European Futures

Challenges and Crossroads for the European Union of 2050

Chad Damro, Elke Heins, Drew Scott, Chad Damro, Elke Heins, Drew Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000366341
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Forecasting
• Index: Business

This edited volume explores the opportunities and challenges facing the European Union in the future from different disciplines and assesses the EU's prospects across various policy areas.

Using the European Commission's 2017 White Paper presenting five different scenarios for the future of Europe to 2050 as an organising framework for analysis and debate, the volume reflects upon the drivers of the EU's future, including its changing place in an evolving world, a transformed economy and society, heightened threats and concerns about security and borders, and questions of trust and legitimacy. The concluding chapter summarises and compares the findings to determine which of the scenarios is the most instructive to understand and plan European Futures to 2050, and beyond.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of European integration, EU politics/studies, and more broadly international relations, as well as European policy-makers.

1
Introduction

European futures, past and present

Chad Damro, Elke Heins and Drew Scott

Europe has long been a target of scholarly inquiry. Given recent social, economic and political developments both within and outside Europe, the continent and its process of regional integration remain highly intriguing – and challenging – topics of study. The potential scope of this subject creates room to raise significant and contentious questions from various disciplines and begs for analyses that can shed light not only on the past and present, but also on the future prospects for Europe and the European Union (EU). In order to appreciate the subject and understand our approach, it is helpful to set the stage and expound upon the context that helped to shape this book and its contributions.

This edited volume directly engages the dynamic subject of Europe and undertakes a concerted and multidisciplinary effort to explore the future opportunities and challenges facing the continent and the EU. The volume comprises chapters and ideas based on expert presentations that were initially delivered at the 50th anniversary conference of the University of Edinburgh’s Europa Institute in April 2019. Founded in 1968 by Professor JDB Mitchell, then Professor of Constitutional Law in the University Law Faculty, the Europa Institute is the United Kingdom’s (UK) longest established centre of excellence for the study of EU law, governance and policy. Initially founded as a centre for EU legal scholarship, today the Institute comfortably straddles the disciplines of EU law and social sciences, advancing the analysis of politics, institutions and policy and actively promoting multidisciplinarity in the study of the EU and European integration.

The conference not only marked 50 years of EU scholarship at the University of Edinburgh. It also celebrated the University of Edinburgh’s continuing commitment to European studies with the launch of the new FUTURES Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, based in the School of Social and Political Science.¹ The FUTURES Centre has been broadening the range of EU-related activities at the University and has as a core objective the dissemination of new ideas about European futures to a wide audience in and beyond Scotland. Indeed, the theme of the conference – European Futures – was selected to ensure that our new Centre was launched in the best possible way.

To that end, we were delighted to welcome to Edinburgh an extraordinary, multidisciplinary group of leading academics with expertise on various aspects of European integration to share their own views about the challenges facing the EU at what we all recognise to be a – perhaps the – critical juncture in its history. For there can be little doubt that today the EU faces a conjunction of challenges that, if not successfully addressed, have the potential to galvanise further the forces of European ‘disintegration’ that some now suggest are markedly present within the EU’s political and governance dynamics ( Jones, 2018; Vollaard, 2014).

The conference convened during the very difficult and uncertain negotiations to settle the terms of the UK’s exit from the EU – a tangible and dramatic example of a new phenomenon of ‘disintegration’ pressures that are arguably bearing upon the EU (Rosamond, 2016). Although at the time of the conference the UK’s exit from the EU was still nine months away, and while Brexit was not intended as a focal point of the deliberations, it did cast a shadow over the proceedings. As academics, we look to the evidence when analysing the consequences of specific policy decisions. And although none of the chapters collected in this volume are dedicated to addressing the causes or consequences of Brexit, there was a sense that the evidence demonstrated that neither the UK nor the EU stood to gain as the UK disentangled itself from a community of nations and single economic entity of which it had been an integral part for close to half a century.

As we discussed and debated the future of the EU in the spring of 2019, we could not have anticipated the scale of the health and human crisis the world was to experience as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. First and foremost a health crisis that has brought misery and bereavement to many thousands of families in every corner of the world, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a global economic downturn of unparalleled severity in recent times, creating levels of unemployment and social hardship not witnessed since the Great Depression of the 1930s. At the time of writing, the full scale and likely duration of the social and economic impacts of the pandemic cannot be reliably estimated. Nor can its costs – its human cost, its societal cost and its economic cost – although it is clear they will be considerable. We cannot predict how quickly individual countries will recover from the pandemic-induced economic downturn; what impact it will have on longer-term trends in employment and social cohesion; the extent to which the patterns and organisation of world trade and mobility will be disrupted; the extent to which we will return to ‘business as usual’ domestic economic policies; or how countries will manage the substantial increase in public debt that has been a consequence of the massive increases in public spending triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. All of these considerations, and more, will be pivotal in shaping the future of the European economy and, quite possibly, the prospects for European integration.

For the EU, the crisis has a highly significant added dimension – namely the extent to which a sufficiently forceful collective response is orchestrated to support individual member states whose economic and social systems are particularly vulnerable in the face of such immense and relentless challenges. While it is tempting to analyse any questions about the future through the lens of an ongoing global health crisis, that is not primary aim of this book. In many ways, the lasting impact the virus will have on the future – including the scope of adjustments to policy, politics, institutions/law, social and economic relations – will not become clear until sometime after the pandemic becomes managed or even controlled. At this stage, we simply cannot know. But because the pandemic does matter for analysis of the future, it does feature – to varying degrees – in individual chapters in this book (for example, see Chapter 3 [Verdun]; Chapter 6 [Grabbe]; Chapter 10 [Bulmer]; Chapter 11 [Greubel and Zuleeg]).

History might well come to record the COVID-19 pandemic as a decisive moment in the chronicles of European integration and the European Union itself. In the face of such crisis, it is pertinent to recall the prescient words of Jean Monnet (1976, p. 488):

L’Europe se fera dans les crises et elle sera la somme des solutions apportées à ces crises.

[Europe will be forged in crises and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.]

Those of us who have studied the EU over the years are very familiar with the rhetoric of ‘crisis’ that has regularly accompanied the process of European integration (Rhinard, 2019). Indeed, sometimes it seems that the EU has never not been in a state of crisis – the Luxembourg crisis of the 1960s; the Euro-sclerosis of the late 1970s and early 1980s; the budgetary debates and juste retour demands of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; the seismic geopolitical events of the late 1980s; the ‘legitimacy’ debates triggered by the implementation of the Treaty on European Union and later vetoes over prospective treaty reforms; the financial crash of 2008 and accompanying existentialist threat to the eurozone; the ongoing migratory challenges from outside the EU external borders; and more recently, Brexit; the emergence of so-called ‘illiberalism’ in Poland and Hungary; and the implications of potential fractures in the core Franco–German alliance that has always acted as the ‘engine’ of European integration.

It would be wrong, of course, to portray the history of European integration as one solely of crises. Against the backdrop of these periodic challenges, the successes of European integration have been all the more remarkable, and in many ways confirm Monnet’s conviction. For example, the completion of a genuinely single EU market was an antidote to the Euro-sclerosis of the 1970s, along with the emergence of a supranational legal and legislative system of governance that has delivered substantial benefits to EU citizens. In addition, notable successes include 1) the post-1989 enlargements of the EU to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe that not only consolidated the democratic and economic reforms undertaken by those countries but arguably may come to be recognised as a critical milestone in the EU’s gradual evolution as a geopolitical actor; 2) the creation of EU citizenship and the progressive expansion of the rights and privileges this accorded all EU citizens; and 3) with the onset of the financial crisis and the sovereign debt crisis that followed, the EU successfully – although far from painlessly – navigated a potentially existentialist challenge to the eurozone, if not to the wider integration project as a whole.

But while Monnet was undoubtedly correct in his prediction, it would be facile to suggest that the sum of the solutions adopted in the wake of these crises has not itself created a deep-seated democratic unease – to varying degrees across member states – within the citizenry of the EU. And it is that sense of dislocation between ‘governed’ and ‘governors’ in the institutional architecture and ever-expanding policy agenda of the EU, and the challenge to preserving accountability it implies, that continues to concern those tasked with progressing the agenda of this ‘ever closer union’ (European Union, 2007).

The context of the White Paper on the Future of Europe

In the aftermath of the most acute phase of the eurozone crisis, and in the shadow of the tragic summer of 2015 that saw thousands of refugees losing their lives fleeing conflict-torn regions in Syria and North Africa, EU leaders came together to mark the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome. The self-congratulations that inevitably attach to such events were muted. Although the precarious economic recovery was showing signs of strengthening, unemployment remained high and living standards for many people across the EU – especially in the south – remained below their pre-crisis levels, sometimes dramatically so.

But economic security was not the sole concern for many at this time. The increase in a terrorist threat following recent devastating attacks in Spain, France, Germany and Belgium was fresh in the minds of citizens across the EU. And, of course, the response to the life-and-death challenges faced by refugees seeking to enter EU countries continued to divide the member states. In the meantime, the Brexit vote had become a reality.

Against this turbulent and troubled backdrop, the European Commission published its White Paper on the Future of Europe early in 2017 to mark the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. At the heart of the White Paper was the theme of legitimacy. How could the EU reconnect and reestablish trust with a citizenship that was still suffering the effects of recession and confronting a series of new and grave challenges, while also seeming to be increasingly uneasy with, if not hostile to, the European project (European Commission, 2017)?

This was far from a new question. Tackling what many had long regarded as a legitimacy (or democratic) deficit at the core of the EU’s supranational architecture is an issue that has bedeviled and threatened to derail the process of integration since the early 1990s, when it first came to prominence during the troubled negotiation and ratification of the Treaty on European Union.

Later, it was precisely these concerns that triggered the decision at the Laeken European Council of December 2001 to call for a convention that would debate the future of the European Union. That convention would pave the way for an Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC) to bring forward treaty reforms addressing the four main issues deemed to be central to the development of the EU – a better division of competences; simplification of the EU’s instruments for action; increased democracy, transparency and efficiency; and the drafting of a constitution for Europe’s citizens (European Council, 2001). Collectively, it was believed that properly tackling these themes would restore public confidence in the European project and reduce the political – or legitimacy – gulf that had opened between what many regarded as the elitist governance of the EU and the day-to-day concerns of its ordinary citizens.

Over a period of 18 months, the Future of Europe Convention met and debated potential treaty reforms that would meet the aims of the Laeken Declaration. In June 2003, the President of the Convention, former French President Valery Giscard D’Estaing, delivered its results in the shape of the Draft Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, an ambitious document that sought to recast the EU Treaties in a way that made more accessible to the public the broad aims of the EU, and which proposed significant institutional reforms to improve the EU’s legislative and policy processes (European Union, 2004). Following amendments, the Draft Treaty was adopted by the European Council, and one year later began the process of ratification.

Although the Constitutional Treaty was ratified in a number of member states, it became the focus of a significant Euro-sceptic backlash in others – not least the UK, where earlier promises of a referendum on ratification were not honoured. In the event, the new Treaty fell before facing the UK Parliament for ratification. It was rejected by French and Dutch citizens in national referendums held in mid-2005. Undeterred, however, the EU Heads of Government and State pushed ahead with most of the substantive changes set out in the Constitutional Treaty, although doing so by a conventional reform procedure and without changing the structure or the titles of the existing EU Treaties. The ultimate result was the Treaty of Lisbon reform treaty, signed in December 2007 and entering into force on 1 January 2009.

The timing of the Lisbon Treaty ratification process coincided with the unprecedented economic crisis triggered by the global financial crash of 2007–08. That crash heralded the start of a severe downturn in the global economy and, in the EU, was manifest in rising joblessness and the onset of a sovereign debt crisis that, for a time, threatened to bring down the eurozone system. Many feared that a fragmentation of the eurozone would result in an existentialist threat to the EU itself.

The immediate response to the financial crisis saw governments across the EU undertaking significant direct fiscal interventions, financed by borrowing, to protect the banking sector from failure. Moreover, the beginning of the subsequent recession triggered coordinated fiscal counter-cyclical measures along with the operation of automatic stabilisers, leading to a further worsening in public finances. The upshot was a dramatic deterioration in the fiscal positions of all EU member states. Between 2008 and 2010, the average annual national budget deficit had increased from 2.5% to 6.4% GDP and average public debt had jumped from 61.3% to 89.6% of GDP (Eurostat, n.d.).

While there is little doubt that the (Keynesian) counter-cyclical fiscal policies implemented across the EU in the teeth of the crisis prevented the onset of a full-blown economic depression across the continent, by the end of 2010 policymakers became increasingly preoccupied with the deficits and debts to which these policies had given rise. That heralded an abrupt and ill-timed switch in policy through austerity measures designed to reduce fiscal imbalances – in effect to restore deficit and debt to levels consistent with the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). The new mantra became ‘fiscal consolidation’, to be achieved by often swingeing cuts in public spending in preference to increases in taxation. So began a period of economic austerity that challenged the underlying social and political cohesion upon which a large segment of the legitimacy of the EU rested.

The financial crash had a less direct, but equally problematic, consequence for the dy...