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Few of us who care about freedom of speech, free expression, and a free internet will shed many tears about the announcement yesterday by EU commissioner Thierry Breton that he is resigning, with immediate effect.
What we should perhaps care about, however, is the rationale for that resignation, as set out in his letter abandoning his post:
https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1835565206639972734It is very clear from that letter that Breton believes that his resignation was the culmination of a process designed to remove him, instigated by the EU Commission President, Ursula Von Der Leyen. In recent days, Breton alleges – and we have no reason to disbelieve him – Von Der Leyen wrote to President Macron of France urging the French President to withdraw Breton’s name from nomination, and to submit another candidate instead.
We should be concerned, because Ursula Von Der Leyen has no statutory authority of any kind to determine who France nominates as its EU commissioner. The right to nominate a commissioner is entirely the prerogative of national governments.
Indeed, this is not the first such interference by Von Der Leyen. Irish observers who have been paying attention will have followed the saga of the Irish Commission nominee, Michael McGrath, and the fact that Von Der Leyen wrote to the Irish Government seeking an alternative name to be nominated alongside him, allowing her to pick a woman for the commission job instead. The Irish Government correctly (if somewhat hypocritically, given their own obsession with gender balance) refused to nominate anyone else.
“But so what?”, you might say.
The “so what” here is that what we are witnessing in real time is the evolution of the post of EU commission President into an office with far greater powers than those granted to it in the EU treaties. Readers will recall outrage (some of you may even have felt the outrage) last October when President Von Der Leyen travelled to Israel in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on that country and appeared to set EU policy on a firmly pro-Israeli path. Setting the EU’s foreign policy is, of course, firmly outside of her remit – yet both she and the Israelis understood the significance of having “The President of Europe” touch down and pledge her allegiance.
Now, when it comes to the commission she leads, she is once again acting – with impunity – as an executive President who picks her own cabinet, rather than what she is – an appointed civil servant.
To some extent, this evolution of her job was always intended – which was one of the many reasons that eurosceptics opposed its creation and the involvement of the EU parliament in the first place. Because Von Der Leyen has a mandate from the parliament, having had her nomination confirmed by that body, she now has democratic legitimacy that the holder her post was never intended to possess. “The Parliament asked me to do this job, so I should be allowed to pick my own team”, she says, in effect.
If you have never seen William Hague’s very funny 2008 warning on this very topic, you should watch it. Proviso: Hague was talking about a different office (The EU Council Presidency) and some of his predictions did not come true. But the general drift of what he said, sixteen years ago, certainly is coming to pass.
Many decades ago, Henry Kissinger asked – or scoffed – about the European Union, asking “who do I call when I want to talk to Europe”. The problem, for those of us skeptical of the EU’s ever-greater drift towards superstate status, is that there is now an answer to that question: You call Ursula Von Der Leyen.
This drift towards establishing her post as a kind of executive presidency with the power to select and appoint people to important jobs is very significant because – as most students of politics know – personnel is policy. An EU commission President with large powers, de jure or de facto, to select her own team therefore acquires immense power to set EU policy. Perhaps, for example, Von Der Leyen agrees with many of us that Thierry Breton’s approach to internet regulation was terrible, so she wants a different person in that job who might pursue a policy she (and we) deem preferable. That’s a short-term gain, to be sure – but at the longer term cost of having a European Union where one unelected person has gained enormous power to set the direction of policy that affects all our lives.
It would be better, therefore, in the long term had Macron done what the Irish Government, to its hypocritical credit, did: Told Von Der Leyen to stay in her lane, and get stuffed. Alas, though, this thing is only headed in one direction.
You cannot create an office of President, fill it with a capable politician – which Von Der Leyen is – and then expect a different result. The federalists wanted an EU President, and they have one. The rest of us were never asked to vote on the matter.
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