Integration by coup(s): a counter-history of the EU

The text of the talk I gave yesterday at the full-house launch of my latest MCC Brussels report: "The silent coup: the European Commission’s power grab"

Here’s the text of the talk I gave yesterday at the full-house launch of my latest MCC Brussels report: The silent coup: the European Commission’s power grab (available here).

Why this paper? First of all because we felt it was necessary to draw people’s attention to a deeply disturbing trend that most European citizens are unaware of, if not on a very superficial or instinctual level, and that even a lot of people in the Brussels bubble, I think, fail to fully appreciate: the way in which, over the pasts fifteen years in particular, we have witnessed what has been to all intents and purposes an institutional revolution within the EU (albeit a revolution from above or a “passive revolution”, as Gramsci would have said): i.e., a constant and exponential process of supranationalisation and what I call “Commissionisation” of the decision-making and policy-making process, whereby the European Commission — and the supranational institutions of the EU more in general, especially the ECB and the European Court of Justice — have constantly and exponentially expanded their powers and competences, even in areas where they previously had none, at the expense of the national sovereignty of member states, of intergovernmentalism more in general, and ultimately of democracy.

As said, this is a phenomenon that most people fail to fully understand and appreciate, and yet it represents, I would argue, the greatest threat that we face in Europe today, to the extent that it is at the root of virtually all the problems facing Europe — and of our inability to resolve them. So the first aim of this paper is to draw attention to the problem, and hopefully kickstart a much-needed public debate.

The second aim is to provide some crucial analytical tools to those who are aware of this phenomenon — and I assume most if not all people in this room are aware of what’s going on — but yet may fail to understand exactly how this is happening, and what is driving this phenomenon.

And mind you: this is not by chance; this is by design. You’re not supposed to understand. The reason it is so hard for people to understand exactly how this process has occurred is because in it didn’t happen as a result of a big public debate, of formal treaty changes, of referenda. No, it has mostly occurred surreptitiously, through various forms of so-called “competence creep”, with no formal treaty changes, outside of the arena of democratic debate and often even outside of the boundaries of the law itself.  

This is why some scholars refer to the process of European supranational integration as one of “integration by stealth” or “covert integration” — i.e., a totally undemocratic form of economic and political integration. In this paper I describe this process as integration by coup (or coups), hence the title of the paper, because, borrowing a phrase from the political philosopher Perry Anderson, I think that the concept of “the coup” — which Anderson describes as “an action taken suddenly, by stealth, catching its victims unaware, and confronting them with a fait accompli that cannot be reversed” — really encapsulates better than anything else the history of European integration, especially over the past decade and a half.

Hence the idea to flesh out in detail just how this power accrual has happened, with a focus on some of the most crucial turning points, insofar as this phenomenon of “Commissionisation” is concerned. Not just as a contribution to the public debate and even the scholarly debate, but also as a tool of political action, if you will, because if we want to slow down, stop and ideally reverse this trend — which anyone who believes in democracy should want, regardless of their political orientation (by the way, I myself come from the tradition of the old-school anti-EU left) — then we need to understand the dynamics that are driving it.

As said, the paper focuses on some key historical turning points or crises that were all exploited by the EU and the Commission to expand their powers at the expense of national sovereignties. “Integration through crises” is in fact another way scholars refer to the process of EU integration. I focus on three events in particular: the euro crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war. I’ll now briefly go over each one.

Now, the euro crisis might seem like ancient history but it can’t not be mentioned in this story, because it really was in many ways the first major coup: a classic example of shock doctrine, which is the idea that in moments of public fear, panic and disorientation, it is much easier to re-engineer societies and institutions, either because people will be distracted or because they’ll be much more willing to accept even unpopular reforms if these are seen as helping resolve the crisis at hand. As we’ll see, this is a recurrent theme throughout every EU crisis.

Thus, during the euro crisis, we witnessed in a relatively short time span, a breathtaking expansion of the powers of intervention of the EU’s supranational institutions — the Commission and the ECB — for example through the Commission-ECB-IMF troika, which led to a game-changing transfer of sovereignty from the national to the supranational level. These new powers were then institutionalised and constitutionalised through various new laws, rules, agreements, and (in this case) even a new treaty, the Fiscal Compact. As a result, the European Union, mainly through the European Commission, effectively became a sovereign power with the authority to impose budgetary rules and structural reforms on member states, particularly those of the eurozone, outside of democratic procedures and without democratic control. This fits the definition of a coup in my book, as citizens were completely excluded from the whole process.

The euro crisis tells us two things about the nature of supranationalisation: first, its path-dependent nature. What this means is that even limited forms of supranational integration create institutional, material and even psychological path dependencies that make further transfers of sovereignty inevitable (or apparently so) further down the road, especially in times of crisis. This was well understood by the fathers of European integration, who put forward the theory of step-by-step integration. The history of the euro is a great example of this. There’s no time to get into it here, but consider this: if you’ve ceded your monetary sovereignty to the EU, then, when a crisis hits, you can either leave the euro or you have little choice to but to cede further control to the institution that now controls your monetary policy — i.e., the EU — as we saw during the euro crisis. You can’t stay in the middle.

So the lesson here is that you can’t have just a bit of a supranationalisation: once you go down that path, it’s very hard to avoid escalation. The other lesson of the euro crisis is the way in which “temporary”, “one-off”, “emergency” solutions that are presented as contingent on responding swiftly to the crisis at hand, then give rise to new institutional realities, which then become the status quo — the new normal. Hence how we went from the troika to the Fiscal Compact, for example.

So in many ways the Juncker Commission laid down the blueprint for this shock-doctrine approach to crises: using crises to surreptitiously expand the Commission’s ability to intervene into areas that were previously reserved to member states — and in the affairs of member states themselves, of course.

But von der Leyen really took this approach to a whole new level, first during the Covid-19 crisis and then during the Ukraine crisis.

During the pandemic, von der Leyen and the Commission took a leading role throughout the whole affair — first in devising the “economic recovery programme” and then in organising the joint procurement of vaccines. The Next Generation EU package was essentially devised by von der Leyen, and this didn’t simply accrue greater power to the Commission, which now had yet another a powerful tool through which to exert further pressure on member states by having the final word on how the money should be spent, but also to blackmail states by withholding funds to states in breach of the Brussels agenda (as it did with Hungary and Poland).

Perhaps even more importantly, von der Leyen, under the guise of “responding the crisis”, was able to effectively change the actually existing economic constitution of the EU, by getting the EU to embark on a massive joint borrowing operation. Now the point here isn’t whether one thinks this is a good thing or not (and this is a caveat that I’ll repeat throughout this talk); the point is that it’s something that has long faced strong opposition by certain countries and electorates and that was ultimately overcome not through democratic deliberation but through “emergency politics”. So yet another coup.

And then of course we have the vaccine procurement programme, which saw von der Leyen effectively single-handedly negotiate a staggering 71 billion euros’ worth of contracts on behalf of the member states to purchase up to 4.6 billion doses of vaccines — that’s more than ten doses for each European citizen. Again, the issue here isn’t what one thinks of the vaccine programme, but the way in which the centralisation of the procurement process didn’t lead to the cheapest and most efficient outcome, as claimed by the supranational rhetoric, but in fact led to a massive waste of money (according to one study, the EU, i.e., the member states, overpaid the vaccines by more than 30 billion euros, on top of buying infinitely more vaccines than were needed), and to highly questionable — if not outright fraudulent or illegal — practices, should as the infamous Pfizergate scandal, where von der Leyen personally negotiated a 35-billion-euro deal for the purchase of up to 1.8 billion doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine via a series of text messages and calls with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla (which after three years she still refuses to hand over: so much for transparency).

So the Commission emerged from the pandemic more powerful than ever, with unprecedented powers of intervention in matters of public health and economic policy. But this wasn’t enough for von der Leyen: ever since her first her first address as president in 2019, she had made it clear that she wanted the Commission to play a much greater role in the one area where governments historically have been most reluctant to grant power to the EU — that is, foreign policy, and military and defense policy in particular. She said she wanted a “geopolitical Commission”.

Well, the Ukraine crisis provided her with the perfect opportunity to do just that. And she did this by once again seizing the window of opportunity created by the crisis to place herself at the lead of the bloc’s response. Von der Leyen’s first step was getting the Commission to devise in record time an unprecedented, wide-ranging sanctions regime against Russia. Especially in the early months following the invasion, member states were virtually absent from the whole process: they limited themselves to rubber-stamping the sanctions packages that were put forward by the Commission. In fact, von der Leyen coordinated more with the Americans than she did with member states themselves, which is astonishing. And there would be much more to say about the way in which von der Leyen worked tirelessly to align the EU with NATO and US interests, which I talk about extensively in the paper.

As usual, this was presented as being contingent on the need to respond swiftly to the crisis, but it soon led to institutional transformations, such as granting the Commission the power to establish and enforce EU-wide penalties for the violation of sanctions, something which until then had been the remit of individual member states. So once again we see the same dynamics at play. But more in general, by essentially placing herself at the helm of the sanctions regime, von der Leyen was able to become the de facto foreign policy spokesperson for the EU — especially over Ukraine — which she did by adopting not only a very aggressive rhetoric against Russia but also by making sweeping commitments, in the name of all member states, to “helping Ukraine for as long as it takes” and promising EU membership to Kyiv, even though there were (and still are) significant differences among member states on the issue.

And once again, the point isn’t whether one agrees with von der Leyen’s approach to the Russia-Ukraine war — that’s for another debate — but rather the way in which, through such statements, she was able to “lock in” policies before they had been formally approved by member states, let alone national parliaments, not only on crucial matters of military and security policy, but on fiscal/spending policy as well. One may argue that member states ultimately remain in charge to the extent that any policy ultimately needs to be approved by the European Council, but this ignores the way in which such statements effectively created a new epistemic “reality on the ground”, to which member states then came under heavy pressure to conform to.

Overall, a major lesson here is that there seems to be no obvious economic or practical trade-off for the dramatic loss of democratic control and accountability resulting from the erosion of national sovereignty implicit in the deepening of the EU’s process of creeping supranationalisation. On the contrary, lack of oversight simply exacerbates the capture of the decision-making process by powerful vested interests, driven by profit, power, ideology or usually a mixture of these factors, leading to suboptimal outcomes, at least for society at large. And I think the von der Leyen presidency is the living example of that: many of her policies are directly responsible for the absolutely tragic state of Europe — in economic terms, in terms of industrial competitiveness, in terms of its self-inflicted energy crisis, in terms of the looming threat of a direct confrontation with Russia and more in general in terms of the complete abdication of Europe to the pursuit of its own strategic interests, and complete vassalisation to the US and NATO.

This is why I think it’s more important than ever to seriously think about how to push back against this trend of supranationalism, and restore democracy and national sovereignties in Europe. I don’t see any other way we can get out of the situation we’re in. Thank you.

Read the full text of the report here.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope 

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)