Abstract
The European Union’s one directly, democratically elected and accountable political institution is relatively under-developed. The European Parliament has not accumulated anything like the degree of decision-making responsibility or competence which balances out that degree which has been relinquished by the equivalent institutions (the parliaments) at the nation-state level, leaving aside the degree relinquished by the full range of political institutions (including the governments and the courts) at the nation-state level. The decision-making powers which have been transferred from the nation-state level, including from the parliaments, to the Union level have been largely re-distributed to supranational institutions which are not directly (electorally) accountable at nation-state level. It would seem that the Union, by virtue of the particular way in which it has re-distributed its acquired and accumulated supranational decision-making powers among its institutions, currently participates in the process of governance (geo-political management) in a far more top-down (see Elliott, 3 March 1997; and our Chapter 3) manner than has traditionally been the case among its current Member States. The more the Union progresses as a supranational organisation without altering its managerial style so as to far more closely resemble the approach to governance which has traditionally characterised and distinguished western liberal democracies (see Dunleavy and O’Leary, 1987; Hancock, 1993; Laffan, 1996a; Richardson, 1996), the more the Union’s democratic deficit will grow; and the more the Union will be a supranational regime that leaves itself open to the accusation of being a dictatorship:
John Major yesterday made Brussels’ ‘dictatorship’ over Westminster a central battleground for the next election, after the European Court threw out Britain’s objection to the 48-hour Working Time Directive.
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Notes
See Weatherill, 1996, p. 234, footnote 3: ‘Weatherill and Beaumont [1995], Chapter 12. In Case 6/64 Costa v. ENEL [1964] ECR 585 the Court declared memorably that “The transfer by the States from their domestic legal system to the Community legal system of the rights and obligations arising under the [EEC] Treaty carries with it a permanent limitation of their sovereign rights, against which a subsequent unilateral act incompatible with the concept of the Community cannot prevail […]”’ (Weatherill, 1996, p. 234). Referring to the same case, Klaus-Dieter Borchardt says: the ‘Court’s answer was unequivocal. “By contrast with ordinary international treaties, the EEC Treaty has created its own legal system which, on entry into force of the Treaty, became an integral part of the legal systems of the Member States and which their courts are bound to apply. By creating a Community of unlimited duration, having its own institutions, its own legal capacity […] and, more particularly, real powers […], the Member States have limited their sovereign rights, albeit within limited fields, and have thus created a body of law which binds both their nationals and themselves”’ (Borchardt, 1994, p. 56). On the ‘supremacy of Community law’, see Josephine Shaw’s European Community Law (1993, pp. 151, 164–6, 175, 232); and her Law of the European Union (1996). As reported by Shaw, ‘the supremacy of Community law [was] a concept well entrenched in the Community legal order before the UK [for instance] accepted the [founding] Treaties’ (Shaw, 1993, p. 175). It follows that this concept is ‘part of the acquis communautaire (general policy framework) which [has] to be accepted as non-negotiable by any new members’ (Williams, 1991, p. 44), including the UK.
The ‘EC Advocate General Philippe Leger who, in his judgement [of] March [1996], stated quite firmly that regulating working hours, rest breaks and paid holidays fell unequivocally into the field of health and safety’ (Jane Moorman, 19 October 1996). As the European Commission explains: the ‘Court of Justice comprises 15 judges assisted by nine advocates general’ (European Commission, The Institutions of the European Union, May 1995, p. 10).
‘Even the dramatic non-cooperation of the French “empty chair” policy in 1965 (which led to the so-called “Luxembourg compromise”) on majority voting does not appear to have been accompanied by extensive French breaches of existing Community law’ (Daintith, 1995b, p. 3, footnote 4). See Brent Nelsen and Alexander Stubb (1994), especially Chapter 5 on ‘A concert of European states’, reprinted from Charles de Gaulle, Memoirs of Hope: Renewal and endeavour (1971). As Nelsen and Stubb explain: ‘De Gaulle […] criticized the supranational vision of Europe […]. He argued [that] states [should] not give up their rights as sovereign entities to a European “superstate”. De Gaulle’s unwillingness to concede France’s right to control its vital affairs led to the 1965 crisis in the Communities and eventually the Luxembourg compromise that, in practice, gave every member state the right to veto Community decisions. In effect, the Six were forced to accept de Gaulle’s vision of an intergovernmental Europe’ (Nelsen and Stubb, 1994, p. 25). Subsequently, however, the Community shifted its vision and direction as far as Community decisionmaking and, in particular, the availability of the veto are concerned, most notably by way of the provisions of the Single European Act (SEA), which came into force in 1987, and of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union, which after being signed in February 1992 finally came into force on 1 November 1993. Thus, the ‘major innovation’ of the SEA ‘was to extend to practically all of [the] required legislation’ for the creation of a ‘single internal market […] a system of qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers’ (Wistrich, 1994, p. 4). Similarly, in the case of the Maastricht Treaty while ‘unanimity was still retained in the formulation of new policies in some of the [Community] competences, legislation implementing the policies would largely be enacted by qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers’ (ibid., p. 8).
On the network of European Community and Union institutions, see European Commission, The Institutions of the European Union, 1995;
European Commission, Questions and Answers about the European Union, 1994; Borchardt, 1994; Borchardt, 1995; Fontaine, 1995; and Emile Noël, 1993. As summarised by Borchardt, the primary role of the Community institutions is to put practical legislation in place to flesh out the framework for integration marked out by the Member States. The main actors in the legislative process are the Council of the European Union, the European Commission, the European Parliament and two consultative committees — the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions […].
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© 1999 Paul Close and Emiko Ohki-Close
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Close, P., Ohki-Close, E. (1999). European Supranationalism and the Global System. In: Supranationalism in the New World Order. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333983164_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333983164_3
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