Strengthening Europe without revolution is possible. An essay

Is giving more power to Brussels really the only way to overcome the European Union’s obvious weaknesses? Giovanni Pitruzzella’s latest book, L’Europa in trasformazione. Tra geopolitica e democrazia (Mondadori), offers an analytical and original perspective on how our institutions can respond to an increasingly challenging world – and how the world affects our institutions. For Pitruzzella, the EU is not a true political union: it is rather a ‘legal machine’ which, through an adaptive process, has sought to bridge the gap in democratic legitimacy through the law. Initially, the founding fathers’ plan was to pursue peace through economic integration. Legislation at EU level laid the foundations for this, but it was above all the harmonising role of the Court of Justice that made it possible to build a supranational legal order and ensure that the rights derived from it were enforceable in practice. More recently, against the backdrop of the new geopolitical context, the Court has gone a step further: it has, in effect, constitutionalised an evolution of the EU, enabling Brussels to intervene swiftly and on the basis of unprecedented powers not immediately apparent in the Treaties. But this is where we come to the short circuit – or, to put it more accurately, the limit of this experiment: the law cannot replace politics. Not that politics is entirely absent: the European Parliament, which grants a vote of confidence to the Commission, is directly elected by all citizens; the Council, in which national governments are represented, can exert significant influence over its decisions. But a convoluted decision-making process ultimately fuels the perception of an unbridgeable gap and a self-referential bureaucracy. The problem manifests itself, in particular, in the relationship between judges and elected representatives, in disputes over the rule of law, and in the difficulties of reconciling differing national sensibilities.

The geopolitical crisis makes this transition all the more urgent. If the world returns to being dominated by power dynamics, Europe must equip itself so as not to be at their mercy. Defence, energy security, raw materials, trade and technology are no longer sectors separate from politics, but prerequisites for European freedom and autonomy. It is above all in the economic sphere that the book highlights a contradiction. Europe suffers from two opposing ills: on the one hand, excessive regulation, which is the most obvious symptom of the gap between Brussels’ legal capacity and its limited democratic legitimacy; on the other, market fragmentation, which stems, conversely, from the failure to fully enforce EU law (as evidenced by the decline in infringement proceedings). More controversial is the rediscovery of industrial policy and ‘European champions’. Here, Pitruzzella – now a constitutional judge and formerly Advocate General at the Court of Justice – speaks in the voice of the former president of the Antitrust Authority: national firms protected from competition can accumulate market power, reduce incentives to innovate and exploit economic rents. If European fragmentation prevents firms from growing, the most coherent solution is to remove the obstacles, not necessarily to hand-pick the winners from above. The same question applies to the EU’s new financial activism. Pitruzzella observes that integration is now also achieved through shared debt, European funds and conditionality. It is a transformation of great significance, but not a neutral one. Every new financial instrument distributes resources, risks and power; every joint programme raises the question of who sets the priorities and who is accountable for any failures.

In this sense, Europe cannot become a mere extension of national bureaucracies, as the sovereigntists would have it, nor can it pretend to be a fully-fledged federal state, underpinned by a single people and a single political identity, as certain pro-Europeans hope. Pitruzzella’s proposal is more pragmatic: to recognise the coexistence of national and European identities, to foster democratic links and, through differentiated integration, to allow states to proceed at different speeds where necessary. “Europe in Transformation” is essential reading for understanding that strengthening Europe does not mean multiplying its powers, nor does supporting competitiveness require giving up on promoting competition.