From a pragmatic perspective, this situation appears dangerous: National welfare states are under immense pressure to cope with and adjust to external and internal changes (Scharpf/Schmidt 2000). But this adjustment must be achieved through legitimated political action. The Court can only destroy existing national solutions, but it cannot itself create a “Social Europe.” At the same time, political action at the European level is impeded by the prohibitions stipulated in the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties – and if these were lifted, by high consensus barriers and the politically salient diversity of existing national solutions. In short, European law as defined by the Court is under-mining national solutions without being able to provide remedies at the European level.
The practical effect must be a reduction of the overall problem-solving capacity of the multilevel European polity.
From a normative perspective, what matters is that the Court’s interventions are based on a self-created framework of substantive and procedural European law that has no place for a proper assessment of the national concerns that are at stake, and in which the flimsiest impediment to the exercise of European liberties may override even extremely salient national policy legacies and institutions. Within this highly asymmetrical juris-tic framework, a normatively persuasive balance between the essential requirements of European communality and the equally essential respect for national autonomy and diversity cannot even be articulated. By the same token, the legal syllogisms supporting these judicial interventions could not possibly persuade opponents in communicative discourses between member-state governments and their constituents. In short, the po-litically unsupported extension of judge-made European law in areas of high political salience within member-state polities is undermining the legitimacy bases of the multi-level European polity.
But this cannot be a plea for unconstrained member-state autonomy or a relocation of the Kompetenz-Kompetenz to the national level (Weiler 1999a). The result might indeed be an escalation of protectionist and beggar-my-neighbor policies that could well
dis-rupt the Union. It should be realized, after all, that – even though the Court never men-tioned it – Viking and Laval did involve a distributive conflict between high-wage and low-wage member states whose fair resolution would have raised difficult normative issues – and the same may also be true of the Rueffert and Luxembourg cases.39 There are good normative reasons, therefore, for some kind of European review of national measures impeding free movement among member states. But such a review would need to allow for the fair consideration of all concerns involved – which the jurisdiction of the ECJ does not. Its self-referential legal framework prevents any consideration of the normative tension between the solidarity achieved with great effort at the national level and a moral commitment to the “inclusion of the other” in a European context.
But which institution would be better qualified to assess the balance between politically legitimate (and divergent) national concerns on the one hand, and the equally legiti-mate constraints that national polities must accept as members of a European commu-nity of states? In my view, the European institution that would be uniquely qualified to strike a fair balance is the European Council.40 From the perspective of individual member states, its decision would be a judgment of peers who are aware of the po-tential domestic repercussions which may be caused by the obligation to implement European law, and who must realize that they might soon find themselves in the same spot. At the same time, however, these peers would also be fully aware of the dangers of protectionist free-riding, beggar-my-neighbor policies and discriminatory practices that would violate solidaristic obligations. Moreover – and most importantly – in their role as “masters of the Treaties,” the members of the European Council would be best placed to determine whether and where the Court, in its interpretation of primary and secondary European law, has so far exceeded the legislative intent that a political cor-rection appears necessary.
Even if the basic logic of this suggestion were to be accepted, however, its adoption by a unanimous Treaty amendment seems most unlikely. But there is one scenario that might change these probabilities. I refer back to what I said about the fundamental
39 But we should remain realistic: The transnational redistributive benefits (for workers from low-wage countries) that may follow from these judgments are likely to be dwarfed by intra-national redistributive damages, as the wages of national workers are pushed downwards while protec-tive legislation and collecprotec-tive agreements are being disabled.
40 Joe Weiler (1999a: 322) called for a “Constitutional Council” composed of sitting members of national constitutional courts to decide issues of competence; and a similar proposal was re-cently promoted by Roman Herzog, former president of the German constitutional court and of the European convention that produced the Charter of Basic Rights (Herzog/Gerken 2008).
In my view, being a judicial body that is bound by its own precedents and obliged to general-ize its decision rules, this Council would also tend to define uniform standards that could not accommodate the legitimate diversity among member-state institutions and practices. What is needed is the disciplined “ad hocery” of a political judgment that understands that it may be necessary, for the time being, to allow national parliaments and courts to have the last word on abortion in Ireland, alcohol in Sweden and drugs in the Netherlands (Kurzer 2001), even if that should interfere with European liberties protected elsewhere.
dependence of the European Union and its legal system on the voluntary compliance of its member states, and about the lack of control on the part of political actors over the expansion of judicial legislation. Imagine, if you will, that the governments of some member states – say Austria or Sweden or Germany – would openly declare their non-compliance with specific judgments that they consider to be ultra vires. If that were all, such a declaration would surely trigger a constitutional crisis. There is, of course, a great deal of incomplete compliance and tacit noncompliance among EU member states, but a declaration of open non-compliance would strike at the foundations of the European legal system. That is why governments would – and indeed should – hesitate to trigger this “nuclear option.” But what if the declaration were presented as a reasoned appeal to the political judgment of the European Council and coupled with the promise that a (majority) vote affirming the ECJ decision would be obeyed? This would separate the protest against the ECJ from the charge of disloyalty to the Union.41
Whether the Council would accept the role thrust upon it by such a declaration is, of course, highly uncertain. If it did, however, the Union would finally have a forum42 and procedures43 in which the basic tension between the equally legitimate concerns of community and autonomy could be fairly resolved.44 Similarly welcome would be the probable effects on the jurisprudence of the Court itself. Faced with the possibility of political reversal in the Council, it could be expected to pay more systematic attention to the relative weight of national concerns that might justify minor impediments to the exercise of the Treaty-based liberties. If that were the case, European law – even in the absence of “republican” input legitimacy – would cease to be characterized by the single-minded pursuit of rampant “individualism” (Somek 2008).
41 As “good Europeans,” in other words, we should stop defining automatic compliance with any type of European rule as the criterion of our goodness. We should seek to strengthen the Eu-ropean political capacity for collective action through legislation and through enhanced ca-pabilities in the field of foreign and security policy. But we should also become critical of the anti-democratic effects of “integration through non-political judicial legislation.”
42 In order to ensure procedural viability, the Council would need to rely on the preparatory work of a permanent committee that would hear and evaluate the relevant claims and arguments. But the final decision would have to remain with the heads of governments.
43 In my view, the affirmation of the ECJ judgment should require only a simple majority in the Council.
44 Once introduced, the same rules might also be used to allow “conditional opt-outs” from the preemptive effect of the legislative acquis. This would ease the problems caused by the near-irreversibility of existing secondary law, and the possibility of later opt-outs could also facilitate political agreement on new legislation. A similar solution has been discussed in the context of federalism reform in Germany (Scharpf 2008). But these extensions go beyond the present ar-gument and their discussion would exceed the limits of this article.
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