Nicole Scicluna (Collegio Carlo Alberto)

“Journey to the centre of the EU: Does Europe have a core, and does it matter?”

abstract

What kind of ‘core’, if any, does Europe have? This question has gained new urgency in light of the EU’s ongoing crises, which are reshaping the integration project and leading to a renewal of political discourses around the concept of core Europe and related terms, such as multi-speed Europe and differentiated integration.

How core Europe is defined depends on who is wielding the concept, and to what end. For some observers, the notion captures the emergence of a union within a union, that is a smaller group of member states with a greater stake in, and commitment to, European integration, who are moving ahead of the EU-28 by adopting new and deeper forms of cooperation and integration. The political nature of this core is debatable as is the extent to which it is becoming institutionalised. Some see the beginnings of a political union that will eventually encompass, perhaps, a full set of institutions parallel to those of the EU-28. Others see in current developments the emergence of a more intergovernmental formation, based on what German Chancellor Angela Merkel termed ‘the union method’. 

Core Europe carries considerable normative import too, as exemplified by the German discourse from Jürgen Habermas to Wolfgang Schäuble. Some scholars explicitly link the concept to the completion of political union, an ideological agenda most readily identified with the Habermasian vision of a fully institutionalised supranational entity that draws democratic legitimacy from a European public sphere. However, core Europe may also serve more pragmatic agendas. Decades of enlargement have pushed the EU to the limits of the current institutional framework, particularly the requirement of unanimous ratification of treaty change. This was reflected in the long and torturous process of treaty reform undertaken in the 2000s, which ended in the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009. More recently, the Fiscal Compact had to be adopted as an international treaty, outside the auspices of EU law, after the UK and the Czech Republic refused to sign the pact. Thus, the creation of a core, or cores, has been posited as a way of enhancing the EU’s responsiveness, flexibility and decision making capacity.

This paper will explore the various geographical, political, legal and institutional implications of ‘core Europe’ in the context of the crises currently afflicting the EU. It will suggest that the utility of the concept is limited and limiting, insofar as it is focused on the solidification of a single core, whether based on the eurozone or a subset of it. Drawing on Erik Jones’s (2012) notion of ‘the willingness to participate’, a more viable approach to organising European integration could be through the formalisation of multiple, functionally-based cores of varying and variable membership.