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The dishonesty of making treaty reform taboo
European Voice
One possible response is to take Schäuble's words at face value, to conclude that he believes that repair work on Europe's banks is possible now, without treaty change (what he calls “a banking union of sorts”). But more far-reaching reforms in the ...
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Thursday, 16 May 2013
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Germany's finance minister reopens the debate on treaty change.
What should we make of the pugilistic assertion by Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany's finance minister, that the eurozone's emerging banking union will require changes to the European Union's treaties? On the eve of a meeting of eurozone finance ministers, Schäuble gave only guarded support to the Commission's plans to construct a banking union. In his view, the existing treaties are not adequate to support a central resolution authority.
One possible response is to take Schäuble's words at face value, to conclude that he believes that repair work on Europe's banks is possible now, without treaty change (what he calls “a banking union of sorts”). But more far-reaching reforms in the longer term – a steel-framed banking union, rather than the interim version that he considers “timber-framed” – would require treaty change.
A less innocent interpretation of Schäuble's words is that he does not want a banking union with a resolution mechanism. To say that it would require treaty change is tantamount to saying that it should not happen – because Schäuble knows that many member states do not want treaty change, and others that might simply do not believe it is possible.
Admittedly such an interpretation does not pay due respect to a well-established German line on economic and monetary integration – Germany has always taken a stricter view of what the EU's treaties will allow than, say, France – nor perhaps does it recognise the chaos that Germany's constitutional court can create.
Nevertheless, what should worry anyone who wants to see the EU functioning smoothly is that such a sceptical interpretation is both possible and plausible.
For what it tells us – not for the first time – is that the EU is hamstrung: incapable of shaping its own destiny. There are things that it might like to do, reforms that it might like to make, but cannot, because to do so would require treaty change and it is not prepared to make treaty changes for fear that those changes would be rejected by a referendum in one member state or another.
As if that was not bad enough, David Cameron, the United Kingdom's prime minister, has contrived to make the EU's predicament even worse. Having announced in January that he wanted to renegotiate the UK's relationship with the EU as part of the next revision of the EU's treaties – and that he would then, if returned to power at the next general election (2015) call an in-or-out referendum on that revised relationship, he has this week dismantled that carefully constructed edifice. The spurious clarity of his declaration is now obscured by gunsmoke rising from civil war within Cameron's Conservative Party.
Through that smoke, it becomes very difficult to see why the likes of Angela Merkel or François Hollande should come to the aid of Cameron, by offering him a repatriation of certain powers (which would never be enough to satisfy the unhappier parts of his party).
Ultimately, the EU is caught between a rock and a hard place. Schäuble urges it to an honourable defeat. Cameron urges it to a dishonourable defeat. So it opts for the cowardly position of non-combatant. For the moment, the EU lives an uncomfortable lie.
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