Conviction and responsibility

One and a quarter million refugees applied for asylum in the Union in 2015, twice as many as the year before. The images were dramatic: small boats on the Mediterranean, handcarts on Balkan roads, full trains stranded on the way to the rich North. The influx of people looked to many like a mass migration, almost an invasion; and the public, in fearful bewilderment, had the impression the authorities had lost control. Could Europe act? Was Europe authorized to act?

The demand for action had a different character from that which accompanied previous crises. The Ukraine crisis of 2014–15 was a matter of war and peace; the Union itself had hardly any resources or powers to bring the conflict under control, so active intervention by the member states jointly was an obvious necessity. Moreover, application of the magnetic forces provided by the Brussels diplomatic toolkit, the showpiece being the association agreement with Kiev, had worked out badly. No one at that point, therefore, disputed the primacy of events-politics. In the fields of asylum and migration, by contrast, the Union had quite a few competences and regulations. The situation became unmanageable because the regulatory framework collapsed under divergent strategic interests and because of the disruptive impact of the situation on public opinion. For a long time Brussels was blind to the gap between what was administratively possible and what, in this exceptional situation, was politically required. Engagement by the highest political authority needed for events-politics was even actively hindered by some institutions, reinforcing the impression of a loss of control, of powerlessness.

The contrast with the euro crisis of 2010–12 is illustrative as well. To steer their poorly equipped currency through the storm, the leaders, at gunpoint, had both to design new tools and to deploy them immediately.

Emancipation of executive power

Anyone who visits Washington and sees the magnificence of the legislative Congress, with its majestic dome on the axis of the city, and then looks at the White House, built for the president, small by comparison and off to one side, senses what the founders of the American republic at the end of the eighteenth century believed the relationship should be between the main powers: the legislators in charge and the executive power in second place. The 13 newly united states had thrown off the British king, their colonial sovereign, and did not want a citizen-king in his place. Something similar happened in France. After the revolution of 1789 and the fall of absolute monarch Louis XVI, the focus was on the impersonal and all-encompassing authority of the law. As Pierre Rosanvallon shows in Good Government (2018), primacy was given to parliament, as guardian of the sovereignty of the people. France went through a turbulent episode under Napoleon (and half a century later his nephew), but distrust of arbitrary leaders ultimately produced the parliamentarianism of the Third Republic. Like the Americans, the French kept the executive power small.

The founders of the Community similarly drew a line under the past. Just as the young American and French republics had put aside their king, so the new European Community excluded national governments as far as possible.