Come On, Let’s Found a European State! The Role of European Citizens in the EU

In the corona crisis, at least at the outset, the member states’ renationalisation reflexes posed a significant challenge to the EU (border closures, confiscation of medical equipment, lack of solidarity). The same old story! The fact is that the EU’s future – or whether it even has one – has been periodically called into doubt for decades now. There is always someone who wants to leave (the British) or should have left (the Greeks), while others dream about leaving (latterly the Italians) and others do not want to leave, even though some would happily show them the door (the Hungarians). The euro never seems to be stable and the EU is always having to cope with ‘challenges’ of one kind or another. In a Deutschlandfunk (German World Service) interview during the corona crisis, Jean-Claude Juncker, on being asked about the negotiations on the EU’s multi-year financial framework (MFF), declared that there was ‘nothing to see here’. The German expression he used is ‘damit ist kein Staat zu machen’, which taken literally means that ‘a state could not be made’ out of the EU (more precisely, its budget). This has turned out to be a long introduction but perhaps it was necessary. After all, what the EU could do to ensure that European integration could no longer be undermined at every eventuality or that it no longer had to struggle with ‘challenges’ at every turn, is exactly what is at issue here: in other words, the EU should become a state.

The Question of a European State

Is it really so absurd to pose the question of founding a European state? German finance minister Olaf Scholz said recently in an interview with Zeit online that the EU could not go on as it is, and called for a European fiscal union and a Eurozone budget, in short: a federalisation of the EU that, if one thinks it through to the end, would ultimately develop the features of a federal state. Because in order to legitimise this kind of fiscal federalism true transnational democracy would be necessary at European level, including separation of powers, tax autonomy and sovereignty for the EU, as well of course as adequate parliamentary controls. The EU has none of this at present. What is more, there is no prospect of acquiring it until it becomes a state. Without a parliamentary right of initiative, with an EU budget of only 0.9 per cent and with a Court of Justice that is constantly challenged by national constitutional courts there are structural obstacles to rational crisis management in the EU. And concerning the billion- or trillion-euro rescue packages that are currently being negotiated it should be mentioned that every euro that the EU is disbursing, besides credit lines, was provided by the member states. In fact, this is money that has been entered in the books twice. Money and sovereignty are really the same: every euro can only be disbursed once – sovereignty, too, can only be allocated once. And both are ultimately granted by the citizens! In other words, this is a ‘no taxation without representation’ moment that we have reached at European level. The very moment in which the liability union and state foundation coincide, at least in theory. Dare one even say it out loud?

Groundhog Day

And for those who believe that this is perhaps too much of a challenge for the EU, the question of founding a European state is far from new. Around 20 years ago French politician, political scientist and philosopher Jean-Marc Ferry, in the run-up to the European Constitutional debate in 2003, broached this issue in his widely read book La Question de l’État Européen. Perhaps it’s time to take this book down from the shelf and have a look at how one might go about founding a European state. After all, up until 1998 the objective of a United States of Europe as a federal European state was still part of the CDU’s party platform. It was also clear to all signatories of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 that a currency union cannot function without a fiscal, budgetary and social union, and that Article 125 TEU (the so-called ‘no bailout clause’) was something of an anomaly in the Treaty, behind which people are only too happy to take cover today, on the ground that the law is the law. Not least Germany, which is not willing to surrender any of the economic privileges this clause bestows on it, such as its ability to exercise a dominant role in the internal market and the euro, without having to redistribute the benefits (or gains) this gives it across Europe. But even more than having to rethink the economic and fiscal challenges facing the EU perhaps the main thing would be to terminate the undignified, even dishonest debate on Europe conducted for years now by Germany’s political elites. Much would be gained if, for example, joint bonds were no longer placed surreptitiously, coming in, as it were, through the back door, but rather so to speak could come with their heads held high through the political front door. This is not about some sort of unlawful ‘transfer union’, but rather a much needed financial constitution for Europe. In any case, the EU will not be able to deal consistently with its economic challenges jointly, unless it turns its attention first and foremost to the structural defects of the Economic and Monetary Union.

None of this is new. The banking, euro and austerity-crisis of 2010 had already laid bare the defects of European governance structures. But as in real life, all the problems that the EU fails to solve just keep rearing their heads again. The corona crisis has made it incontrovertibly clear that the EU is not sovereign, cannot act alone when a major crisis hits and depends on its member states both politically and economically, while the intergovernmental approach is de facto permanently blocked in the Council by hardened fronts between creditor and debtor states.

The Role of European Citizens

There are no citizens without a state. Only when a European state has been established will there also be European citizens. Their role is thus key to the future political process because the EU stands at a turning point, amidst a paradigm shift from a union of states to a union of citizens. Both may be found in the Maastricht Treaty. To date, however, the European Union as a political system has not been straightforwardly and directly legitimised by European citizens and thus is still not accountable to them. European citizens literally have no choice; they cannot, even if they wanted to, vote either the European Council or the European Commission out of office, which is the prerogative of any sovereign. In short, they have no say in the question of power in Europe. It is precisely for that reason that Europe’s citizens are not straightforwardly and directly involved in the EU’s political system – and that the EU is always in peril of being perceived as a remote political superstructure. That is why no term is more euphemistic than ‘European citizen’, which is now constantly bandied about in Europe’s political discourse. Nevertheless, the core of Europe’s democratic problem, namely that there are no European citizens, lies in the fact that there is no European state. At the end of the day, there are only Austrian, Finnish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Slovenian citizens, who to some extent share a market, and some of whom also share a currency. European citizens, however, share neither electoral nor fiscal equality, nor the same access to social rights. The general principle of equality does not apply to them. This, however, is a necessary, albeit insufficient condition of any democracy. If Europe wants to become one, it has to satisfy this condition. European citizens need to live up to their name.

Being a citizen in EU Europe is still differentiated by nationality. Nationality decides whether one receives unemployment benefit, as in Germany, or not, as in Greece. Or whether there is basic social insurance, as in Austria, or not, as in Italy. While European goods are equal before the law in the internal market and the same applies to money in the euro currency area, there are no European citizens as political subjects. The coronavirus has shown this clearly: national borders were closed to European citizens, but still open to trucks and thus goods; money – the euro – circulated and labour (for example, farm labourers from central and eastern Europe), too, was able to cross borders. In other words, for the EU, European citizens living within EU territory exist solely in their functions as workers or as customers and consumers, but absolutely not as citizens, as sovereign political subjects. The EU should transition from a (hybrid) EU community of rights to a politicised European legal area,[1] that uncompromisingly grants equal rights to all those who – literally – stand on European territory.

The EU is still a long way away from this. Although EU citizens enjoy legal equality within any single EU country, not all EU countries offer the same rights, especially in the social realm. Contemplating the legal equality of European citizens thus requires a citizen-based approach to jointly address Europe’s challenges by creating a transnational democracy, in which it is no longer states that negotiate and make decisions, but European citizens who, as sovereign, are directly linked to the EU’s political system and decide things together, beyond nationality. The EU’s principal challenge is thus the creation of a European citizen’s card, which confers on all EU citizens the prospect of equal rights from Lisbon through Dublin and Warsaw, to Thessaloniki. One could establish a trajectory for this by issuing, from a given reference date – for example, 1 January 2025 – all newborns with a European citizen’s card. That would represent a politically peaceful transition to a European democracy: everyone already living would remain in their respective administrative, national electoral and social systems. All newborns would be socialised by means of such a card – and naturally this would be built into it, politically – into a European democracy and thus a European statehood. This would be Europe’s great transformation, whose future no one would have to worry about any longer.

There could be a Europe-wide referendum on this process together with the European elections in 2024. The future European state could, like most European states, be constituted as a republic, because according to Cicero a republic is at root nothing other than citizens who, regardless of their origin or identity, submit to the principle of a general political equality in a common political unit.

Formulated with such clarity I personally am convinced that this political process could be developed without fuss and over time attract robust majorities in Europe and eventually prevail.

(Translated from the German)

[1] Bogdandy, Armin von 2017: Von der technokratischen Rechtsgemeinschaft zum politisierten Rechtsraum: Probleme und Entwicklungslinien in der Grundbegrifflichkeit des Europarechts, in: MPIL Research Paper Series No. 2017–12, Heidelberg.
 

The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.