Martin Schulz recently wrote an opinion piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung laying out his ideas on converting the European Commission into a real European government, as a response to the problems clearly highlighted by the pro-Brexit vote in Britain on 23rd June.

In the article, Schulz said “the Commission should be converted into a real European government”. For many this might be a strange proposal. Why? Well, for some of us, we are thinking, ‘it is a European government in all but name, so what’s the conversion actually going to look like?’. Schulz explains “the European government should be under the parliamentary control of the European Parliament, and a second chamber made up of the representatives of member-states.” Now we are getting somewhere. “These representatives should be known people from the national level, and will make the Union-level more transparent”.

Of course as we all know the EU has a deficit in its democratic processes. The Commission which drafts all bills voted on by the Parliament and the Council is the only body which can propose bills, and is un-elected. Some supporters of the current system will point out that actually, the last Commission President was elected by the people indirectly through the parliament – each party put up a Spitzenkandidat (top candidate) who they would nominate to be Commission President; the party with the largest number of votes would have their Spitzenkandidat appointed by the Council. There you go, they say, parliamentary democracy. Well, they are wrong if they say this is real parliamentary democracy. Admittedly, it resembles to a degree the way the Spanish or British systems work, where the party with the majority in the chamber has their candidate appointed (or nominated in the Spanish case) by the Monarch, and then they go to form a government. Well, there are some differences, mainly that the candidates are usually elected officials themselves, and that the invested candidate then goes on to form a government of other elected officials (in the British case at least) who are jointly and/or individually held accountable by the entire chamber. The chamber can remove them all (and in some cases individually) and it can block them. More interestingly is the Spanish and German examples, where the Prime Minister or Chancellor is actually elected by the chamber (in Spain the monarch simply nominates a candidate; a nomination which can be ignored). Now, it’s the strange nature of British political evolution that has led to a Prime Minister which is not chosen or approved of by the chamber – why would we copy that model at the European level?

The second crucial point here is the powers of the parliament as a body itself. Now die-hard supporters of the current Union will correctly tell you that the parliament has been incrementally gaining more and more powers over the years – it wasn’t even directly elected once – and that today, it’s practically a real, full-blown parliament. In fact, most of the actions of the Union today are carried on the back of the legitimacy provided by a directly elected chamber. If you think about it though, if the President of the Parliament (Speaker/Chairman) himself says ‘the Commission isn’t under parliamentary control as in the member-states’ then I think we can accept that it’s not a real parliament. Berthold Rittberger, a political scientist at Universität München, says Schulz’s proposal aims for “full-parliamentarisation”, suggesting that right now, we do not have that. That’s not to put down the role or the work of the parliamentarians in Strasbourg/Brussels. But as parliamentarians, they have a mandate to more control over what the European level does than is the case now.

Schulz is right when he says “Europeans don’t really know or understand where decisions are made” or by whom. He also said in his article that the nature of the union is such that people are so unsatisfied in some cases, that is raises fundamental questions about the Union. That’s putting it lightly, as we saw in Britain not too long ago. Why do you think the EU has lost every democratic contest since January 2015? There are 2 more coming up around October/November (Austrian Presidential elections and a Hungarian referendum), and I doubt at this rate they’ll go much better. Schulz highlights the issue with transparency, and says ‘more Europe’ needs to be much clearer defined so that Europeans know what to expect when integration deepens. I agree.

However, as Der Spiegel highlighted in its own article on Schulz’s real European government, he misses the critical problem of the European Council. Because, as the Spiegel highlights, it is here that the real issues of democratic accountability lie. The Commission, whilst not elected, has its proposals discussed and voted on by the Parliament, which is recorded and publicly broadcast. The Council is a permanently ongoing diplomatic conference. Nothing is democratic about a diplomatic conference, except that everyone involved gets a vote. We all know that the real decisions in diplomacy are deliberately taken out of the public view. We know that deals are made, and anything that happens in public has been agreed on prior to the ‘official’ decisions. They’ve tried to account for this in the treaties, but I’ve seen the minutes from Council meetings, and they’re not that enlightening. The Spiegel highlights the further problem, that with the involvement of the member-state governments, positive outcomes can be claimed to be the work of the member-state in question, whereas negative outcomes can be blamed on the Union. Everyone who comes out of Council-meetings either claims all the credit of the success themselves, or completely disowns the decision, blaming the ever present concept of a ‘minority of one’. It was nothing to do with me, leave me alone. Who else then do we hold to account?

Now of course, there were critics of this proposal for more Europe, and people who drew other conclusions from Brexit. Angela Merkel was one of them, who is still under the impression that the status quo in Europe is going to hold. From her actions along with those of her Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who together held two diplomatic conferences post-Brexit (one with the original Six, Chancellor Merkel’s with just Paris and Rome) it seems she thinks this is the hour of the Heads of Government in the Council, who will once more come to the rescue. This kind of crisis management has been a feature the Union for decades now, and has led to outcomes which European jurist Thomas Schmitz at the Universität Göttingen has described as “the Dictatorship of Hesitation”. There are only half measures with this method of problem-solving, nothing is decided in the open, with a democratic debate, and once more the question of what Europe is, what the Union is moving towards is put off. If we don’t have this discussion now, when will we?

It’s times like this that I’m drawn to Jürgen Habermas’ quote, when commenting on Merkel holding both the positions of being pro-integration and against the ECB fulfilling its functions as a Central Bank for the EU – “Chancellor Merkel seems to be playing an interesting double-game”. It seems to me that Merkel hasn’t realised yet, people have had enough of the status quo in Europe. The way the Union works now is leading to its disintegration, with people realising either that the Union doesn’t work for them, or that it cannot solve Europe’s problems in its current form. If we want Europe to work for the citizens, and actual support European people and their values in the world, then we have to take radical actions. That means in the first case creating a European government with an actual, honest and constructive role in European politics.

Sources: FAZ, Der Spiegel