now very strongly one of impatience with central and Eastern Europe. In the run up to the sixtieth anniversary Rome summit in March 2017, the idea of a multi-speed Europe gained prominence and lay at the heart of several governments’ proposals, as well as the Commission’s White Paper on the Future of Europe.30
The former director of the European Council’s legal service argues that a two-speed Europe can be formally structured not to create long-lasting divisions but rather to create the flexibility necessary to keep the whole European project together.31 The Economist proposes a ‘multi-tier’ model; it sees this as more fluid and innovative than the current batch of two-speed proposals, but still envisages a more fully integrated core around the eurozone, a second tier of non-euro member states, and additional tiers of current non-members.32
Some academics insist that managing divergence is essentially a matter of engineering a formal split between eurozone and other member states, with the former proceeding to political union.33 Joseph Stiglitz has called, in turn, for a split in the euro, with southern states disconnecting from the northern states to operate a ‘soft euro’, with more expansionist policies.34 Alternative für Deutschland has taken up this idea with a particularly divisive call for a formal and binary split: one strong euro around Germany, one weak euro around France.
Yet the notion of a core Europe has been around for many years and has always met resistance. The main problem with the two-speed vision is that it would surely need to be forced on the states excluded from the self-selecting inner nucleus. Governments may welcome the principle, but recoil from any suggestion that they would be the ones resigned to an inferior status. As a result, it is a notion likely to unleash even more resentment across Europe and exacerbate the imbalances driving the poly-crisis. Those states in danger of being ‘left behind’ will in practice try to ‘keep up’ with the core, but do so very grudgingly and with little feeling of popular ownership – a dynamic likely to compound the EU’s legitimacy shortfall.
In southern member states, citizens are clearly hostile to the notion of a two-speed Europe.35 They fear forms of differentiation that leave them more vulnerable to the de facto dominance of an inner core. The turmoil of recent years has occurred precisely because there are no easy ways to downgrade eurozone members’ degree of participation in existing integration commitments. The templates that have been forwarded for splitting the eurozone conspicuously fail to consider the real-life politics of how this is supposed to happen with any degree of harmony.36
Moreover, the notion of a core Europe does not run with the grain of current trends: much focus in 2017 has, of course, been on unease over deeper integration in parts of the supposed core, like the Netherlands and France. The Dutch are in the lead of states wanting a looser form of integration. Euro members themselves have different visions of the next steps towards political union. Even if member states signed up to the notion of an inner core, they would then disagree on which policies would require a complete buy-in from all countries and which would be pursued only by the vanguard group. In current debates, a two-speed Europe is presented in particular as a way of bypassing increasingly truculent central and Eastern European states; yet significant differences and reticence also exist among the supposedly core Western European states.
Moreover, proposals invariably advocate flexibility for future areas of new integration but not for current policies, and therefore do nothing to address the tensions and divergence that have arisen during the poly-crisis. Think of the importance now attached to activating the (already-existing, but so far unused) provision for ‘permanent structured cooperation’ in defence and security: while three or four states may usefully club together to buy certain types of military equipment or to participate in a training mission in Africa, this says nothing about how the EU should manage differences that currently exist over substantive security questions. When it comes to these kinds of issues, in practice member states usually still block others from adopting significant variations that don’t match their own policy preferences – despite all their rhetorical support for flexibility.
A fiscal or economic union that included only a rich core of member states would negate much of the purpose of such deeper economic integration – even if its formation were politically possible. Conversely, if the new core were to include all states inside or signed up to the euro, this would hardly be a template for multiple levels of variation. This is because nearly all member states are either inside the eurozone or aspire to join the single currency. Positing the eurozone as a new vanguard for political union amounts to little more than potentially excluding Sweden and Denmark – not exactly a high degree of differentiation. So this most commonly suggested basis for ‘flexibility’ simply looks like a standard route to a fully federal Europe, not a way out of the current EU straitjacket.
These tensions and shortcomings infused debates around the Rome summit in March 2017. After the Commission’s white paper and a summit of the French, German, Italian and Spanish leaders pushed the possibility of a two-speed EU to the top of the agenda, other member states and the Commission mobilised decisively against such a prospect. That meeting of the four largest member states simply sparked further recriminations and divisions, inciting the Benelux, Baltic and Visegrád states to call their own summit to counterbalance the influence of the bigger states.
After much bargaining, references to multi-speeds were dramatically watered down in the Rome Declaration. As of 2017, flexibility is now to be explored within existing treaty provisions. This brings the focus back to the relatively circumscribed enhanced cooperation mechanism that has so far been used for proposals on patents, a financial-transactions tax, divorce laws and a public prosecutor. Rather than unleashing a decisive breakthrough, the flurry of recent proposals for a two-speed Europe has in fact encouraged many politicians and analysts to insist that there be strict limits on flexibility and to argue that giving member states an ability to choose their preferred areas of cooperation would lead to disintegration.37
A final challenge relates to Brexit. Proposals for different-speed Europes have often been concerned with the singular problem of the UK. Brexit will, in this sense, add to the dilemma of giving coherent and clear substance to the broad principles of differentiation and flexibility. A more radical model of flexibility may be necessary to allow the UK back into any kind of engaged relationship with the EU – and for the moment it seems that neither side in the Brexit negotiations has begun creatively to entertain any such far-reaching flexibility. This also means that Britain’s departure will force other member states to clarify their ideas about flexibility as a notion that is about more than assuaging one difficult member state.
Pushing the idea of an inner–outer divide further, some have advocated an associate-member status. Such a status could be relevant both to neighbouring non-EU states and current member states wanting to escape the confines of full membership while maintaining a productive relationship with the Union. Again, this suggestion is not so much about rethinking the tenets of integration per se as about cooperating with those states not part of or wishing to leave the integration project. Moreover, after years of debate about this option, in practice it has not gained traction on policy agendas.
Some writers argue that the EU could become more like a ‘club of clubs’ organised around clusters of specifically defined cooperation. Under such a model, each area of cooperation would be allowed to find its appropriate form of policy-making, institutional structure and membership. There would be no single centre but rather lots of different forms and types of cooperation, separate from each other, in a polycentric Europe.38 Resonating with such ideas, one survey of opinion in all 28 member states suggests there is support for a variegated and utilitarian ‘Europe of projects’.39
Giandomenico Majone insists there should be no need for a heavy layer of institutions and rules that overarches functional spheres of cooperation. There should be less intrusive harmonisation and more pragmatic cooperation, with the EU refereeing this cooperation rather than pushing for its own vision of ever-deeper integration. This approach would allow states to find the optimal benefits from cooperation while avoiding the downsides of all-embracing integration.40 It would also enable European integration to move away from legal centralism. It would be based on a spirit of healthy competition between EU member states. Proponents of the clusters approach insist that such competition will be better able to find the best solutions to problems, the best models of public policy and the optimal forms of economic policy.
The related argument is that the EU could learn from other regional initiatives around the world that are doing well on the basis of far looser modes of cooperation. These initiatives show that more flexible and informal types of resolving disputes can work well.41 In line with this, Mark Mazower believes the key is to return to the beginnings of EU integration in the 1950s, when cooperation was largely technical and did not threaten national sovereignty or raise questions of democratic legitimacy.42
In one of the most thought-provoking accounts of recent years, Jan Zielonka also advocates a set of functional clusters of cooperation, operating without any single, strong institutional centre – cooperation based on ‘task-oriented integrative networks’. He suggests that such ‘neo-medieval polyphony’ would involve a major downgrading of EU-wide law and existing institutions like the Commission, European Council and European Parliament. Functional clusters would be organised on varied bases, in accordance with the requirements of each area of cooperation – and could easily be run by sub-state actors such as cities, regions or NGOs as much as by national governments.43
Zielonka makes the point that the EU has, in a sense, done the job it was designed for: embedding peace between European states. We should not be afraid to acknowledge that it has served its purpose and that it is time to move on to a different form of cooperation more suited to today’s challenges than those of 1945. Dismantling the heavily centralised and legalistic edifice of today’s EU would not open the door to conflict between member states or precarious Westphalian power-balancing. Interdependence has progressed too far – economically, socially, functionally – for this to happen.44 The EU’s institutional logic was designed for an economy based on the control of resources; it sought to enforce a shared management of these resources to stop governments fighting to control them. But today’s organising logic of an economy based on knowledge is entirely different, as knowledge sharing and co-generation proceed in a more naturally bottom-up and institution-lite fashion.
Others have even suggested that the disparate – and usually maligned – Holy Roman Empire could offer useful lessons. Charlemagne’s creation embodied a system of loosely affiliated princedoms that endured from 800 to 1806. One historian argues that the longevity of this network of cooperation based on local autonomy suggests ‘an alternative to the stark choice between the EU as a single, homogeneous super-state or fatally weakening Europe’s global position by fragmenting it into a mosaic of national states’.45
The sentiment behind more task- and results-oriented cooperation is well grounded. And these accounts surely provide a valuable service in reminding us that the current EU institutional structures are a means, not an end in themselves: if integration can be better pursued in different forms, then the priority must be to explore such avenues rather than to preserve the institutions of the Union as an end goal in their own right.
Yet the clusters approach is not sufficient on its own and has an unduly apolitical feel to it. Overarching political issues cannot simply be excluded. The ‘club of clubs’ plan is often presented as a largely technocratic vision, based on a return to so-called output legitimacy – the EU simply getting things done and delivering results. As Zielonka warns, political accountability is the Achilles heel of functional visions of integration. This more flexible and pragmatic model must be made compatible with citizens’ desire for stronger democratic control and participation. If it were pursued on a purely technocratic basis, offering citizens little input, it is likely to worsen the EU’s crisis of legitimacy, not solve it.46
The challenge is to combine these models of flexible clusters with means of rebuilding bottom-up and democratic solidarity. This combination is the crucial political metric with which any successful model of flexibility must comply. Radical flexibility should not be about mere shapeless expediency. The European project needs a spine of common solidarity. The rationale for a better model of flexible integration should be about finding alternative ways of locating and fostering the factors that can help reconstruct this spine – given that the existing policies supposedly making up the EU’s central pillars of solidarity have crumbled so badly during the poly-crisis years.
This means that if a polycentric Europe is to play a role in setting European cooperation on a firmer footing then reforms must go further: integration must combine flexibility with democratic accountability and alternative measures of solidarity. There must be a link between the imperative of democratising the EU on the one hand, and the need to manage multi-divergence on the other. Flexibility must deepen democratic quality. This is clearly a challenge – requiring flexibility to be understood in a political and more controversial way than has typically been the case. But it also represents an opportunity: flexibility can be harnessed as a means of helping restore the EU’s democratic legitimacy.
The key is that debates about democratising the EU and the trends in localism outlined in previous chapters should inform efforts to fashion a more flexible form of European integration. Traditionally, flexibility has been seen in terms of an enlightened elite deciding how policy-making dynamics should vary between different areas of policy and between different states. Differentiated integration is invariably equated with mind-bendingly complex ways of dividing formal legal competences. This hardly resonates with the need for citizens to be more engaged with the EU.
Flexibility must be understood in more political and democratic terms than is habitually the case if it is to work as a core component of a democratically transformed integration model. It should not simply be a device for ad hoc opt-outs from selected policies for particular member states. Differentiation as it exists today accentuates the democracy problem, because it worsens the disconnect between those who make decisions and those affected by them. Some noted experts believe the Commission’s March 2017 white paper was damaging in excluding all considerations of accountability from its concept of multiple speeds.47
Flexibility should be understood as democratic subsidiarity. A form of subsidiarity is needed that is carried out through particularly strong democratic input and weighs carefully which issues are amenable to a functional or practical logic of centralisation and which are not. This should not be defined in a technocratic way, and it should not rest on the assumption that there is an objectively correct division of competences between national and EU levels.
Instead of being a concept enabling technocratic elites to divide competences between European, national and local levels, flexibility must be a device for fostering democratic debate in issue areas where citizens wish to share responsibilities across borders. EU institutions have tended to present and understand flexibility as a kind of managerial slimming down of the EU, spending less and cutting red tape.48 This dangerously takes away the necessary political components from the notion of a flexible Europe. The integration templates adopted by other regional organisations – in Africa, Asia or Latin America – are not a good model for the EU as they take the human and democracy dimensions even more damagingly out of the equation, which in the EU’s case is simply not possible.
One example of this imbalance is seen in relation to the issue of free movement, where de facto flexibility is being introduced without open debate or accountability. While most governments insist they are categorically against flexibility on free movement, in practice they are resorting increasingly to regulatory requirements that make it more difficult for citizens of another member state to get a job.49 And while governments insist absolute free movement is essential to the single market, they then block the latter’s completion. President Macron wants to limit movement across borders by reducing companies’ ability to offer lower wages to migrants.
Whatever one’s own position on free movement, there must be a strong case for giving populations more ownership and flexible options over this issue. This might open ways of helping protect vulnerable communities from rapid increases in migration flows, without upending the core principle of cross-border interaction. While politicians fear this would open a Pandora’s box of states erecting new barriers, recent Eurobarometer surveys show that citizens in most member states see free movement as the most positive of EU rules – implying that offering a degree of democratic choice in this field should not produce a massive backsliding.50
Democratic flexibility must also facilitate and reflect the spirit of empathy and euro-civismo discussed in the previous chapter. Critics of differentiated integration often raise the spectre of a merely à la carte spirit undercutting core principles of solidarity. However, through democratic oversight that embodies a degree of euro-civismo, this risk could be mitigated. Legitimate flexibility need not be interpreted as the inverse of solidarity. Radical flexibility should categorically not be seen as synonymous with dysfunctional expediency or a disempowerment of formal governance capabilities. A thicker web of democratic participation would veer an alternative Europe away from à la carte transactional or utilitarian minimalism.
The key is whether radical flexibility can be underpinned by the generation of more bottom-up and more firmly rooted forms of solidarity. As states and citizens are accorded greater flexibility to select those elements of integration they support, the quid pro quo will be to search for more informal and voluntary signals of solidarity. The crucial point is that a democratic rather than technocratic form of differentiation would be more likely to address the challenge of such bottom-up solidarity – and ensure that lines of mutual support bind together the newly variegated model of European integration.
Donald Tusk captured the necessary conjoining of flexibility with mutual responsibility in his letter to leaders before the September 2016 Bratislava summit, writing:
The slogan ‘less power for Brussels’, which sounds attractive in political campaigns, should translate as more responsibility for the Union in national capitals. This responsibility for the Union is nothing other than a readiness to sacrifice part of one’s own interests for the sake of the community.51
Exactly the same orientation would apply to sub-national actors, CSOs and citizens. An alternative EU will hinge around the mutually nourishing triumvirate of participation, flexibility and solidarity.
To implement this kind of radical flexibility, an alternative Europe should be guided by six principles. These six tenets grow out of the analysis offered by the previous chapters to the extent that they propose new forms of differentiation that resonate with underlying social trends and transcend the shortcomings of existing understandings of flexible integration.
The first guiding logic should be one of voluntary and flexible opting in. At present, there is a standard and uniform template for integration in different policy areas, with the onus on states having to justify any reticence about specific parts of the model. This should be inverted. There should be a menu of different areas of cooperation to which states should be invited to opt in. A state’s selection of which policy areas to join would then represent a positive choice, not a passive obligation.
Agencies managing a series of policy communities would be created. These could be dispersed to different locations across Europe, to give tangible expression to the move away from one single supranational centre. For instance, an agency for the single market could be located in Copenhagen, one for monetary policy in The Hague, one for the environment in Stockholm, one for social questions in Madrid, one for industry in Toulouse, one for international and security strategy in Bonn, one for refugees and migration in Milan – along with any number of other possible agencies in other places, covering those policy areas in which there is sufficient demand for formally managed coordination.
The collection of policy communities could include new areas of cooperation that have not so far figured highly in EU affairs. The voluntary opt-in logic should not be seen as synonymous with a lesser degree of overall cooperation. On the contrary, it might well open up new avenues and possibilities for states working together – especially as governments would no longer feel obliged to slow others down for fear of being bludgeoned into unwanted commitments. An extension of the integration frontier might, for example, be likely in areas like industrial competitiveness, education, health, the low-carbon transition, identity and deradicalisation strategies and defence. Far from suffering a corrosion of governance capacities, the integration project’s overall level of formal institutional power could increase.
States that are not full members of the current EU might be allowed to participate in some of the new policy communities, with decision-making powers. This would constitute a practically oriented expression of the long-discussed ‘associate member’ idea. While the associate-membership proposal has not progressed, allowing certain policy communities to incorporate the likes of the UK, Turkey or Ukraine might be deemed more politically feasible and a more operational way of rendering the EU’s borders less absolute.
The flexible opting-in logic would undoubtedly make European cooperation messy, as there are linkages between different areas of policy. But it would be far worse to continue on the basis of states and citizens having no ability to separate out the aspects of integration they want from those they do not. Some core standards – such as on democratic rights and basic economic openness – would need to be retained across all states. Some kind of overarching coordinating forum would be needed to sit on top of the different policy communities, a political dimension beyond what is envisaged in the ‘club of clubs’ approach. These arrangements would safeguard the EU’s core institutional integrity, operating with a light touch and as unobtrusively as possible. Thinning down the Brussels institutional architecture to some degree might help show that European cooperation does not need to be about an overreaching, distant and supranational centre.
Second, as there is such a wide variety of policy preferences across today’s Europe, the EU should embrace a spirit of competition between different economic, social and political models. As a dramatically streamlined entity encasing an array of separate policy communities, the EU would set broad goals but not impose the details of how these aims are to be reached. Member states could then mould their own preferred routes towards meeting common goals. The most successful policy models will prosper by example, rather than through legal fiat.
This approach to ensuring democratic flexibility would offer member states the freedom to choose how to meet European objectives. Member states could sign up to common goals, but then select the routes to achieve those goals that enjoy strongest democratic legitimacy among their own citizens. The European level would become an umbrella framework for shared aspirations, rather than a set of detailed policy strictures. This might help combine solidarity with flexibility. Within the framework of shared integrative commitments, governments should be freer to choose their own policy mix – with the quid pro quo that they would also assume responsibility for the success or otherwise of their chosen routes.52
This route to flexibility would require a streamlining of formal, legal rules in each of the policy communities established. This would determine which centralised rules are absolutely essential to keep cooperation afloat; those that are not should be transformed into common aspirations that would allow states flexibility in how to go about securing their achievement. Such streamlining would need to go far beyond the Commission’s current efforts to check if new legislation is necessary or not.
Of course, to a limited degree the EU has already deployed the method of setting broad targets, through the aforementioned open method of coordination. The effectiveness of such an approach has not been great. Most infamously, the Lisbon Agenda and its follow-up, the ‘Europe 2020’ strategy, set a range of targets for competitiveness that all but a small handful of member states have got nowhere near fulfilling. The various targets that have been set on carbon emissions and energy efficiency have been taken more seriously but also leave the EU far from having an adequate climate-change policy. The open method of coordination has failed because it confuses flexibility with vagueness, as it is predicated on targets that have little concrete impact on government’s day-to-day policy commitments and that lack any connection to democratic accountability.53 In an alternative EU, flexibility would need to go much further. It should go beyond simply setting targets that reflect and express a basically uniform set of assumptions about socio-economic and political models. It would need to allow greater scope for competition between such models.
This logic could be applied most significantly to economic and monetary union. Management of the eurozone is one of the hardest cases for flexibility. During the crisis governments have struggled to find ways to allow national economies greater room to make their own economic choices without the euro unravelling. However, some scope for flexibility and differentiation surely exists within the parameters of economic and monetary union.
Christian Odendahl argues that national governments need to set their own fiscal and budget targets and live with the consequences. The European Central Bank would guard against serious slumps in demand and oversee certain aspects of financial regulation. Within this framework, decisions over fiscal policy would be taken nationally. National governments would coordinate on such decisions, but they would eschew the notion of a single, supranational economic policy.54 Other prominent economists have similarly suggested that member states need more, not less, scope to mould their own fiscal policies and take their own decisions over deficit levels, with fiscal discipline being ensured by national governments having responsibility for their own sovereign-debt rescheduling procedure.55
In essence: those states that want to end austerity may not be able to convince creditor states to adopt pan-European Keynesianism, but they themselves could be allowed the chance to either succeed or fail in showing that pro-growth policies do indeed offer the better route to reducing debt levels. Without going as far as a politically damaging split between a ‘hard euro’ and ‘soft euro’, this would allow some space for models to compete – within a broadly common economic framework, this spirit of competition could be constructive rather than destructive.
A third key challenge is diversity within states. In almost every member state a breach has opened up between those happily signed up to the cosmopolitan and internationalist spirit of the EU project and those who feel marginalised by it. Little is to be gained from condescendingly bemoaning ‘nativist ignorance’. An integration project incapable of taking on board doubters’ concerns and that proceeds only by suppressing their democratic voice is hardly one worth defending. The question is whether the whole form of European cooperation can be rethought simultaneously to allow space for both groups – the globalists and the nativists. Is it, for example, possible to have different arrangements for Europe’s multicultural, cosmopolitan cities than those that apply to the hinterlands?
This would not be easy in practice, of course, and within-state flexibility may well be feasible only in very select policy areas that do not threaten the EU’s spine of common commitments. But it is here that at least some degree of innovative thinking is surely required. The EU could usefully tap into a rich vein of thinking on so-called legal pluralism, which explores how in very tightly defined areas different juridical and regulatory norms can coexist within a single political system. Many highly diverse societies around the world that struggle to deal with divergent identities among their populations – from India to Africa and parts of the Middle East – show that variability in formal, legal rules and institutional channels can make such pluralism workable.56 Legal pluralism is a notion that might play a role in reviving European integration, however vocal and predictable the objections to such sub-state innovations.
For instance, slightly more liberal labour-market conditions for non-national workers might apply in Europe’s big multicultural cities than in the hinterlands. One suggestion that has been floated in the UK context is for a ‘London work visa’ that draws from a model used in some Canadian cities.57 Or some regions of a member state might want to adopt European cooperation initiatives that other regions of the same country oppose. Some areas of a state might be happy to make a financial contribution to be part of common European policy communities, while others might decide the cost is not worthwhile. Some communities might wish to contribute financially to benefit from EU citizenship rights, while others may not.58
It goes without saying that all such eventualities would be extremely difficult to manage. The principle of within-state flexibility would raise many practical questions related to how different parts of a single state could be effectively partitioned and allowed the kind of European cooperation they thought most desirable for their given local circumstances. Undoubtedly there would be limits to how far this could be taken. Nevertheless, the deepening of internal divisions in nearly all member states suggests that some efforts along these lines should at least be attempted.
A form of European cooperation is required that allows for fluid change – an essential element of democracy’s signature ability to self-correct. Current structures assume agreement is reached between states on a given issue, and that then the issue is transferred to the EU level in perpetuity with little scope for fine-tuning. There needs to be a dynamic in which policies can move both ways – towards but also away from the centre. This principle must be central to an alternative EU.
Allowing decisions on whether or not to join a given policy community to have a degree of reversibility would help redress one of the most idiosyncratic and increasingly damaging features of European integration – namely, that governments may change, circumstances may alter utterly and popular preferences may undergo far-reaching shifts, but policy commitments at the EU level are irreversible and unbending.
Breaking integration down into its component parts through a collection of separate policy communities would help add a degree of reversibility. This is because a member state with a particularly serious set of new concerns may change its line on one area of policy without this sparking a major crisis for the whole integration project – as tends to happen at the moment. A state’s shifting position on one issue does not need to be treated as a sin or affront to the overall spirit of European integration. Clearly, there would need to be a relatively strict set of conditions for states to withdraw from a given area of cooperation, so that policy changes do not become too ad hoc, unpredictable and unmanageable.
The mechanisms proposed in the previous chapter for civil society involvement should have a specific link to the question of flexibility. Sceptics and populists often assume that a flexible Europe means a Europe of Nations, handing governments the lead role. Even if flexible arrangements do involve competences residing at the national level, this is not the way that differentiation should be understood and engineered. Rather, citizens should be the arbiters of flexibility, and in a more regularised and participative fashion than current democratic channels allow for in European affairs. As a central pillar of the Compact of European Citizens, a dedicated ‘Civic Forum for Flexible Integration’ could be created to assess new legislation and to judge how to keep measures as close to the local level as possible.
National permutations of this forum should play a central role in states’ decisions over which European policy communities to join. The forum should have a say over subsidiarity decisions – modifying the current subsidiarity assessment exercises that are conducted by the Commission with little visibility. It should also have the power and responsibility for preparing reports on the result of competition between different economic, social and political models. It might also consult with local communities on practical ideas for allowing flexibility within each member state, where this might help meet citizens’ preferences. It would trigger deliberations where certain states or communities want to reverse a decision either to join or not to join a given policy community. Civil society input on all these important areas of a flexible, alternative Europe should be formalised, regularised and meaningful.
The basic aim would be to ensure that common policies are the result of bottom-up and proactive pressure, and come about after careful citizen deliberation on the right balance between healthy local ownership and diversity on the one hand and respect for necessarily common rules on the other. Of course, this balance will never be easy to strike and such a forum would hardly offer a magic panacea, but it would at least prompt governments and societies to frame the challenges of integration in this way – something that at present simply does not happen in EU debates, and certainly not with the active participation of European citizens.
There should be practical efforts to ensure that flexibility is not simply about fewer rules but also about a thickening of mutual empathy or euro-civismo. There should be a process to assess how different policies contribute to common European objectives and deeper solidarity between states and societies. Governments would be obliged each year to explain how their policies are advancing the core of agreed objectives. There will be a need to show and measure exactly how differentiation enhances solidarity and reduces states’ and societies’ hostility to having measures they don’t like imposed upon them.
The civic, democratic component would help ensure that ‘flexibility’ is not simply code for the negative unravelling of existing integration. Flexibility should not be about simply putting limits to cooperation but about citizens playing a positive role in suggesting new forms of cooperation that are likely to reflect their different preferences. This is certainly not to suggest that new routes to solidarity will be easy to locate or that they will emerge easily and spontaneously; but a more prominent democratic dimension will at least make the social aspects of flexible integration a central feature of debate to a far greater degree than the current technocratic, hyper-controlled approach to differentiation.
A well-structured civil society component could contribute positive ideas of how elements of flexibility and variation might help advance common objectives. It might provide a stronger force of binding peer pressure than the currently ad hoc and disorganised way in which many governments simply ignore those EU rules they dislike – whether on deficits or judicial independence – and escape sanction in a way that stirs up resentments across Europe. Citizens and governments should then seek alternative ideas to retain core solidarity, as they choose diverse policy options.
One example of flexible solidarity is currently being discussed as a way forward on migration policy. Apparently accepting that there may be downsides to imposing the 2015 relocation scheme on member states through a supranational EU policy, the Commission has proposed that states not willing to accept refugees make financial contributions to those that are. The Visegrád states say they are now funding refugees in other member states.
Critics remain unconvinced of this arrangement. It is certainly less than ideal, and one might strongly disagree with central and Eastern European states’ hostility to refugees. Yet a significant upgrading and spread of such arrangements might be the only practical way forward – a means, albeit inelegant, of trying to square the circle of having flexibility with some solidarity, while preventing EU cooperation from breaking down altogether. In general, the solidarity component certainly needs to be strengthened far beyond the form it takes in this particular example. In some policy areas it might be possible for cautious governments to align themselves with central rules through informal measures of cooperation – retaining some degree of national control but without eviscerating all solidarity.
There is a sad irony in today’s EU crisis. In historical terms, today’s disagreements between European states are minor compared to centuries of wars and invasions. Yet because the model of integration aspires to squeeze states into a common mould, today’s disagreements take on a greater magnitude than they need to. The overarching, structural issue for the EU integration model is how much further differentiation can and should go. Clearly, it is no longer simply a question of member states advancing towards a common goal at different speeds. Differentiation is not merely a matter of some states wanting to adopt new commitments while others do not; it also embraces debates about rolling back some areas of commitment. Flexibility cannot only be about existing ‘enhanced cooperation’ rules that allow a small group of member states to agree on a new area of integration. And even if it accords important roles to the nation state, neither can flexibility be reduced to the kind of purely nation-state-based model of integration now pushed by right-wing populists.
Many argue that extensive flexibility is either not feasible or would pander too much to ascendant Eurosceptics. But reformers should challenge the commonly made assumption that flexible integration necessarily equates to less integration. Under the flexible principles suggested in this chapter, those countries whose citizens desire a wide range of much deeper integration would have scope to pursue this – simply without obliging others to follow exactly the same path should they prefer other forms and degrees of cooperation. If flexibility is structured in the right way, over the longer term it could lead to more, not less, integration overall. It could enhance the degree of formal institutional power that can be mobilised to address European policy challenges; the flexibility options suggested in this chapter are certainly not aimed at disassembling effective governance capabilities – quite the reverse. An alternative EU needs to push back against the long-held assumption that solidarity is synonymous with the development of single-EU policies. Solidarity and singularity need to be delinked. A more pliable EU does not need to entail a more pinched and hunkered Europe, but can prompt a more positive and untethered form of cooperation.