“Let me tell you clearly (my emphasis) that until today no qualified majority exists among member states on the need to activate this directive,” EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom told MEPs last Tuesday (4 April).
She was referring to the Temporary Protection Directive, an emergency mechanism created by the EU as long ago as 2001, which would share refugees between the member states should an untenable situation arise on any of their borders. It would need a qualified majority in the EU Council, composed of member state governments, to become operative. Unsurprisingly it has never been put into practice in the 10 years of its existence.
If there is one person who is not at all surprised by the above statement, that person is myself for the writing has been on the wall for years now and every citizen on the island knows it. We have to thank Berlusconi for an agreement with Libya that gave us some breathing space. I have expressed myself clearly in the past and I am not going into that particular subject again. I leave that to those who claimed they knew better, to those who initially pretended the problem did not exist, then defended Frontex as our saviour, and finally hoped to persuade member states, all with their own refugee problem, to add ours to theirs. I admit there is no easy answer and every single politician is aware of the traps that lie in wait along this particular track. Nevertheless they may well have to make some hard choices if the situation that the Prime Minister now finds alarming should come about.
A coat of many colours
Such a situation is inevitable as it is in-built into the structure of the EU itself. France and the UK have been left to deal with the Libyan crisis on their own except for some token support here and there. Certainly the EU has only words to offer for it is almost impossible for it to offer any thing else with Germany dissenting. That is the problem we continually face in Malta as the smallest unit in the EU.
A quick look at what goes on in the corridors of power will explain the reasons. The Lib Dems in the UK supported the creation of the euro but the pledge never featured in the party’s election literature for Westminster or the European Parliament for fear of losing votes. The Labour Party was equally cautious. In the 2009 EU parliamentary election, the European Socialist manifesto omitted any endorsement of nuclear power because of objections from Germany’s Social Democrats, any mention of agricultural reform because of French socialist objections, and any mention of recognising Kosovo because of the objections of Spain’s socialist workers’ party. The strong language on banking secrecy it featured in its final draft was toned down after Luxembourg’s socialist workers’ party announced that it would constitute a problem for the Grand Duchy if it could not keep sheltering tax dodgers from neighbouring Germany. Of course Malta has her own turf to defend and we all believe that it is in fact the duty of our MEPs to do so.
The irony is that all politicians now know that a European dimension to party policy is central to the party’s credibility. This is very evident in the PL, which under Joseph Muscat has dropped all anti-EU rhetoric. Electors are slowly beginning to realise full well that electoral promises cannot be honoured in the absence of EU approval and support. There is not a single citizen of Malta who does not now realise the power of the word that sums it all up for them: Brussels.
This creates a dilemma because while some political parties may claim to be more pro-European than others, they still have to be elected within a national context. Successive French governments have presented EU agricultural policy in terms of the support it provides French farmers. Germany defends the EU’s single market by stressing the benefits for German exporters. Poland says that the EU’s structural funds are vital to finance Polish development. As for Malta, well, we all know that entry to the EU was sold to the electorate basically on how much money we would be able to milk from it.
In other words, it seems that the best way to sell European politics is to make EU decisions look as if they are supporting the national self-interest. No country, as yet, seems ready to surrender control of national policy to MEPs or to the coordinating secretariats in Brussels of the different European political formations, a stance that I support and indeed encourage.
Another dilemma is that in many member states, the politicians who end up in Brussels are, generally speaking, members of the opposition parties. EU elections have increasingly come to be seen as a form of vote of confidence – or lack of it – in the national government. We have seen that happen over here as well. Maybe that is why six out of 10 European voters stay at home on EU Election Day. According to present trends, it is calculated that by 2029 voter participation will shrink to around 20 per cent and the EU Parliament would have lost all legitimacy.
There are 750 deputies in the European Parliament, but there are 9,571 deputies in the national parliaments of the 27 member states. The latter feel excluded from the European decision-making process although they are expected to defend EU decisions with as much earnestness as the national laws they pass themselves.
What is being pondered with increasing seriousness is the fact that, while all acknowledge that the EU is democratic, many wonder if it is a democracy. The worrying and inescapable fact is that participation in elections to the EU Parliament has decreased even as membership of the EU has gone up. So perhaps it is time for some serious reform.
One suggestion is for the European Parliament to have a built-in representation from national parliaments. This would assuage the feelings of national MPs – the guardians of their country’s sovereignty – from feeling that they are there simply to impose on their people decisions they have not participated in. Whatever the final outcome, the building blocks of the EU need some careful rearrangement.
And tiny Malta must find a way of being part of the building team.