WE REALLY MUST stop meeting like this. As 150 motorcades whisk kings, queens, and presidents around New York, it looks as though the most useful thing to come out of the “world’s largest summit” may be a surge in demand for luxury biscuits. Meanwhile, while attention was elsewhere, Europe’s unelected judges have ruled that the EU can force governments, against their wishes, to jail their own people for breaking EU laws. This new transfer of power to Brussels has again wrong-footed politicians focusing on lofty Millennium Development Goals, not on bread-and-butter sovereignty.
The insidious drip, drip of global governance fatally dissipates the energies of elected national leaders. The European Parliament has spent the past week arguing about a “sunshine directive” that would have made EU employers responsible for the health effects of sunlight on their staff. Beetroot-red builder’s bottom has now been preserved for the nation, apparently, after a battle that should never have been fought — with our money — in the first place. There is a similar air of unreality in New York. One newcomer to summitry says he is amazed by the industry of pre-meetings and pre-pre-meetings. On Sunday a diplomat commented that the atmosphere in the room was as if there were ten days to the end of the negotiation, not two working days before world leaders were due to arrive. But technocrats have all the time in the world: when the summit ends, the machine will lumber on.
When the UN and the EU were set up, the challenge was to create big institutions that could underpin peace and prosperity. Today the challenge is to tame institutions that have acquired an internal momentum far beyond democratic control. Sure, jaw-jaw is better than war-war. But the UN has prevented war on precious few occasions in its 60-year history. The EU relied on America to intervene in Yugoslavia, and its attempts to dissuade Iran from going nuclear have been a miserable failure. Jaw-jaw can drown out reality.
The UN is inevitably a hostage to compromise — which is why it has stood still while 200,000 have been killed in Sudan’s genocide, and why Kosovo was saved by Nato, in violation of the UN Charter. The UN’s failure to agree a definition of terrorism, four years after 9/11, makes it hard to believe that it can do much about collective security, despite the fashionable belief that the new terrorist threat requires global co-operation. And its credibility has been damaged by the Oil-for-Food scandal, perhaps the largest ever fraud. It is strange that expectations of the UN are so wildly overblown when it is so unaccountable and when its scope for action on big issues is deliberately limited by the vetoes that are the price for security council members turning up.
Europe has its own oil-for-food problem. For nine consecutive years the EU court of auditors has refused to sign off a budget of about £65 billion. The chief accountant Marta Andreasen paid the price for drawing the world’s attention to 10,000 possible frauds in the EU accounts. Corruption has been ignored by commissioners who are mostly mediocre politicians kicked upstairs.
It has suited British politicians of all colours, since Dutch and French voters killed the EU constitution, to claim that Europe has been “neutralised” as an issue. But this wilfully ignores the fact that the machine has hardly skipped a beat since the vote. Ask anyone in the City of London currently embroiled in the Market in Financial Instruments Directive, possibly the biggest single piece of financial legislation to come out of the EU, which could cost the City more than £1 billion. It’s business as usual in the EU, and that’s looking increasingly less good for business.
Someone needs to stop and think about whether completing the single market is still a realistic objective in the face of stolid resistance from national governments. The EU spent 12 years trying to agree a directive on takeover bids before the Germans killed it. What value do we place on our time?
Yet the machine is not set up to ask such questions: it has no reverse gear. Europe’s judges are especially deaf to Dutch and French voters, to whom they are not accountable in any way. While Americans earnestly debate the views of President Bush’s nominee John Roberts, what he thinks of Roe v Wade and whether the Supreme Court will shift to the right, few Europeans even know the names of those who sit on Europe’s Court of Justice (ECJ). Yet its ruling this week abolished another national veto. It may not sound particularly awful to have given Brussels the power to impose criminal penalties on companies that flout EU environmental laws. But the 11 member states that fought the Commission, including the UK, Germany and France, rightly maintained that only governments should control criminal law. The Commission now hopes to set criminal penalties in areas including intellectual property, the internal market and monetary matters. Great news, I imagine, for those aforementioned people in the City who are supposed to be creating wealth, not taking legal advice.
Judicial creep is the inevitable result of federalism. Like the US Supreme Court, the ECJ’s duty is to interpret the spirit of the treaties — which are generally integrationist. The court’s rulings on cross-border tax disputes are slowly eroding national vetoes on tax. It has ruled that public health is covered by single market legislation because health is a service, and services can be traded. The can is open, and lawyers will worm their way into more areas of national life.
Monarchs grandstanding in New York seems so last century. Maybe we should turn down the volume and listen more carefully to the whirring of the machines. If we don’t get wise to where the real power is, we will sacrifice any hope of changing the world.
camilla.cavendish@thetimes.co.uk
JOIN THE DEBATE
Send your e-mails from here
