Adding creativity to the EU mix

I would like to say something about another F-word: flexibility. It seems to me that Paul Hirst and Christopher Lord agree that the problem of EU democracy is that we have a trade-off between legitimacy and policy-effectiveness.

The problem of legitimacy is considered particularly severe at the EU level because citizens identify far less with European institutions than they do with their own national political institutions.

But solutions to the legitimacy deficit - such as consensus democracy at the EU level - might have a tendency to produce joint-decision traps and inefficient policy making. However, I think that trade-off does not manifest itself in the same terms and with the same severity in all member states.

For instance, I come from a country, Italy, where according to Eurobarometer polls, citizens trust the European Commission more than their own national government, and they trust the European Parliament more than their own national parliament. In a referendum held in 1989, 88 per cent of the Italian electorate voted for giving to the European Parliament the task of drafting a constitution for the ‘European Union’. Italy might be an extreme case, but there are good reasons to think that the ‘cost’ of pooling and delegating sovereignty is not the same in different member countries.

For the citizens of some countries, the legitimacy problem of EU governance seems less severe than in others, and I wonder whether we should take this diversity more into account when we think about possible institutional solutions to the European legitimacy-effectiveness trade-off.

In other words, maybe we should think about how to incorporate in the architecture of the EU more institutional flexibility than there is at the present. Countries for which EU legitimacy is less of a problem should be able to increase their political integration within the EU framework, while more Euro-sceptic countries should be able to detach themselves from political union. How this might be possible in reality is a difficult question, but it might be a worthy topic for exercising our institutional creativity.