This week a man who could be named by just 8.2 per cent of European Union voters, according to a recent survey, is likely to take over the most powerful position in the EU. But Jean-Claude Juncker, who had to resign as Luxembourg’s prime minister last year over a spying scandal, may well not be terribly concerned that he is so unknown among the 506 million people over whom he will exert influence, if he is confirmed as president of the European Commission at the meeting of EU leaders in the Belgian town of Ypres tomorrow.
He has, after all, not sought to disguise his contempt for ordinary Europeans in the past. When he was head of the group of Eurozone finance ministers in 2011, he said that in tricky economic situations: “When it gets serious, you have to lie.” And when it was unclear whether French and Dutch voters were going to approve the proposed EU Constitution in 2005, his almost heroically arrogant view was: “If it’s a Yes, we will say ‘on we go’, and if it’s a No we will say ‘we continue.’”
As the Gulf Cooperation Council prepares for a customs union due to come into effect next January, it is worth pondering on Mr Juncker – and taking away this realisation: that he is a prime example of why, far from seeing the EU as a model to aspire to, regional associations such as the GCC, Asean (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and Mercosur in South America should regard it as the opposite.
The EU is a model for exactly not what to do. An institution with no real mandate, but which is united on so little that too often its top jobs end up going to second-raters whose chief virtue is that no one can object to them too much. (At least Mr Juncker is familiar to those who follow the EU. When Herman Van Rompuy was chosen as the first permanent president of the European Council in 2009 – effectively the EU’s top ceremonial role – ABC News reported that Europe was asking “Herman who?”, adding: “Even in his home country of Belgium, Mr van Rompuy was a low-profile figure until he became prime minister last December.”)
The GCC, founded in 1981, and Asean, in 1967, are younger groupings than the EU, whose origins lie in the Treaty of Rome of 1957. But even though their histories are shorter, they have been wise to take any integration at a far slower pace than the EU, whose “ever-closer union” has occurred with scant regard for the wishes of the populations of its member states. Every time a country has voted “no” to a pan-EU issue, it has either been invited to try again and come up with the “correct” answer, or the further binding that Eurofanatics wished to push through has been repackaged so that initial failure is no setback – as was the case with the EU constitution, which reappeared as the Lisbon Treaty. The same applies with any pooling of sovereignty, a process that history shows is very hard to reverse. The late Margaret Thatcher may be revered as a heroine of Euroscepticism now, but it was her UK government that passed the Single European Act in 1987, which provided for great transfer of powers from London to Brussels and which subsequent administrations have found very hard to repatriate. “The trouble was,” she later said, “that the new powers the Commission received only seemed to whet its appetite.”
The EU Commission brings us back to Mr Juncker, and possibly the greatest warning the EU offers to other regional associations looking to it for guidance. There used to be a British sitcom called Yes, Minister (later Yes, Prime Minister) which has a certain cult following worldwide. Its conceit was that while politicians thought they were in charge, civil servants – supposedly just there to implement the wishes of their political masters – really ran the show.
In this the expected appointment of Mr Juncker as president of the European Commission is quite truly beyond satire. For the commissioners are supposed to lead “a non-partisan civil service, [and] represent the general EU interest rather than their home nations”, as the Financial Times put it recently. The commission can propose EU laws, but not decide on them, but still happily refers to itself on its website as “the EU’s executive body” – as though it had the democratic mandate of an American president or the leader of an EU constituent state, when it has nothing of the sort. (The support for Mr Juncker in the European Parliament hardly counts; elections for the parliament have always been characterised by low turnouts and tend to be vehicles for zero-cost protest votes against incumbent national administrations.)
How has Europe allowed its dominant institution to spiral so badly out of control that a man whom nobody really wants is about to become head of a civil service that has been allowed to set itself up as the EU’s government? As the German commentator Wolfgang Munchau put it recently: “A voter backlash against this amorphous political cloud called Brussels should not be surprising. The system of checks and balances between EU institutions is out of whack.” But then the views of the voters, most of whom have no idea who Mr Juncker is, will not be represented in Ypres tomorrow. Even among the EU leaders there will be few, if any, who will greet his appointment with excitement, with some, like Germany’s Angela Merkel, supporting him against their own personal wishes for domestic political reasons. No one would create the EU as it is today if one were starting from scratch, but the political will and unity to reform it are impossible to muster. So other regional associations should certainly look to the EU for guidance – and then make sure they never make the same terrible mistakes.
Sholto Byrnes is a Doha-based commentator and consultant
