International

Last Friday saw the appearance of the long-awaited memorandum from Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans on the question of which areas of policy ought to be returned to national regulation and from which interference from Brussels should be excluded. The government posed in this note the question of why the European Commission has, in every area in which it has competence, also invariably the exclusive right to propose new legislation. This is a good question, yet the government failed to give an answer to it. It can’t do so, in fact, because this would necessitate an extreme make-over for Brussels, and Prime Minister Mark Rutte is opposed to any amendment to the Lisbon Treaty. That’s why, in this respect, the memorandum is an opportunity missed.

If the government can’t answer the question of why the Commission is so power-hungry, I’ll do it for them. The European Commission is simply an extremely odd institution. Made up of twenty-eight Commissioners who see themselves as European Ministers, it employs tens of thousands of officials who are imprisoned in a golden cage, paid top euro - salaries they couldn’t earn anywhere else at all - and who are rewarded only if they ensure a supply of legislation to which the Commissioners can append their monikers. In short, the entire institution is organised in such a way that it just has to come up with new proposals as soon as there is a question of it having any kind of authority.

In the Dutch current affairs weekly Elsevier, there appeared this week a great article by Carla Joosten which throws light on the idea which the SP has been developing of an ‘extreme make-over’ for the Commission. If, in common with the SP, you don’t want to see a federal Europe, you won’t have much time for politicians who see themselves as European Ministers, still less for officials who, in order to get and keep their jobs, must ‘believe’ in Europe and lose touch with the citizens in the member states.

As long as the Commission is what it is, the SP supports retaining twenty-eight Commissioners, which at least ensures that we still have one from the Netherlands. Dutch Commissioners should stand up for Dutch interests, however, which they haven’t to date been much good at, arguing that they are there principally to promote European interests. When it comes to the French, on the other hand, things are rather different. The French Commissioner Michel Barnier has kept a very close eye on France’s interests, unlike our own Neelie Kroes, who’s concerned in the main to pursue her dream of a federal Europe. So the Europhile argument that the Commission is there to represent the interests of small member states is belied by the facts.

There is, then, also no reason whatsoever after years of maladministration to have much belief in the institution known as the ‘European Commission’. This Commission simply has to change, and thoroughly. In my view the position of the Council, which directly represents the member states’ governments, should be strengthened at the expense of that of the Commission. The Commission should be there to make proposals under instruction from the Council and the Parliament, but without such an explicit demand it should no longer enjoy the ‘right of initiative’. What peace that would give us! If the government really wants to put an end to the eternal flow of new Commission proposals, then it must have the courage to say so, and to start a discussion on this. That’s why a treaty amendment is necessary, and that would at the same time be a good moment for a referendum. There would still be hope for the officials in Brussels – less work making up new laws, but more pressure to enforce the existing legislation. This would at last give these people a chance to be critical: if your boss wants to push proposals that neither the Council nor the EP has requested, you can say that there’s no basis for such. This is a much better solution all round, it seems to me, and it’s just a pity that Timmermans didn’t raise this sort of essential question in his memorandum.