The Atlantic Times, August 2009
Many op-ed columnists in Germany praised the Karlsruhe decision setting conditions on the EU reform treaty. Now the critics are having their say.
Somebody has finally said it.” That is the best way to sum up the initial response to the recent decision by Germany’s Constitutional Court on the Lisbon Treaty. Somebody has finally factored in what the public thinks about Europe: namely, that the EU makes decisions on increasingly more areas of policy that trump national regulations; that national interests have taken a back seat to EU interests; and that elites have been busy building a Europe without the people’s interests at heart.
“Germany today will not allow the ‘ever closer union’ to be created by ‘the peoples of Europe,’” commented Nicolas Busse in the economically liberal daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “There will not be a United States of Europe,” crowed former Constitutional Court judge Paul Kirchhof.
Of course, the EU leaves itself wide open to criticism – above all with its small-minded obsession with fine detail and its love of rulemaking. But are those reasons to abandon the grand goal?
The Karlsruhe decision is a step backward. Yet, highly regarded political commentator Heribert Prantl at the left-leaning daily Süddeutsche Zeitung celebrated it as a “great European moment.” “Europe will need to be translated into German in the future,” he wrote. The next day, his colleague Kurt Kister said, “When in doubt, Germany is more important than Europe.”
A grand coalition of commentators praised the highest German court to the heavens – yet it is a coalition of cowards. Among them are also pundits who – in other debates – are more than willing to doubt the competence of “the people” and who otherwise react negatively to cries of “Germany first!”
Two or three decades ago, some of them were progressive thinkers who supported Europe as a counterweight to what they saw as the narrow-minded and nationalistic thinking of Germany’s conservatives. Most of them were veteran social liberals. Today they line up alongside well-known anti-Europe campaigners like Peter Gauweiler from traditionally euroskeptic Bavaria, one of those who used to mockingly call the euro, “Esperanto money.”
What is Germany fighting about?
The issue is: Who decides policy in the EU? Obviously, it should not be the EU itself – at least, not solely. The court’s decision has “put paid to self-importance in Brussels,” according to Prantl, also a former judge and state prosecutor. He said the German parliament had been sentenced to more democracy – in other words, the voice of parliament and therefore its sovereign, the people, would have to be heard on all decisions made in Brussels; it would have to “flag EU regulations, check them and enrich them, and it would have to give its assent.” Prantl used the image of a freight train that departs from Brussels. “On its way through Germany, it has to make stops for parliament to add to the load,” he wrote.
This image betrays a truly myopic view of the situation. Because if the freight train makes stops in Germany, why shouldn’t it also stop in the capital cities of the other member countries? And why not in the provincial cities of the countries and regions that still maintain a petty-minded “vision” of a Europe of regions? A train like this would run out of steam – it would be a train to nowhere.
“Karlsruhe does not like the EU’s general direction of greater integration,” said former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. “Now the court wants to stop that at the national level.” The critics say there is a growing feeling among the population that the EU is becoming less transparent and more unable to make decisions since it has grown to include 27 members. Fischer countered that this feeling has arisen “because the 15 governments of the old European Union were unable to adequately overcome their national egoism and agree on more efficient institutions and procedures for the union.” He said the Lisbon Treaty would ensure more democracy. Torpedoing it would mean a loss of influence on the international stage.
Fischer wondered what Karlsruhe would say if Europe only had one vote on a reformed UN Security Council? What would Karlsruhe say if the EU was left with only one vote in international financial institutions? Germany would not even get a seat in the lobby, because if Karlsruhe implemented its decision consistently, it would have to refuse one.
Dieter Oberndorfer, a retired political science professor from the University of Freiburg, also jumped into the debate, drawing a parallel with Switzerland as he castigated what he saw as a parochial “canton mentality.” He said all the little regional rulers would now be able to raise their own profiles at the cost of the political union of Europe. His colleague in Paris and great promoter of Franco-German cooperation, Alfred Grosser, may have been speaking for many Europeans when he speculated that “the Germans have never taken Europe seriously.”
That is an exaggeration. But it is striking that many formerly progressive forces are switching to the side that wants to slow down the integration of Europe instead of accelerating it. Few Germans dream of the United States of Europe nowadays, but Jürgen Rüttgers, the leader of North Rhine-Westphalia (CDU), still dares to. “Europe needs a grand goal otherwise it will fall apart,” he said. He envisions “the Federal Republic of Germany as part of the ‘United States of Europe.’”
To reassure Europe it must be said that he is not the only one who takes this position. Many center-left Germans still believe in the European idea.