Call for a Bottom-Up Subsidiarity Audit of EU regulations
Europe is facing a crisis on multiple fronts. The brilliant project initiated by Robert Schuman in 1950 achieved a remarkable European Economic Community but it turned into an overregulated European Political Union with the Lisbon Treaty as its back-door Trojan horse. The EU increasingly regulates every aspect of its citizen’s daily life, very often completely ignoring the diversity of cultures and histories among its member states.
The overregulation, often ideologically inspired, has not helped its economy. Heavy taxpayer funding is not sufficient if companies are burdened with regulations and long investment delays. Regulations can’t be exported; products and technology must be competitive on a world-wide scale. The EU is weak geo-politically and lacks a common strategic and unified defence. It lacks a long-term vision notwithstanding the often-empty declarations made by its political leaders. Calls for more sovereignty threating the union, whereas hard-core federalists want to increase the centralisation without taking into account the reality in the field.
Schuman2030 proposes an alternative way. Schuman2030 recognises the need for strength at the European federal level for the domains where it is needed. Defence, International Affairs, Long Term strategy and Cross-border high speed transport are some of the most obvious domains. At the same time Schuman2030 recognises that overregulation has to be constrained and competences should be returned to the member-states if the European level brings no benefits. In order to have an objective view and what needs to be federal of member state level, a Bottom-Up Subsidiarity Audit is proposed. See https://schuman2030.eu/wp8-bottom-up-subsidiatity-audit/ for more details.
The Schuman2030 proposed structure of a future European Union strictly separates federal and member state competences. See www.schuman2030.eu/WP6 for more details. At the EU federal level, we only retain the competences that need to be federal because they imply cross-border trans-national matters that member states cannot address themselves, either by the nature of the competence, either because they need all member states to reach the required level of resources to be efficient. Clear examples are defence and trans-European high-speed transport. The first objective of the regulations and directives audit is to clearly identify these federal competences, independently of current EU treaties. By clearly identifying them Schuman2030 believes that this will focus the efforts and strengthen the results.
A second objective is to identify those competences that are currently regulated at the EU level, but could as well be handled by the member states. This will reduce the burden at the EU level so that it can focus on the real EU federal competences, often domains in which Europe is currently weak on the geo-political scene or has not reached significant results yet. An important benefit will also be that member states will regain part of their lost sovereignty, which is currently a source of friction in the EU. Hence, the criterium to apply is to what extent a competence that is returned to the member state will be beneficial or not for the member states, again independently of what the EU treaties stipulate. If there is no added value to have it regulated at the European level, then the competence should be returned to the member states.
It should be noted that some competences are shared in nature, making a clear separation not always clear-cut. As a general rule we adopt the guideline that the shared part, read federal part, should essentially be a guideline or a norm, not a binding law. The implementation however is a member state matter, even if a template proposal can be part of the EU federal guidelines.
A last objective is detecting inconsistencies or indications of inadequacy in the current EU regulation. Subsidiarity audits have been done in the past but they mainly looked at the legality of the regulations, which is seldomly a point of discussion because the EU treaties are used as justification and in case of discussion, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has made a final verdict.
Note: to simplify the text we often only use the term “regulations” while we mean to include “directives” and other manifestations of EU law.
At the moment of writing this first version of the WP8 document, the project is in an early stage. The objectives have been put forward and an implementation approach outlined.
As the reader will see, the task is immense and complex. For this reason, Schuman2030 aims to use the latest AI technology available to speed up the work. Nevertheless, this work requires multiple iterations, starting with a more extensive semi-manual audit of selected regulations to further refine the methodology. Human supervision and validation will remain mandatory at each step.
There are multiple reasons why the project should be done in cooperation with other organisations, experts and EU participants. The reasons are clear and clarified more in detail in the WP8 text. There is a sheer volume of regulations and directives, distributed over many diverse domains. It will not be sufficient to scrutinize the regulations on the basis of a member state or federal competence criterium, especially as competences have shared components often requiring experts’ judgement. But it has also been revealed that the factual base for regulations can be discussed. Some regulations are clearly manifestations of regulatory overreach and bureaucratic zeal. And last but not least, the EU legalistic jargon in use is certainly not promoting democratic participation and control.
To evaluate this a wide range of expertise and viewpoints are needed. Therefore, we invite the reader to considering how they can participate and support the project, in all objectivity and without any ideological bias.
Contact person: Eric Verhulst
Contact: mail@schuman2030.eu
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