ELIAMEP: One of the most remarkable elements of the EU regime is the well-known “Community method”. This policy-making method combines elements of supranational policy-making and intergovernmental policy-making, with the latter to dominate the legislative process. Through the incremental process, the European Parliament acquires progressively more legislative power (this will be the case if the Lisbon Treaty will enter into force), but the states – and more precisely their governments – continue to hold a central place in the system. Contrary to what might be thought, the “Community method” asserts government elites’ legitimacy, if not as solitary, at least as dominant rulers. Is there a need for radical rethink on this direction?

Prof. Helen Wallace: Over the years the EU has developed several different ways of developing collective policies – and there is not a simple dichotomy between ‘Community method’, on the one hand, and ‘intergovernmentalism’, on the other hand. So the Community method applies in a few areas in the classical sense – agriculture, fisheries and so forth (where incidentally the powers of the European Parliament are only consultative). In many areas of mainly economic regulation, the European Parliament has indeed become very important, and we can describe the system as ‘bicameral’.  In areas of policy which involve spending EU money, the member governments are always at the centre of the decision-making and involved in tough intergovernmental bargaining.  Then there are numerous policy areas where the EU process is more deliberative and mainly about coordinating policies among the member states or using comparison and benchmarking  to transfer policy lessons from one member state to another.  And lastly there are some policy areas, typically foreign and security policies where for the moment member governments remain the key actors and the Commission, European Parliament and the Court of Justice play little part and the process is what I call a kind of ‘intensive transgovernmentalism’.  Justice and home affairs has become a mixed case, with some issues now dealt with by a version of the Community method and others dealt with by transgovermental bargaining.  So the EU has a very mixed system.  And recent experience suggests that the system is becoming more mixed and less monochrome, mixed within policy sectors as well as between policy sectors.   It is true that as regards the relationshsips among the institutions, the European Parliament typically gains from treaty reforms.  I expect this variation to continue whether or not the Treaty of Lisbon is ratified – and at this stage it is not at all clear what the chances are that the Treaty of Lisbon will be ratified.  That depends on Czech politics and especially Irish politics – difficult to read in the current climate of economic disruption across the EU and globally.

ELIAMEP: Some EU analysts point out that the old French idea of a directoire (directorate) became reality since the election of N. Sarkozy. Germans, led to a new kind of national introspection, and British are more than satisfied that the Commission’s role ends when it has proposed legislation. Do you believe or rather do you agree with that saying?

Prof. Helen Wallace: The French are repeatedly inclined to talk about the idea of a directoire, that is to say some kind of acceptance that it is the really big member states which are the ones that should predominate within the EU.  Yet history tells us that (so far at least) things do not work out like that.  The big member states need the medium-sized and smaller member states to make the EU system work and to deliver outcomes.  It is the smaller member states that have most at stake in the EU since their options for go-it-alone policies are so much more limited.  It would in my view be a dangerous outlook for the EU if it became dominated by the large countries.  On the other hand, the EU also needs to retain the support and the engagement of the bigger member states in order to thrive.  So a balance has persistently to be struck among the interests of the different member states.  And, yes, for certain kinds of decisions, of course it is necessary to get the bigger member states on board in order to strike periodic strategic bargains, as most importantly was done in the decision to go ahead with establishing the euro as the single currency.  It is also a continuous source of regret to me that the UK does not play as effective a part in the EU as it could do if it were less ambivalent about the ‘European project’.  As for introspection, I think that we are going through a period f history in which many – maybe most – member states are going through a period of worried introspection, and this will continue until the economy picks up again and confidence and optimism are restored.

ELIAMEP: The 2004 enlargement was seen largely as a major source of stress for the EU institutions. Going from 15 to 27 members, with the possibility of further enlargement before long, can only make an already complex institutional system even more unwieldy – and also less transparent. In an enlarged EU, instead of creating new powerful institutional positions, reinforce traditional modes of legislative process and legitimize national-based electoral mechanisms, should we develop other modes of political interaction and decision-making, for instance inter-administrative cooptation, deliberative polling mechanisms etc?

Prof. Helen Wallace: Actually the 2004 and 2007 enlargements have worked out MUCH better than many had expected.  It turns out that the EU institutions perform pretty much now as they did before in terms of their levels of activity and levels of output.  Several studies have been done on this and they all seem to point in the same direction – ie business as usual and no gridlock – and this even without the institutional reforms envisaged by the Treaty of Lisbon.   So we should be careful not to exaggerate the impacts of enlargement on the operating system of the EU, which fortunately turns out to be rather resilient. It also turns out that the EU system has some self-adapting features that enable it to respond to challenges by experiments and by organic reforms. However, this is not to say that everything is fine and that everything works efficiently and effectively.  But the difficulties to me seem rather to be a consequence of a much bigger picture of secular changes across Europe (adjusting to post-cold-war for example), or of global challenges (climate change, migration, failed states and so forth) or of an emerging global architecture in which the Europeans are much less important than they used to be.  Thus the ‘G2’ is the US and China, not the US and Europe.  In all of these areas we Europeans have to do a good deal more thinking and talking and deciding about how to frame and how to pursue collective European interests and policies.  But here the questions are about substance and not so much about institutional processes.

ELIAMEP: According to some specialists on EU’s structural reform and enlargement, the 2005 ratification failure of the Constitutional Treaty was a major step back in political and democratic development of the EU. Instead of using the established European bargaining techniques of packages deals, opt-outs or side-payments, more fundamental political choices have to be made. In your expert opinion, what seem to be the most plausible scenarios for the Union’s future development after carefully weighing up the risks and benefits of different strategies?

Prof. Helen Wallace: It follows from my earlier comments that I do not see the failure to ratify the Constitutional Treaty as such as the big failure of recent times.  Indeed it was, in my view, a mistake to talk up the language of treaty reform into a ‘constitutional’ question.  So I was not surprised by the outcomes of the negative referenda in France or The Netherlands, nor indeed by the negative Irish referendum in the Treaty of Lisbon.   There seem to me to have been two other problems at least which have contributed to our current malaise.  One has been hyper-activism on the side of the EU legislators – and here I would criticise all three political institutions in the EU for conniving in developing legislation and rules that impact on daily life without thinking this through and by being too ready to blame ‘Brussels’ for  all the difficult and unpopular decisions.  And, secondly, and relatedly, the EU system is too much disconnected from and remote from daily political life in all of our member states.  Here national politicians and national parliaments are also to blame for not paying enough attention to what happens in and through the EU and for being too parochial.  It is, for example, much too easy for parties in government to introduce EU policies without explaining or justifying them, and it is also much too easy for parties out of government to criticise the EU without taking the trouble to understand what the EU is up to and why.  So we need to work much harder within our domestic political spaces to take ownership of the wider European political process.

ELIAMEP: According to Prof. Loukas Tsoukalis’s argument when he assumed the helm at the JCMS in 1980, ‘… integration theory has been run into the ground, probably because we have been slow in realizing that this new and complex phenomenon could not be studied by our conventional tools of analysis…’ (Tsoukalis, 1980: 215). This stands in remarkably sharp contrast to those arguing the precise contrary: that the problem in the study of the EU has been the failure to properly embrace and apply conventional political/social scientific tools of analysis (see inter alia Moravcsik, 1999; Dowding, 2000; Schneider, Gabel and Hix, 2000; Hix, 2005). Considering either the first or the second argument to be valid, could we say that EU scholars share some responsibility for (not) succeeding in making EU intelligible to European citizens (“cognitive integration”)?

Prof. Helen Wallace: The debate will certainly continue about which tools of analysis are most appropriate for studying the EU.  Much of the classical debate about European integration became trapped in the dichotomy between ‘supranationalism’ amd ‘intergovernmentalism’.  This dichotomy led some scholars and indeed some practitioners to be trapped in an exaggerated polarisation.  As I have indicated above, the EU works in a number of different ways depending on the subject and the context, and we need tools of analysis that can discern the nuances.  I also agree with those in the academic community who argue that we should call on the full array of analytical tools available to us in the social sciences in our efforts to understand and to explain what goes on in the EU.  Some good progress is being made these days on this front.  It is probably also true that some scholars of European integration have been somewhat captured by their object of study and have not been as critical of what they observe, as they should have been to be good scientists.