To prevent the worst

At a time of crisis of the European ideal and of turbulence for the Euro everyone is looking towards national governments. Justly so: for many things depend on national political leaders, and history will apportion no little blame to them if they should fail in the challenge by which they are faced, because incapable of analyses and actions equal to the scale of the task in hand. Perhaps, however, a further two fundamental factors are being ignored in current analyses: first, the fact that not only European economies, but also European societies and national public policies, those that impact on the deepest aspects of our daily life, are by now profoundly interdependent, I would say indissolubly linked. Second, the fact that a network of non-elected institutions has been formed over the last two decades and plays an extremely important role in the current crisis, also in the more humdrum aspects of our life. Let us begin with the latter: we are speaking of such institutions as the European Central Bank, and also of the European Authority for Food Safety, the European Medicine Agency and many others. These new institutions have become part of the European institutional system, together with the older ones, ranging from the European Investment Bank to the European Commission itself, and to Eurostat, the statistics bureau that is internal to the Commission but endowed with considerable independence. These organizations play extremely important roles. The role played in the current crisis of the Eurozone by the European Central Bank (ECB) has been abundantly testified over the last few weeks and days. Equally clear is the important role played by new institutions (such as the so-called European Rescue Fund) and by long-standing institutions (such as the European Investment Bank, which funds the development of public works throughout the EU, an extremely valuable source of financial resources in a time of budgetary restrictions). But attention to the financial markets sometimes makes us lose sight of other areas of the real economy, and of society. One example: each modification or intervention carried out on any kind of aircraft that operates in European skies must be authorized by the European Aviation Safety Agency. Whether a given food product is authorized to be marketed in Europe also depends on the scientific opinions formulated by the European Authority for Food Safety (which is based in Parma). For particular categories of medicines, marketing authorization is based on the evaluations of the European Medicine Agency. To register a trade mark businesses must apply to the European Office for the Harmonization of the Internal Market. And so on. The point is that in all these fields, also thanks to the work performed by this network of European institutions, Europe has become a single reality, and is really influential in the global context. So let’s return to the first point: can we be interdependent in almost all spheres of the economy and society and not have some form of political government? Can Europe be a player in defining standards at the global level in terms of safety when we fly, or when we eat, or when we take medicines, and not have some form of link of federal or confederal type which would link its peoples together? Perhaps it is possible, but it is certainly not an optimal solution. In actual fact it is difficult to imagine a future for Europe without both: elected political institutions and “non-majority-decision” institutions” (technical, independent and aimed at the long term). Perhaps in this historical phase the latter are giving a better proof of themselves than the former: the network of non-elected institutions is in many respects working more effectively than the elected institutions, in primis the national governments, which seem incapable of reaching a political synthesis for the solution of the problems of Europe. But the trouble is that Europe needs both. Without an effective action of both, the future is far more worrying, and not only for Europe, given the role that a renewed EU could play in the world, and the damage that an EU in crisis could cause to the rest of the world (as has been well understood in other capitals). (*) professor of International Public Services Management, Northumbria University of Newcastle (Uk)member of the Executive Committee of the European Group for Public Administration and visiting professor, Università Bocconi in Milan (Italy)