The legitimacy crisis undermining the EU

To fight the tide of populism, the EU must devolve from supranationalism to intergovernmentalism

French President Emmanuel Macron recently claimed the EU must start acting “like a world power” if it wishes to remain politically assertive in the coming decades. But firstly the bloc, with its power concentrated primarily in unelected supranational institutions, must undergo significant reform if it wishes to stem the flow of Euroscepticism gaining momentum across the continent and maintain constitutional unity before it can regain global authority.

The EU currently operates in a tightly integrated political and economic union that sees national sovereignty delegated to higher, supranational institutions that hold the right to overrule states and are largely unaccountable to citizens.

The European Commission, acting as both the bureaucratic arm and the executive for the EU, is an unelected body that holds the absolute right to propose legislation, implement policy and enforce EU law; the European Court of Justice, acting as the judicial branch, has a lack of transparency that extends so far it does not allow public access to its proceedings. The European Parliament however, whose MEPs are elected directly every 5 years, reserves only the right to amend and discharge legislation passed on by the Commission and fundamentally lacks the constitutional agency to dictate policy direction.

Such power imbalances were the primary driver behind the Brexit referendum, where Leavers cited the erosion of national sovereignty to ‘faceless bureaucrats in Brussels’ and the dilution of cultural identity to a framework that prioritises continental homogeneity on issues like migration over national autonomy. With populism growing in France, Poland and Germany and Eurosceptics already in power in Hungary and Slovakia, the infringement of national sovereignty and ‘democratic deficit’  inherent in supranationalism provide distrusters of European integration with both a scapegoat for stagnation and an excuse for detachment. 

The integrated monetary union and redistributive fiscal mechanisms of supranationalism, long a controversial topic, also threaten to unravel under populist scrutiny. Where domestically an interregional redistributive system that favours structurally weak areas is legitimised by a sense of national collectiveness, the shared European identity is simply not strong enough to justify to Dutch and German populists the sending of their surplus tax Euros to Greece and Slovenia by unelected Commissioners.

The public resentment generated by the Eurozone bailout of several Southern states between 2010-15 translated to a surge of votes for Eurosceptic parties in the 2014 EP elections, illustrating the extent to which a supranational monetary union is contributing to the fraying of inter-European relations.

Supranationalism, tracing its origins back to the 1952 Treaty of Paris, has long been employed by the EU as the chief instrument in preventing ‘Eurosclerosis’, an economic phenomena where emphasis on inter-nation consensus and pluralism indirectly creates a culture of low productivity, stagnating economic growth and labour market inflexibility.

But in observing the relative economic and innovative progress of the bloc in recent decades, what becomes apparent is not only that these weaknesses remain pertinent in a supranational system, but that the accompanying legitimacy deficiency further emboldens nationalist rhetoric.

To mitigate such threat and prevent further ‘Brexits’, the EU must continue to decentralize power from supranational institutions by extending legislative authority to the intergovernmental European Parliament. Only by instilling the Parliament with the decision-making mechanisms and the devolved autonomy to build legitimacy and propose legislation can a sense of genuine accountability can finally be reached in the bloc.

By no means is such a redistribution a perfect fix; vesting increased power in intergovernmental approaches can slow decision-making and undermine collective action on shared European values. But in an age of heightened political polarity, intergovernmentalism offers a solution to the democratic deficit while negating the rigid ‘one-size-fits-all’ structure of supranationalism; only then, with the restoration of democratic legitimacy, can the EU begin to act as a unified world power.