European Papers (Feb 2021)
Neither Representation nor Values? Or, 'Europe's Moment' - Part II
Abstract
(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2020 5(3), 1101-1104 | Editorial | (Abstract) Part I of this Editorial dealt with the interrelation between representation and taxation reflected in the measures adopted or envisaged by the EU institutions to face the COVID-19 pandemic. There is, however, another relationship which is at stake in these turbulent days. Representation also entails the existence of a set of distinctive values shared by a community, whose protection and promotion should be shared by its representatives. This conceptual scheme, simplistic as it may be, can help us understand the story of the conditionality mechanism designed to exclude EU Member States (MS) which violate the Union’s fundamental values from the financial assistance provided for by the Next Generation EU (NGEU) project. As is well know, this mechanism is established by Regulation 2020/2092 of the European Parliament and of the Council, of 16 December 2020, on a general regime of conditionality for the protection of the Union budget. It is equally notorious that, prior to its approval, the European Council adopted, with the usual method of consensus, a declaration related to its implementation, incorporated in its Conclusions of the meeting of 10 and 11 December 2020. The idea promoted by the political declaration of the European Council – that violations of the rule of law come within the scope of the Regulation only if this violation produces a detrimental impact of the principle of the sound financial management – is therefore untenable, in legal logic no less than legal ethics. There would be no need to make a Regulation to determine that conduct of a MS affecting the sound financial management of EU funds are in breach of EU law; Art. 310, para. 5, and the existing rules implementing it would have been more than sufficient. Nor should the declaration be regarded as an intelligent expedient necessary to overcome the objections of Poland and Hungary. These MS perceived Regulation 2020/2092 as a serious obstacle to the pursuit of their own model of illiberal democracy within the Union and did not shy away from threatening to veto the new decision on own resources and on the Multiannual financial framework i.e. the financial sources of NGEU.Regulation 2020/2092 symbolically expresses a very basic paradigm: participation in the integration project entails the sharing of its fundamental values. Its unconditioned adoption, therefore, would have transposed the discourse on Union’s values from axiology to law; it would have definitively established the Union as a community of values; it would have constituted a revolutionary start for a new phase of the process of integration. To have given all this up in the name of a political compromise has indelibly stained this European moment.
Keywords
