INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS OF THE EUROPEAN UNION AS AN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION

Abstract

It's been 64 years since the European Coal and Steel Community was created, or 58 years from the creation of the European Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community. This process of economic and political integration is unprecedented in modern history and represents a major challenge for contemporary concepts of the EU management system. Ways of the policy management and the depth of integration inside EU have changed dramatically since the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty, while the Lisbon Treaty continued integration and maybe announced two opposite processes-deeper integration and the transfer of powers from member states to the EU level, and the overall crisis of EU, especially in light of the institutional and economic crisis. The main question that this paper addresses is whether the developments in recent years have consolidated EU or they have weakened it, or whether these events are part of the solution to the institutional crisis or its cause and if they weakened it, what level of management is formed in EU. The general assumption is that the main indicators of the overall institutional crisis in the EU are:

1. Difficulties in reaching a consensus on the issues of EU development and strengthening of the role of large Member States,
2. Poor representational capacity of the Commission, and
3. The loss of legitimacy in the functioning of the Union.

The main way in which this analysis is conducted is a collision of two opposite concepts of policy management in EU, which are seen as a structural causes of the crisis in EU: country-centric policy management, which relies on a theory of liberal institutionalism and the Community method, and then we analyze the main settings of both theories by observing processes in the conduct of policies at various levels in EU.

European integration was firstly built on the premise that member states will voluntarily deepen their relationships beyond the initial trade relations in order to establish a common political and social goals, and the integration process has proved to be a good recipe for survival of larger and smaller countries in EU. The Lisbon Treaty placed member states at the heart of European integration primarily through their role in the Council of Ministers, and their national parliaments were given special rights with regard to monitoring the principle of subsidiarity. The influence of member states is evident the most in the European Council, as the leading institution of EU, and the Council of Ministers, and the most important difference in the functioning of the EU member states and their behavior lies in the acronym QMV or a Qualified Majority Voting institute, which sets diplomacy and executive power in a completely new context. With the expansion of EU to 28 member states, the rules have changed, creating new coalitions, a new weight and balance of power and the creation of national interests. New members do not have much experience like the old EU member states, and many of them disagree with supranational tradition in EU. Many do not feel quite at ease because of the structure of power in EU and existing coalitions. The old coalitions are changing and some traditional such as Berlin-Paris axis are slowly dying.

We have demonstrated the structural causes of the institutional crisis in EU through the two opposing concepts of the EU system management, the intergovernmental method of governance and supranational management methods. The third management method that has been more and more evident since the mid-nineties of the 20th century, is a system of multilevel governance, that combines the previous two. Such a hybrid control mode hides structural causes of the institutional crisis in EU because the differences between the two main methods of management of the EU system are gradually turning them into contradiction.

When we talk about low-representational capacity, we can see that this is a consequence of the predominant role of the member states and a conferred jurisdiction. On the one hand, the national governments are monitoring the executive powers of the Commission, and on the other side after the establishment of a comitology procedure, the Council and the national governments have become part of the whole process. It seems that through this procedure, member states have full control over the Commission, but for them it is much harder to control it in areas where the Commission has exclusive power, for example in the area of competition, state aid, agriculture, trade policy and the internal market. At first glance, it appears that COREPER, yet another modern institution, serves as a meeting of diplomats of the EU member states and which prepares meetings of the Council. However, a deeper analysis of the role of COREPER suggests that it is evident that it is the main decisionmaking body in EU, which is used for communication with the EU member states. In this sense, the COREPER has evolved from a simple intergovernmental body, informal in its nature, to a de facto decision-maker. Although the original role of COREPER was to prepare the meetings of the Council, the development of these institutions is one of the unrecorded cases of the evolution of institutions in EU. In other words, much of the power, and undefined powers have been transferred into the hands of the Permanent Representatives of the Member States.

When we talk about democratic legitimacy in the functioning of the EU, we must bear in mind that this legitimacy has not received specific place in the constitutional structure of the EU. Far greater importance is given to the principle of the rule of law, and a double-line of democratic legitimacy tells us that the EU is not based so much on the role of citizens of the Union, from which it should derive its legitimacy, but that it is based on the treaties between its member states. This dual line is expressed at the institutional level in elections for the European Parliament, which are the only way of voting for policy makers at the EU level. This second line of democratic legitimacy is far more significant, and elections for the European Parliament are second-rate. The only power the Parliament reflects in the influence in EU, is the composition of the Commission. We must also say that the democratic principle in the Lisbon Treaty replaced the principle of democracy, and instead it was replaced by the primacy of them the transparency, representativeness, public debate and flexibility. The executive power has been predominant in EU since its creation, which produced huge consequences at a European level especially with regard to the management and the legitimacy of the institutions of the EU, but also at the national level because of the large transfer of competences to EU. In addition, we must add the conceptual diversity or heterogenity of European political demos because it is not one nation, but nations, and thus the logical question of how EU can submit diversity in light of the current institutional crisis. The legitimacy of EU is measured primarily through benefits of integration, represented by the concept of output rather than input-and, what is at the root of the entire crisis, is the fact that EU citizens simply do not base their relationship with the EU institutions on previous confidence but the expected benefits instead. This leads directly to the EU civil clientelism, rather than democracy, a concept that will only temporarly, or situationally determine the functioning of EU, because it is not a permanent solution.