Event Summary
The EU seems incapable of undertaking economic reforms and defining its place in the world. At the same time, public support for the EU has declined dramatically in the last decade and throughout Europe citizens feel they cannot influence what goes on in Brussels. What the EU needs, Simon Hix argues in his new book What’s Wrong with the European Union and How to Fix It (Polity, 2008) is ‘limited democratic politics’. More open political competition would promote policy innovation, foster coalitions across the institutions, provide incentives for the media to cover Brussels, and enable citizens to identify who governs in the EU and to take sides in policy debates.
Event Information
When
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
3:30 PM to 5:00 PM
Where
Saul/Zilkha Room
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC
Map
Contact: Center on the United States and Europe
E-mail: CUSE@brookings.edu
Phone: 202.797.6494
The EU is ready for this new challenge. The institutional reforms since the 1980s have transformed the EU into a more competitive polity, and political battles and coalitions are developing inside and between the European Parliament, the Council, and the Commission. This emerging politics should be more central to the Brussels policy process, with clearer coalitions and identifiable winners and losers, at least in the short term. For example, there should be a genuine contest for the Commission President. The risks are low because the EU has multiple checks-and-balances. Yet, the potential benefits are high, as more open politics could enable the EU to overcome policy gridlock, rebuild public support, and reduce the democratic deficit.
Transcript
SIMON HIX: I’ll give you a bit of background from where this book comes from. I’ve always sort of worn two hats. One is a political scientist, professor of comparative and European politics. The other one is advisor to various different people, but during the convention on the future of Europe, which was the convention that drafted the failed EU constitution, I was a chair of a working group for the British Cabinet Office advising the British government on their position they were taking in the convention. They didn’t listen to much of what we had to tell them, maybe that was part of the problem, but we can get back to that.
So from starting off right, this book started with a series of policy papers for the British government. It then turned into some lectures and seminars at various different conferences in Europe, in what was then called the reflection period which was the period to sit down and think and talk and expel a lot of hot air about why the constitution had failed. And then it evolved from these series of lectures and presentations into a book. You never know it might turn into a film at one stage, I hear that’s the fashionable thing around here.
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Participants
Speaker
Simon Hix
Professor of European and Comparative Politics, London School of Economics and Political Science
Respondent
Jeffrey Anderson
Graf Goltz Professor and Director, BMW Center for German and European Studies (CGES), Georgetown University