THE CAMEL, it is said, is a horse designed by a committee. And, in truth, the bizarre institutional camel that EU leaders have laboured to produce in Brussels has all the features of an organisation at the limit of its capacity to change and grow, its evolution strangled by the inherent contradiction of proceeding only through an increasingly difficult consensus of a growing membership with different perspectives.
And not just different perspectives – in the case of the UK, hostage to the most extreme Tory Eurosceptics, an unwillingness to go the extra mile to accommodate the needs of partners suggests again that its membership is at best semi-detached, always in question. Was de Gaulle right after all? Britain’s different mindset made it unclubbable. And prime minister David Cameron’s grandstanding was particularly regrettable given that the real, albeit difficult, possibility of accommodating a British opt-out within the current treaty framework and without threatening its interests was achievable.
With each treaty revision the EU architecture has become more complex and ungainly . . . Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice, Lisbon . . . to the point when it became necessary to evolve mechanisms to allow member states to proceed at different speeds. Now even those are unable to meet the needs of the EU’s great project of monetary union. And we are being forced to sideline the community institutions and structures that have served small states particularly well for a new intergovernmental treaty and a diverging twin-track EU.
Its inelegance notwithstanding, is this deal fit for purpose? Can the fiscal disciplines the new treaty will impose copper-fasten the euro by providing the guarantees that the European Central Bank appeared to need to loosen its purse strings? Will this so-called “final chance” reassure the markets? On the markets, the jury is yet out, but despite some extra funding for the IMF, the financial response to the crisis, the firewall, still appears deeply inadequate. The ECB’s apparent continued reluctance to step up to the plate does not bode well – perhaps the leaders would have been better employed in discussing treaty reform of its statutes.
Most of the substance of new fiscal supervision mechanisms had been well-flagged ahead of the summit, with member states grudgingly ready to accept the new disciplines. The problem for leaders was how to enact them in a sufficiently robust legal/institutional framework with credible enforcement. For Ireland that raised two particular political concerns: firstly would the changes trigger a referendum? The answer is still unclear, although the intergovernmental nature of the treaty appears to make it more likely. And would new mechanisms preserve the “community method”, the EU decision-making that gives the commission rather than large member states the right to initiate proposals and protects smaller states. British reluctance to allow the commission to do the work of fiscal supervision means someone else, perhaps a shadow commission, will have to do it. Its structure and independence will be crucial.
Not, however, a good day’s work.