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If the EU has a lesson to impart, it is surely how to make once-lethal enemies work together for common goals — “united in diversity” as the bloc’s motto has it. Conversely, lack of unity is often blamed for the EU’s struggles to punch above its weight in the geopolitical arena. The unstated axiom is that for Europe, division breeds indecision. But what if the truth is closer to the opposite? To become more decisive, the EU may need to get more comfortable with division, not treat it as something to be avoided.
Take the new trade agreement with the Mercosur bloc, which the European Commission this week sent to member states and the European parliament for approval — 26 years after talks first started. That is cause for celebration, if perhaps only once the votes have been counted. But we need not wait to reflect on how it could take so long.
While trade policy is squarely in Brussels’ remit, the commission has long been intimidated by a few countries with strong farming interests, France first and foremost. The fear has been that France would muster a blocking minority of states. The commission has been right to add sweeteners, but too many years have been lost in the hope of improving the agreement to everyone’s satisfaction. Seeking everyone’s satisfaction is a fool’s errand.
Consider another so-called trade deal on the table: the handshake agreement with the US, which is supposed to deliver trading arrangements that will be stable (if worse than before) — and better, says Brussels, than if there were no agreement. Few are convinced of this, even inside the commission itself: Teresa Ribera, transition and competition commissioner, has come close to suggesting that renewed sabre-rattling against EU tech regulation may mean the deal is off. It is far from guaranteed the European parliament will approve the tariff changes Brussels has promised the White House.
The commission’s highly competent trade officials could certainly have achieved a better outcome with a more confrontational attitude from their political masters. There were early musings of pulling out the bazooka of the “anti-coercion instrument” (ACI), which would allow Brussels wide powers to punish US Big Tech, for example, for punitive tariffs on EU exports. Why did nothing come of it? One explanation is the fear of a piqued Donald Trump pulling the rug out from under Ukraine. But another is deference to big member state governments whose priority was to protect national export interests. The moral is that results suffer from deference and fear of pushback.
Another example: Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta complained in influential reports last year that the EU economy is fragmented by too many different national rules. Their solutions included more regulations (which are the same for all) rather than directives (which member states adapt into national law), and creating an opt-in “28th regime” of corporate rules to circumvent capitals’ protectiveness of national laws. Both problems flow from a politics of consensus. It is easier to get countries on board with directives, which they know can then be tailored to special domestic interests; and it is hard to overrule countries’ attachment to long-standing domestic systems. But the result is stasis. In practice: more diversity, less unity.
This is not to repeat the tired call for “variable geometry” — institutional solutions to let different groups of EU countries integrate to different degrees in different fields. While important, that substitutes institutional reform for a needed change in political culture: one less worried about consensus and more focused on moving forward.
This is possible within the existing institutional set-up. Some decisions legally require unanimity, but many more can be pursued with narrower support and a “just do it” attitude: wrap up the Mercosur deal sooner without agonising about French conniptions; launch the ACI to strengthen the EU’s hands against the US; or pursue “enhanced co-operation”, where as few as nine member states can pass common rules when others disagree. An alternative is Spain’s “competitiveness lab”, a quest for coalitions of the willing in financial policy integration.
Consensus is a wonderful thing. When it is achieved, as it has been with 19 sanctions packages against Russia, it creates strong political foundations for action. But as sanctions policy shows — the EU has pulled punches to keep Moscow’s European sympathisers on board — there is a trade-off between seeking consensus and achieving more. If the EU understands that more is demanded from it in these dangerous times, it must also understand that trade-off has gone too far in one direction. A less consensus-ridden EU would be a stronger actor on the world stage, too.
