German politicians could be confused for eurosceptic MEPS

GERMANY, backed by France, is bringing about a fundamental change in the European Union.

The European Commission is being increasingly sidelined as Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy lose patience with all the negotiating required to introduce changes.

Instead, they are at one with Britain’s David Cameron in wanting less to come from Brussels — and more to come from agreements between national governments.

There are several reasons for this. Firstly the big powers’ control of the European Commission has diminished, partly because of enlargement and partly because they lost their two commissioners, ending up with just one each like the smaller states.

The Lisbon Treaty has increased national governments’ involvement and, as a result, local parliaments are dictating much more to their governments on how to respond and vote on draft legislation. They play less of a role when changes are agreed among the governments themselves.

National interests are also playing a big part as the larger economies find they have to battle harder against the smaller states and are frequently forced to compromise.

Take the directives on car emissions. Germany, whose economy is highly dependent on car production, and France fought the efforts of the Commission to ensure car manufacturers made the necessary changes to their vehicles to cut emissions.

In the end they got their way with limits that almost immediately were overtaken by the industry, leaving the targets well within their competence.

The latest issue to raise German hackles is the soil directive. The Commission reports much negative reaction from Berlin. This directive is designed to help reverse Europe’s growing loss of biological diversity, with its serious consequences for our environment and agriculture.

But Germany’s farmers, and their huge chemical industry that produces vast quantities of fertilisers, has been lobbying hard against it.

Some German politicians are sounding increasingly like eurosceptic British MEPs, saying that the EU should stick to the big projects that help Europe compete as an entity against the other economic blocs such as India and China and the US.

They cite big research projects that have helped the EU become a world leader such as ITER, the ground-breaking science institute, and Galileo, the vast satellite system that gives Europe its own GPS system, making it independent of America’s system.

However, they continually quarrel over the vast sums of money these big, global-leading projects cost and threaten to rethink their support for them.

Instead, German politicians arepushing for more inter-governmentalism — where member states that agree on a project just move ahead on it, cooperating between themselves.

The objections to this is mainly that decisions are taken behind closed doors, that the bigger member states set the agenda and adopt a “take it or leave it” attitude towards the smaller member states.

The alternative is to ask the Commission to produce proposals which they do after public consultation, draw up a preliminary draft paper, which they redraw after feedback from governments and others, carrying out impact assessments to see what effect it will have economically and environmentally and it then goes to the Council representing member states and the European Parliament. They debate and haggle and eventually agree on a final draft. And the time taken by this process? It can be as little as a year or it can drag on for years.