HEIDELBERG, Germany, Feb. 21 (UPI) -- In a bombshell article in Germany's Welt am Sonntag newspaper, former German President Roman Herzog launched a sharp attack on the European Union as a power-grabbing and increasingly unpopular institution that was giving the very concept of European integration a bad name.
"It cannot go on like this," Herzog wrote, in an unprecedented critique of the EU from a senior figure in a country that has traditionally been the banker and major supporter of the EU. And any future proposals for institutional reform should henceforth introduce the principle that the member states should be able to take back powers from the EU.
"Off the record, German politicians on a national and state level repeatedly express their criticisms and concerns at the developments being taken by European politics. But scarcely any of them is prepared to express these fears and concerns in public -- for fear that this could harm the ongoing unification process," Herzog wrote.
"But exactly the opposite would happen: the German population has progressed further than some politicians think. Most people have a fundamentally positive attitude to European integration," the former president said.
"But at the same time, they have an ever increasing feeling that something is going wrong, that an untransparent, complex, intricate mammoth institution has evolved, dissolved from factual problems and national traditions, grabbing ever greater competencies and areas of power; that the democratic control mechanisms are failing," he added.
To illustrate Herzog's point, consider the following developments that have emerged from the EU in recent days.
Last week, the EU Commission issued a directive to punish "environmental crimes" with EU-wide criminal penalties, over which there would be no power of national veto, despite the long-standing tradition that the criminal law should be a national, rather than EU-wide concern.
In a landmark case before the European Court of Justice, 11 of EU's then-15 member states opposed giving the EU the power to set criminal law for member states. No matter; the court ruled in 2005 that the EU could enact criminal penalties and offences, if required to achieve one of the "fundamental objectives of the treaties." This would mean, according to EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini, that the new European arrest warrant could be used to detain polluters and send them for trial in other member states.
The EU Commission has judged that the way to defeat the principle of national sovereignty is to use popular themes like anti-pollution to generate public support that would establish the principle that the EU should take over powers of justice, crime and punishment, rather than the nation states.
Germany, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency, appears happy to go along with this. It has proposed a new directive that says, "Each member state shall take the measures necessary to ensure that the following intentional conduct is punishable: publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivializing crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes".
That would seem to buttress Herzog's claim that the EU is grabbing ever more powers. And his charge that it is becoming a mammoth bureaucracy has been given force by a new calculation by the Open Europe group on the sheer scale of EU legislation. For years, the EU has claimed that there are 80,000 pages in its "acquis communautaire," the body of EU-wide rules and regulations to which each new EU member must sign up. It covers everything from the cleanliness of beaches and health and safety standards to price controls on consumer goods and what farmers are allowed to grow. Open Europe's new count reckons there are now 170,000 pages.
EU supporters contend that however power-grabbing and bureaucratic, the institution is at least setting decent and useful standards and bringing honest and fair-minded governance to countries like Spain and Portugal, which were emerging from fascist rule when they joined, or the former communist-run states of eastern Europe. Well, yes; except that OLAF, the EU's anti-fraud office, reported last week that fraud in the EU institutions is running at more than $4 million a day, with the total cost of fraud adding up to $8.8 between 1999 and 2005.
And the prestigious French daily le Monde reported this week that the EU Commission has quietly resolved to delay several "sensitive" legal actions against France in several potentially controversial areas such as postal liberalization, wine-growing and nitrate pollution in order to keep the issue of Europe out of the campaign for the French presidency. Two years ago, to widespread shock in the EU headquarters in Brussels, the French voted 'No' in a referendum that would have ratified a new EU constitution, and the Eurocrats of Brussels want no more such shocks from the voters in future.
The Dutch also voted 'No' in their referendum on the constitution. No matter. The Eurocrats are pressing ahead anyway. In his inaugural speech, the new President of the European Parliament Hans-Gert Poettering declared: "We intend to help to ensure that under the German Council Presidency a road map and a mandate are agreed at the summit in Brussels on 21 and 22 June, as the outcome of which full implementation of the substantive core of the European Constitution will be in place by the next European Parliament elections in 2009."
Poettering went on to attack "national selfishness", arguing that countries that had signed up to the treaty have a duty to ratify it, despite the referendum 'No' votes. That would seem to establish a new slogan for the EU -- "no democracy, please. We're Europeans."
All this helps explain not just those no votes, but also the fervor at ex-President Herzog's remarkable attack on the EU. As Herzog suggests, the way the EU operates is giving the idea of Europe a bad name, even to those who support the basic concept of European integration.
