The ongoing asylum/refugee crisis in Europe is rapidly draining two kinds of mutual trust: between citizens and national governments, and between national governments and elites in Brussels. In the latter relationship lies the ultimate source of EU strength—and that trust is hemorrhaging badly.
Across Europe, politicians are growing increasingly reluctant to cede new powers to Brussels. One reason is that voters in many countries oppose it, and in many countries trust between citizens and government is already at a record low. Another is the keen memory that past crises have often led to closer integration by default, rather than by consensus derived from deliberation. Political elites in core countries, notably Britain, are now mistrustful of all proposals from Brussels, fearing that they will be tricked into Thatcher’s nightmare: a union, and not in name only.
The tortured negotiations that preceded the Lisbon Treaty, which went into force in 2009, probably marked the end of treaty-driven integration in Europe. The EU is now locked in a defensive struggle to prevent existing treaties from unraveling, whether informally, as seen in the fraying EU asylum and border cooperation, or formally, through the pending negotiations ahead of the British referendum on EU membership, expected in 2017.
If the EU is to reverse this trend, it must overcome three challenges. The first challenge is to create economic growth. Europe’s economy has been flatlining for more than a decade. This has coincided with waning public support for the EU; whether this is merely correlation or is suggestive of some causal connection is in some respects unimportant. As long as millions of Europeans are unemployed or fear for their jobs, many will be wary of deeper European integration. The EU elites’ insistence that it is preposterous to claim that the euro itself created the euro crisis is a very hard sell (as well it should be).
Second, EU institutions must find a solution to the emerging reality that some members do not want to continue the journey towards a federation ruled from Brussels—that “ever closer union” mentioned in the EUs founding treaty. Not all states want to take part in all EU policy areas. This is not to say that no more sovereignty will be ceded to EU institutions, only that member states are more likely to cede some sovereignty if they are confident that they will not be compelled to cede more, let alone all of it. As things stand today, it is getting ever harder to persuade people and politicians into believing that power is not a zero-sum game.
Third, EU leaders must solve the refugee crisis. For that to happen the EU’s porous borders must be sealed or EU institutions must be granted authority to force members to accept more migrants. On September 22 the EU attempted to show decisiveness by using the “nuclear option” of qualified majority voting (QMV) to distribute 120,000 asylum seekers among the member states. This decision was forced through in the face of intense resistance from smaller states, particularly among the new East/Central European members. QMV is regularly used on less controversial issues, but it had never before been applied to something as controversial as asylum immigration. To trample the minority in this way was a bold move, but shortsighted. It only resolved the cases of a fraction of the asylum seekers currently in the EU. QMV can probably not become the modus operandi without inviting an open sovereignty contest between EU institutions and national governments.
During the “empty chair crisis” of 1965, the EU’s forerunner was paralyzed when France simply stopped attending Council meetings. That time the institutions had to back down and accept that members could veto policies that went against their core national interests. For this reason Brussels is willing to go to great lengths to find a way to stop the influx of refugees.
The final challenge is one of blackmail, which now comes in two competitive forms. EU-members to the south and in the east actively funnel asylum seekers to the next frontier in blatant violation of the EU treaties, while Germany is, in return, exercising moral blackmail. Turkey is blackmailing Germany in the old fashioned way—for profit. The country’s remarkably relaxed visa practices allow would-be migrants to amass along its northern borders, where Turkey uses them as a crude but effective tool to extract concessions from the Europeans. Paradoxically, beggar thy neighbor policies have done more to bolster Turkey’s membership prospects than compliance with EU moral, political, or economic standards.
Angela Merkel, Germany’s hard-pressed Chancellor, this weekend promised to expedite Turkey’s stagnant membership negotiations in exchange for Ankara’s taking an active role in halting boat migrants embarking from its shores. She also promised to pay a lot of German money in the process. Alarmingly, the German-Turkish negotiations did not take place in a EU context; they did not even take place in a NATO context, as might be expected given NATO’s “comprehensive security” approach. The only problem is that Turkey is far from meeting the requirements for full EU membership.
For all of the reasons above, so-called “differentiated integration” is rapidly making a virtue of necessity. British friends of the EU have traditionally been skeptical of EU à la carte because they fear it could create an A-team and a B-team in the EU. But in the context of the pending British referendum on EU membership, those who favor innovation are on the offense.
Differentiated integration is not as radical as one might think. Several EU countries have already abstained from integration projects like the Schengen Area, the EU’s defense policy, and the euro. EU treaties already explicitly allow those who want to integrate further to press ahead: EU defense cooperation, for instance, started out as an intergovernmental agreement before being taken into the EU framework.
The danger is that à la carte integration could come to undermine the accumulated rulebook, the acquis communautaire in EU jargon. If some existing members are allowed to pick and choose, new applicants may demand the same option. The struggle will be between those who fear that the EU institutions will be weakened vis-à-vis national governments and those who believe that greater diversity is inevitable in a European Union with 28 member states.
The shrinking policy space brought on by the inept handling of the refugee crisis is now forcing elites in Brussels to give differentiated integration serious consideration. One conceivable solution is to define a mandatory “core curriculum” that would likely include trade and competition policies, the internal market, and the four freedoms (free movement of goods, services, capital, and people). Adoption of the euro, border control, harmonization of criminal justice, and foreign and defense policy could be made subject to voluntary integration à la carte.
Despite the potential drawbacks, differentiated integration may help the union to emerge as less monolithic and, perhaps, less authoritarian than the impression conveyed by the handling of the refugee crisis. The price would be the end of the federalist dream of a United States of Europe. In sum, the refugee crisis and its shrapnel may come to shape the future of European integration, and thereby perhaps the future of the West. The Obama Administration today may appear to be far removed from all of the scratching, moaning, and caterwauling in Europe, but that doesn’t mean that U.S. interests are not fundamentally implicated. Indeed, they are.