A while ago, I read an article saying that we should reconsider the division of tasks in the EU. It was a good article. The author essentially proposed to apply the principle of subsidiarity, which says that each policy area should be conducted at the level of government best suited for it – e.g. the erection of community parks might be best done at the local or provincial level, while dealing with Afghanistan is better done at the national or European level. A very simple and obvious principle really. Yet in the EU, so the author said, there seemed something amiss: some really big issues are still dealt with nationally, while other minor issues are being discussed in the European Parliament. He concluded that we should cede some powers to Brussels, but Brussels should also give some power back. A clear and well-made argument.
This brings me to the title of this article: scale and community. Essentially, the battle between these two is the most basic and fundamental dichotomy in the EU. Any integration effort in European history, from the Roman Empire to the EU, has been forced to confront this issue. Scale is what brings us together; community is what keeps us apart. Governments exist to provide public goods, and the more people live under a government, the more efficiently these public goods can be distributed. So scale brings a lot of advantages. The main problem with providing public goods is the vile free-rider, and that is where community comes in.
Community, as a group of people sharing norms and culture, largely prevents free-riding by compelling all members of the community to adhere to the rules, while exiling those who don’t. But the problem with communities is that they create a mood of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. This causes us to conclude that the benefits of cross-cultural scale are hampered by the constraints of irrational communal identities, a.k.a. populist nationalism. Which, by the way, is ironic because the inefficiency many Eurosceptics blame the EU for is actually in large part caused by their own discourse.
The solution to this, as you might have guessed, is the principle of subsidiarity. The EU, in the words of Gary Marks, “exists chiefly to gain the benefits of scale in providing public goods. The Union encompasses countries and their regions in a continental system of economic exchange, individual mobility, dispute resolution, basic research and external representation. Scale enhances efficiency in each of these endeavours because it makes sense to determine the policy for all the people affected”. Facing opposition from national communities, the EU thus became a complex polity in which local, national and transnational levels each have their say on policy. This division of labour was not done orderly, but rather came to be in a whirl of international trends and national politics.
So what do we learn from this? For one, the EU is not a given. It is the result of hard work and tough diplomacy over several decades, facing multiple crises from post-war restoration to contemporary financial disaster. Central to this evolution was the eternal quest for balance between the obvious benefits of scale and the restraining yet necessary qualities of community. So I could not agree more that the EU should only do what it is best suited for, but that could be more than we are willing to admit.
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