The State of the European Union 2017

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REVIVING THE DEBATE ON POLITICAL UNION AFTER BREXIT
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This includes the package of measures for bet-
ter enforcement of single market rules and, in
the environmental area, a REFIT proposal to sim-
plify environmental reporting following the re-
cent Fitness Check, and measures to facilitate
access to justice and support environmental
compliance assurance in member states”.5
After reading the document, in which the
Commission acknowledges that it is concerned
about “winning back the trust of our citizens”,6 it
seems clear that the current “European
Government” has dropped the proper vision of
the true meaning of the three main principles of
European democratic governance that it itself
places in the definition of its last political priority:
better regulation, accountability and transparency.
First, “better regulation” is a programme or
series of political decisions of a certain ideologi-
cal content that, since its British origin and
adoption by the European Commission some 15
years ago, has essentially sought to abolish as
much as possible the regulation that is sup-
posed to hinder economic activity, including so-
cial and environmental regulations. On that
point, the work programme maintains a certain
consistency with the prevailing political ideology
in the current college of commissioners.
However, on the subject of accountability
the Commission’s programmatic line is not con-
sistent with the principles on which it says it
rests. From 20017, the European Commission
adopted a much more ambitious concept of ac-
5European Commission: Commission Work Programme
2017. Delivering a Europe that protects, empowers and
defends, 2016, p. 17 (COM (2016)710 final). Available at:
6 Ibidem , p. 2.
7European Commission: European Governance – a white
paper, 2001, p. 7. Available at:
legal-content/ES/TXT/PDF/?uri 0428&fro
m=ES.
countability than the current Commission ap-
pears to use. Indeed, to limit the work pro-
gramme as regards accountability to the mere
declaration of this great principle of European
democratic governance, with no clear program-
matic initiative to match it, is, in our view, to
thwart the expectations that legitimately arise in
any European citizen after reading the title of
the tenth and final political priority of the Union
for 2017: “A Union of democratic change”.
Lastly, on the subject of transparency, the
current Commission also thwarts the aspirations
of citizens, as it reduces the work programme to
the reform of the institutions’ transparency
Register, when in this field there is an urgent
need for many reforms, especially with regard
to the decision-making process in the Council of
the Union. The lack of transparency in the cur-
rent negotiation process of the Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is the
most recent reflection of that need.
This short-sighted view of European govern-
ance on the part of the Commission must not
make us forget, on the one hand, the need for
the Union to consider to what extent the cur-
rent global crisis of representative democracy
affects it as a political organisation. Nor, on the
other, that the Union still has pending an im-
provement in its structure and in its political
function after the Lisbon Treaty took effect,
chiefly on matters of participation8. Yet nor can
the question of how and when to tackle this
improvement be avoided.
8From 2001, the European Commission adopted its own
definition of “good governance”, which has remained valid
to this day, through the mention of six chief political princi-
ples: openness, transparency, accountability, coherence, ef-
fectiveness, and, in first place, participation. See European
Commission: European Governance – a white paper, 2001,
p. 7. Available at:
TXT/PDF/?uri 428&from=ES.