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EU needs common vision, patchwork will not help

Macron laid out a huge buffet of initiatives for Europe to pursue.

Last fall, France's young president laid out a strategic plan to further integrate and strengthen the EU and its common currency. Riding high after his election victory the previous May, Emmanuel Macron proposed bold new steps to reinvigorate the bloc, including more military power, a full-fledged border force, greater centralised monetary policies and a Eurozone finance minister.
But by June 28 this year, Macron ideas were shunted to the sidelines of a two-day EU summit as countries including smaller member states pushed back against further centralised power.
Instead Italy, the third-largest EU country, and its new coalition government dominated talks, insisting that its erstwhile EU partners do more to help with the ongoing refugee crisis.
Europe's biggest advocates of greater EU unity, France and Germany, make up nearly half of the Eurozone economy, and a deal by them was often followed by the rest.
But smaller members are now voicing irritation at having the EU's future announced from on high by the bloc's biggest powers. EU President Donald Tusk even invited EU members not a part of the common currency to the second day of the recent summit in a show of support for smaller countries worried about Franco-German dominance.
"Macron laid out a huge buffet of initiatives for Europe to pursue," says Erik Jones, professor of European Studies and International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University in Bologna. "He has yet to offer a grand vision."
"Difference and vision are not the same thing, and so we have spent much of the last year trying to figure out which parts of the buffet are going to be taken up and which are going to be left behind," notes Jones, who is also director of European and Eurasian Studies at Johns Hopkins. "In the end, it looks like a lot is being left behind. This does not mean that Europe is disintegrating, it just means that Europeans don't show much appetite at the moment for further initiatives."
And it seems too many initiatives have long been the problem for the EU. Growing from a bloc to facilitate tariff-free trade in rebuilding after WWII, it has grown into a behemoth that has regulations affecting even small details of daily life. Brexit and rising recalcitrance by member countries show that many have lost patience with more rules without a grand plan.
"Europe's leaders have no shared vision of what they are trying to accomplish through integration in broad terms," says Jones.
Adding to the current challenges is Germany, which is no longer able to advocate sweeping liberal policies. After surmounting a high hurdle in finally forming a coalition government in February, Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union party is feeling push-back from its coalition partners and the wider population. However idealistic some new ideas might be, now is not the time to moot them.
Jones says Macron's ideas are not coming to fruition in the EU because "he is tied up in a very complicated domestic reform agenda and because Angela Merkel is much weaker than she appears on the surface".
Once ultra-liberal Italy is another case in point. One of the EU founding states - it hosted the bloc's formation in Rome in 1957 - Italy now has a Eurosceptic collation government that wants its voice heard.
"You should not ignore Italian policy preferences because Italians are smart people and many of their policy preferences make sense," says Jones. "If the rest of Europe ignores Italy's positions when those positions are essential to the security of Europe (migration) or when they are simply good ideas that bear careful consideration (deposit insurance), then the rest of Europe should not be surprised if Italians become increasingly skeptical of the benefits of European integration. What point is there to be part of a community when your role is to do as you are told and when you are not treated as an equal participant?"
But that doesn't mean liberal, humanistic values have evaporated in Europe, says Jones.
"Germany is suffering from the same problem that is afflicting democracy everywhere," says the professor. "We use 19th century political institutions to govern 21st century political economies.  The timing in that process is not good - it simply responds too slowly to the pace of concerns today. Think of it as time for democracy 3.0.  Does that mean Germans are tired of being liberal and humanistic?  Hardly. No one is eager to run off and join the communists or the fascists. People are just trying to find a way to make their legitimate grievances heard in a timely manner."
Until that transformation comes, it seems the EU is attempting patch after patch rather than true redesign of the system. Now it feels like an over-patched operating system slowed by its many tweaks, unable to complete tasks with any speed.
For now it will have to rumble along. "The biggest challenge for the unity of the EU is the sheer number of issues that it has to wrestle with on a daily basis," says Jones. "Unity and speed do not go well together. The EU lacks bandwidth. That is not an easy challenge to master."
Jon Van Housen and Mariella Radaelli are editors at the Luminosity Italia news agency in Milan