Own debt, new prosecutor: Is the EU mutating into a state?

Friends of Europe are rejoicing: Since the 1st of June, the EU has got important new powers. From now on, Brussels will be allowed to take on massive new debts, and a European public prosecutor and a tax policy advisory team will also start work. Is the EU becoming a state?

“Historic”. These are the words used by EU expert L. Guttenberg of the Berlin Delors Institute to describe the fact that the EU is allowed to take on debts worth up to 750 billion euros – on behalf of all 27 member states.

The start of the European Public Prosecutor is also called historic. It is only supposed to investigate cases of fraud in the EU budget (for the time being) – but this will give new teeth to the European legal STATE, and the EU budget will be better protected.

Optimists already see the European Treasury, European taxes and finally the EU Finance Minister coming – quite logical steps on the way to an “ever closer union”, which are laid out in the two above-mentioned.

France in particular wants to move in this direction. President Macron and his Commission President von der Leyen are even talking about “European sovereignty”, which was used to justify the recent sanctions against Belarus.

But sovereignty presupposes a sovereign. This is missing, as is a real legislature and a European executive. The European Parliament is far too weak, and the laws that Brussels proposes must be executed by the member states.

So the EU is not a state, and it is not on the way to becoming one – much as some might wish it were. It is much more complicated – and also more problematic. For the EU Commission is appropriating more and more competences that otherwise only a state has.

It is thus becoming a state within the state, or an ancillary state, which has recently become involved not only in financial policy but also in health policy – without having a democratically legitimised mandate for this, not to mention parliamentary control.

This worries me, despite all the joy about the “historic” steps taken on 01.06.2021. Above all, the planned “health union” is worrying.

The EU did not come through the pandemic well, the mistakes were not dealt with, the Parliament is left out in the cold. Not a good basis for transferring competences to Brussels…

See also my e-book “Die Coronakrise und die EU: Todesstoß oder heilsamer Schock?” (in German)

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version). The original version (in German) is here