Thursday, 27th August 2009
Auf wiedersehen EU superstate!
A recent landmark legal ruling in Germany has sent the EU integration project into complete disarray. The German Constitutional Court had been examining the Lisbon Treaty – the successor to the infamous EU Constitution – and ruled that the sovereignty of a member state (in this case Germany), must always take precedence over diktats from Brussels.
The Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe effectively declared itself the highest supervisory body in conflicts between Germany and the EU, thus explicitly placing itself above the authority of the European Court of Justice. As ‘Der Spiegel’ reported “This borders on a declaration of war on the European Court, which sees itself as the only authority capable of ruling on the validity and applicability of EU law.”
The German judges went further by ruling that the German Parliament or Bundestag had been wrong in passing an “accompanying law” to the Lisbon Treaty, which determined the rights of the German Parliament to participate in European legislation. By passing the right to monitor the implementation of EU laws to Brussels, the Bundestag was acting unconstitutionally, according to the judges and subjecting the German people to the “whims of a bureaucracy that lacks sufficient democratic legitimacy.”
Indeed the Karlsruhe judges were scathing in their criticism of the EU project, arguing that contrary to the claims in the Lisbon Treaty that “the EU Parliament is a representative body of a sovereign European people”, in fact this is clearly not the case. The judges explain that “After all, EU members of parliament were not elected according to the principle of electoral equality, in other words, one man one vote, but rather according to national contingents, meaning that a Maltese MEP represents 67,000 Maltese, a Swedish MEP has a constituency of 455,000 Swedes and in Germany, the ratio is 1 to 857,000.”
The court sees this as a clear contradiction to the remainder of EU law, which is constructed around the central idea of prohibiting discrimination based on nationality. According to the concluding statements of the court’s decision, this contradiction can only be explained by the fact that the EU is not a state but rather “an association of sovereign states” and, consequently, “there can be no sovereign citizens’ union as well as no completely representative organ in the form of the European Parliament, with the result that the Bundestag must receive substantially more rights.”
The Karlsruhe interpretation thus very eloquently demolishes the old European idea that the recognised democratic deficits in the EU would disappear completely of their own accord by enhancing the rights of the European Parliament, allowing MEPs to assume the role of the national parliaments. Indeed, the judges have exposed the fact that the European Parliament is terminally undemocratic, at least when measured against the basic concepts of representative democracy.
All of this has come as a political bombshell to the newly elected European Parliament, where Europhiles eagerly await the outcome of a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty due to be held in Ireland on 2nd October, praying for a ‘YES’ vote, so that they can press on with their dream of creating a Federal United States of Europe. If the highest Constitutional Court in Germany can rule that the EU, under the terms of the Lisbon Treaty, is basically undemocratic, then the whole project aimed at further and deeper EU integration will be called into question.
UK Conservative MEPs have defected from the large, centre-right, integrationist EPP Group in the European Parliament, to form their own, more eurosceptic, European Conservatives and Reformists group (ECR) with some like-minded allies from Poland, the Czech Republic and a scattering of other countries. The ECR sees itself as breaking the mould of EU politics, by offering a voice to the millions of Europeans who oppose the concept of an EU superstate and instead wish to see the development of a successful economic, rather than political union.
Now, according to the German judges, national identity must take precedence over integration. The Titanic project to create a federal united states of Europe has met its iceberg in Karlsruhe. Auf wiedersehen EU superstate!
