After more than two decades with a ringside seat at the European Union’s major reforms, few have had a closer look inside the Brussels machine than Andrew Duff. A former liberal MEP, who led their group on the parliament’s constitutional affairs committee, Duff was one of several British MEPs who were driving forces of EU integration and reform between 1999 and 2014 — when he lost his seat as part of a surge in support for Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party.
“The EU ‘machine’ needs continual overhaul — and it is not always getting it,” warns Duff as he gives his report card on how the bloc’s institutions function.
He says that “necessity is the mother of invention,” pointing to the experience of the EU’s handling of the Covid pandemic and Ukraine war. In the case of Covid, the health crisis prompted joint procurement of vaccines and the issuance of long-term EU bonds, previously a taboo, to support the bloc’s economies.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, meanwhile, has led to Kyiv being fast-tracked for EU membership. Though he believes that many EU leaders have underestimated the strain that Ukrainian membership will put on the EU institutions, “Ukraine must be brought in as fast as possible,” says Duff, describing it as a “blast of fresh air from the east”.
However, it is hard not to conclude that the momentum of the late 1990s towards deeper EU integration has gone. French president Emmanuel Macron’s idea of a Conference on the Future of Europe in 2022, an attempt to introduce a small degree of direct participation in the EU reform process, produced a series of recommendations, some involving treaty change, but it fizzled out.
“The momentum has gone, but not the imperative,” Duff says, adding that the EU Commission, despite having been “designed to be the driving force behind deeper integration, has been disappointing — lacking geo-political heft and intimidated by the Council, whose raison d’etre has too often seemed to be to impede political union.”
Duff describes the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which later became part of the Lisbon Treaty, as “a very significant constitutional step forward”.
He adds that the defeat of the Constitutional Treaty in referendums in France and the Netherlands back in 2005 “caused a counter-reaction that we are still experiencing”
“The real problem of EU governance is the lack of a government”
He views the 2004 and 2007 enlargements, which brought 12 eastern and central European countries into the EU, as a success, albeit “not untroubled”. “All the risks of the enlargement were foreseen by those of us who knew what we were doing in expanding into the territories of the former Soviet empire. Enlargement is always going to be unfinished business,” he says.
However, each round of treaty reform or political crisis has tended to be accompanied by more powers for the European Parliament, which, in terms of legislative power, is unrecognisable from the talking shop of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Duff says that “where it strays into executive business, it (the parliament) is less impressive.” He points to the continued lack of genuinely federal political parties to connect MEPs with their electorate — a reform which federalists such as Duff have campaigned for over many years — as well as the lack of pan-European constituency for which a portion of MEPs are elected from transnational party lists. The latter was supported by MEPs in 2022 but blocked by EU governments.
“The real problem of EU governance is the lack of a government,” says Duff. He argues that the EU “hovers awkwardly between the confederation that nationalists want and the federal union it is destined to become,” adding that this is inherently “unstable”.
In terms of the EU’s future path, Duff contends that “good constitutional decisions would see a smaller commission grow into a proper federal government with a treasury secretary (and a treasure).”
“It would also mean the European Council taking a firm grip on the council of ministers and the European Court of Justice evolving quickly into a supreme court,” he adds.
The alternative "would see the supranational element dwindle and the power of the national veto grow.” EU law would be only spasmodically effective. Regional groupings would take the place of overall solidarity. Nationalism would trump democracy.
Meanwhile, Duff shares the anxiety of many that several EU states, with Viktor Orbán’s Hungary the most prominent, have become wreckers inside the Brussels bubble.
He says that the famous Article 7(2), which allows for the suspension of voting rights, “should be used against Hungary and, if necessary, Slovakia on the grounds of persistent abuse of EU values.” “It’s a classic dilemma of a confederacy: nobody can trust all member states,” he adds.
However, the UK’s decision to leave the EU in 2016 was arguably the greatest failure of the bloc’s governance. Duff says that the failure to analyse and assess why Brexit happened by the EU is a significant one.
Though Duff attributes the bulk of responsibility for the ‘Leave’ vote to the evolution of British politics towards nationalism, part was the responsibility of the EU not being “efficient, quick, or democratic enough”, and for being “seen to be pretty feeble in international affairs.”
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