The EU Institutional Reform

The EU institutional system is a unique reality in both historical and international perspectives, for all actors involved, whether domestic or supra-national. From an intergovernmental perspective, the EU is no more than a very sophisticated form of cooperation between European states that agreed upon giving up trade barriers and producing the kind of public goods that is impossible to generate through direct, bilateral relations. But this perspective fails to explain the building and development of such institutions as the European Commission or the European Parliament.

From a federalist perspective the EU is just a beginning, a preliminary stage of what would become a federal state per se. However, this perspective does not account for the fact that relevant decisions are still made by the heads of national governments. The European Council, the meeting of the members’ head of states, was established precisely for this purpose.

Quo vadis European Union?

It is not very clear that the EU is heading to any “destination”. The simple belief that a plan must exist shows a tendency towards teleological thinking and has little to do with the actual history of the Union.

For the time being, we know for sure we have an “ever changing Union”, as a recent publication of the Center for European Policy Studies put it. The successive changes following the Maastricht Treaty increased the prerogatives of the European Parliament, de facto reduced the Commission's area of action and significantly changed the voting rules within the Council. The 2004 and 2007 enlargements brought to the negotiating table new players that still search for their national preferences within the Union.

A new series of institutional changes will take place when the Lisbon Treaty will be ratified. Some of these changes will most likely have unpredictable effects. The European Parliament is likely to increase its decision-making power, acting more like a traditional parliament. This is because the co-decision procedure (in which the EP has equal rights with the Council) becomes the rule.

The national parliaments will become EU actors for the first time, a third of them being able to ask the Commission to reconsider some decisions. This method engages the EU responsibility towards domestic legislatures. At the same time, this further complicates the institutional structure and it is not yet clear how the national parliaments are going to use this power.

Also unclear is the way in which the dual Presidency of the Council will function. The current rotating system will be doubled by a permanent President of the Council, a position that is to be defined by the personality and the political weight of its first incumbent. It is not easy to follow and understand all these changes and still keep a long term vision of the EU political system.
As long as Romania's main goal was the EU accession, Romanian political elites paid little attention to these issues. This must change. The CRPE aims to fill in this gap by its committment to address two master objectives:

1) To raise awareness in Romania regarding the ongoing debates on EU institutional design via popularizing these debates and by developing position papers that would emphasize the dialogue between ongoing institutional developments and broad intellectual perspectives on the EU institutional design;
2) To define and/or to help clarify Romanian perspectives on EU-level policy and institutional processes.