While our attention was momentarily distracted by the EU elections and the Westminster expenses saga, a landmark legal ruling in Germany in June has well and truly shafted the EU integration project. The German Constitutional Court had been examining the Lisbon Treaty – the successor to the infamous EU Constitution – and ruled that the sovereignty of a member state (in this case Germany), must always take precedence over diktats from Brussels.
The Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe effectively declared itself the highest supervisory body in conflicts between Germany and the EU, thus explicitly placing itself above the authority of the European Court of Justice. As ‘Der Spiegel’ reported “This borders on a declaration of war on the European Court, which sees itself as the only authority capable of ruling on the validity and applicability of EU law.”
The German judges went further by ruling that the German Parliament or Bundestag had been wrong in passing an “accompanying law” to the Lisbon Treaty, which determined the rights of the German Parliament to participate in European legislation. By passing the right to monitor the implementation of EU laws to Brussels, the Bundestag was acting unconstitutionally, according to the judges and subjecting the German people to the “whims of a bureaucracy that lacks sufficient democratic legitimacy.”
Indeed the Karlsruhe judges were scathing in their criticism of the EU project, arguing that contrary to the claims in the Lisbon Treaty that “the EU Parliament is a representative body of a sovereign European people”, in fact this is clearly not the case. The judges explain that “After all, EU members of parliament were not elected according to the principle of electoral equality, in other words, one man one vote, but rather according to national contingents, meaning that a Maltese MEP represents 67,000 Maltese, a Swedish MEP has a constituency of 455,000 Swedes and in Germany, the ratio is 1 to 857,000.”
The court sees this as a clear contradiction to the remainder of EU law, which is constructed around the central idea of prohibiting discrimination based on nationality. According to the concluding statements of the court’s decision, this contradiction can only be explained by the fact that the EU is not a state but rather “an association of sovereign states” and, consequently, “there can be no sovereign citizens’ union as well as no completely representative organ in the form of the European Parliament, with the result that the Bundestag must receive substantially more rights.”
The Karlsruhe interpretation thus very eloquently demolishes the old European idea that the recognised democratic deficits in the EU would disappear completely of their own accord by enhancing the rights of the European Parliament, allowing MEPs to assume the role of the national parliaments. Indeed, the judges have exposed the fact that the European Parliament is terminally undemocratic, at least when measured against the basic concepts of representative democracy.
All of this has come as a political bombshell to the newly elected European Parliament, where Europhiles eagerly await the outcome of a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty due to be held in Ireland on 2 October, praying for a ‘YES’ vote, so that they can press on with their dream of creating a Federal United States of Europe. If the highest Constitutional Court in Germany can rule that the EU, under the terms of the Lisbon Treaty, is basically undemocratic, then the whole project aimed at further and deeper EU integration will be called into question.
This, of course, is seen as manna from heaven by UK Conservative MEPs who have, on David Cameron’s orders, defected from the large, centre-right, integrationist EPP Group in the European Parliament, to form their own, more eurosceptic, European Conservatives and Reformists group (ECR) with some like-minded allies from Poland, the Czech Republic and a scattering of other countries. The ECR sees itself as breaking the mould of EU politics, by offering a voice to the millions of Europeans who oppose the concept of an EU superstate and instead wish to see the development of a successful economic, rather than political union.
For the Conservatives, the German Constitutional Court ruling has come as a welcome and unexpected surprise, which may lay the groundwork for future relations between the UK and Brussels under a Cameron government. Members of Cameron’s team will be looking closely at part of the Karlsruhe judgement which, commenting on Germany’s role in European unification, stated “Germany’s future lies not in a united Europe but rather in Germany.” Constitutional experts will be drafted in to see how a similar position could be adopted in Britain, with our unwritten constitution. In other words if Germany’s highest court can singlehandedly determine the boundaries of European integration for Germany, could the same thing happen in the UK?
There will also be widespread support in Conservative ranks for the clear definition of national sovereignty offered by the Karlsruhe judges. In their ruling they declared that it is imperative for a country to maintain the “space for the political formation of the economic, cultural and social living conditions”, including “areas which shape the citizens’ circumstances of life, in particular their private spaces of personal responsibility and political and social security, as protected by their fundamental rights,” as well as “political decisions that particularly depend on a previous understanding of culture, history and language and which discursively unfold in a public political arena organised by party politics and parliament.”
The judges explained that these “essential areas of democratic organisation explicitly comprise citizenship, the civil and military monopoly on the use of force, revenue and expenditure, including external financing and all elements of encroachment that are decisive for the realisation of fundamental rights, above all as regards intensive encroachments on fundamental rights such as the deprivation of liberty in the administration of criminal law or the placement in an institution.” These important areas also include “cultural issues such as speaking a language, shaping the circumstances concerning family and education, ensuring freedom of opinion, of the press and of association, and accommodating professions of faith or ideology.”
These then are the clear limits that the German judges believe should be set by a member state on EU integration. National identity must take precedence over integration. The Titanic project to create a federal united states of Europe has met its iceberg in Karlsruhe. Auf wiedersehen EU superstate.
