European where necessary, national where possible

“The time of an ‘ever closer union’ in every possible policy area is behind us”. So say the Dutch Government in their review of subsidiarity published today, a really important contribution to the debate on the future of Europe. You can find a press release in English here.

Over the last few months, Dutch experts have developed a list of areas in which they think that EU action contravenes the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality. These principles say that the EU should act only when its member states can’t do something effectively by acting individually, and that when the EU does act, it should do only what is strictly necessary to achieve that goal.

The Dutch summarise it neatly as ‘European where necessary, national where possible’. From the provision of consular services, to improving the gender balance on boards, they think that action should basically be taken at a national level, closer to the Dutch people.

In our Balance of Competences Review, the British government is carrying out our own evidence-gathering exercise. Issue by issue, it will examine what the EU does, drawing on contributions from business, civil society and a whole range of interested groups.

We’ll shortly be publishing the first six of 32 reports. Our reports won’t be making policy recommendations; these are for political parties and others to put forward. But we hope that our work will be a valuable analytical contribution to the debate, in the UK and beyond: 40 years after joining the European Economic Community, we need to understand properly what our EU membership means.

We’re pleased that the Dutch government have said that they will contribute their subsidiarity review as evidence to our Balance of Competences exercise, and agree with them on the need for reform to be for the EU as a whole.

Across Europe, people, their parliaments and their governments are increasingly asking the same sort of questions, based on the same sort of concerns: how we deal with the issues arising from the Eurozone crisis, how we strengthen Europe’s long-term competitiveness, and how we make the EU more democratically accountable.

In a recent interview German Chancellor Merkel asked whether we shouldn’t consider where things might be better  done at a local level rather than a European level, and made clear that Europe’s value was not measured by the growth in EU law. In another she said she didn’t think there was a need to transfer even more rights to the European Commission in the coming years. I think she’s right.

The Dutch review has offered some useful pointers on where we need to look again. I look forward to taking forward the conversation with our partners in the Netherlands and across Europe on how we can work together to build the more open, competitive, flexible and democratic European Union that we all need.