Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

After ‘Qatargate’: how to protect democracy in the EU

Lola Avril, Emilia Korkea-aho and Antoine Vauchez 16th December 2022

The Gulf state’s pursuit of influence shines a light on a systemic problem for the EU—and it’s not a good look.

Qatargate,European Parliament,influence,corruption,ethics,lobbying,conflicts of interest,revolving door,Barroso
‘It takes years to build trust but just a moment to bring it down’—the European Parliament president, Roberta Metsola, facing reporters during the European Council meeting this week

For the past week, the European Union has been shaken by a scandal whose scope has yet to be established. While the case is extreme on the scale of corruption, what it unearths may well be less remarkable—it being merely another, if crude, reminder of how EU democracy and its long chain of decision-making are under continuous, powerful pressure.

EU policy-makers have recurrently been confronted with the ethics question, ever since the resignation of the European Commission under Jacques Santer in 1999 facing allegations of corruption. In 2012 the health commissioner John Dalli was required to resign over claims of trading in influence by the tobacco industry (which he contested) and in 2016 the former commission president José Manuel Barroso was accused of a conflict of interest when he became chair of Goldman Sachs International less than two years after standing down.

Such episodes have prompted waves of ad hoc initiatives but to no avail. Worse, from the repeated warnings on such conflicts by the European ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, to the report in March by the MEP Raphaël Glucksmann on ‘foreign interference in EU democratic processes’, signs from all quarters have indicated that EU decision-making isnot only increasingly exposed but ill-equipped to face the challenge.

Profound underestimation

There has been a profound underestimation of the deficit of public integrity in the EU and its diffuse costs for democracy. It may not come as a surprise to sociologists that elites, and political elites in particular, have a propensity to minimise and euphemise this problem. Yet their failure is particularly striking in the case of the EU—the critical gatekeeper to the regulation of the largest internal market in the world and a unique access point for large corporations and foreign governments seeking to reach hundreds of millions of consumers and millions of firms.


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

The EU has also repeatedly misjudged the costs of conflicts of interest and corruption. These are not primarily the damage to reputations of institutions (the commission or the European Parliament) or individuals (MEPs and senior officials). Rather, they impair our collective capacity legitimately to address the issues of European import which lie ahead: war and peace, ecological destruction, soaring inequalities and so on.

Given this lack of recognition of the problem, it is not surprising that EU policy-makers have repeatedly failed to redress it. Disparate and discrete reforms have ranged from optional transparency registers to consultative ethics committees, with no real investigative or decision-making powers.

The commission’s ‘ad hoc ethical committee’, created to regulate commissioners’ circulation through revolving doors to the private sector, is a case in point. Renamed the ‘independent ethical committee’ in 2018, after revision of the code of conduct for commission members, it has shown very few teeth. Dependent on the initiative of the general secretariat of the commission to request its opinions, and composed of three former European notables (generally from the Court of Justice of the EU, the commission and the parliament), it has become a tool to protect the institution’s reputation rather than an instrument of scrutiny.

Moreover, there has been an over-reliance on the regulatory capacity of transparency measures: the (non-compulsory) transparency register of lobbyists, the meetings diaries for commissioners, directors-general of the commission and select groups of MEPs, the codes of conduct (for lobbyists and commissioners) and so on. The underlying assumption is that publicity (or the fear of it) will be an incentive strong enough to transform behaviour.

Transparency is certainly useful to nongovernmental organisations, journalists and researchers documenting the everyday life of EU institutions and holding them accountable. Indeed more is needed, as many shadows remain, particularly when it comes to MEPs or senior commission officials. Yet, given the weakness of European civil society, the transformative capacity of transparency has been greatly exaggerated.

New strategy

What could, then, be the pillars of a new strategy in defence of democratic institutions and decision-making?

First must come acquisition of the fuller knowledge indispensable to a genuine comprehension of the scale of the problem. The parliamentary committee of inquiry on the Qatar case should have a broad mandate to assess the systemic threats and webs of interests which weigh on EU public decisions. This should go hand in hand with creation of a Permanent Observatory of Public Ethics, endowed with the means to accumulate the knowledge needed accurately to map the potential threats across time, institutions and policy domains.

This in turn could foster a public conversation among Europeans about the permeability we are prepared to accept between the public sphere and the private sector or, rather, the protection we can build around EU democracy, its representatives and decision-makers. The elections to the parliament in 2024 could provide an opportunity to discuss these incompatibilities and associated conflict-of-interest rules for MEPs, commissioners, other senior officials and member-state representatives—in service but also post-service.


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

Secondly, defence of the integrity of EU democracy requires leaving behind the preference for secrecy, soft-law and self-regulation. Many have proposed a new, inter-institutional ethics body with investigative and enforcement powers. Its mission would be to audit the sincerity and comprehensiveness of officials’ or lobbyists’ declarations and to adjudicate on the admissibility of passage through revolving doors. This would put all actors involved in EU decision-making under the same public scrutiny.

Yet one should not place too much hope in the redeeming power of such an administrative body either. Experience has shown that it is not enough to create a new agency merely charged with pursuing the lack of, or flaws in, declaratory statements (on interests, meetings and so on). The French Haute autorité pour la transparence de la vie publique, on which such proposals are modelled, has revealed its own shortcomings in detecting conflicts of interests.

What the current corruption case shows is the critical importance of criminal law and inquiry when it comes to piercing the veil of corruption and protecting the public interest. Yet Qatargate is revealing too the great dependence of EU democracy on national police and judicial systems: the Belgian police are in charge of the investigation on suspected corruption in the parliament.

Our collective reliance on the police services of the member states in which EU institutions are located is all the more worrying, given the significant decline in rule-of-law standards in a number of member states. In this context, the EU must equip itself with services capable of autonomously carrying out these investigations and dealing with these cases of corruption, if it is even to apply effectively the rules already in force.

It’s time to consider EU democracy and decision-making as Europe’s most precious public good—and arm ourselves accordingly.

Lola Avril
Lola Avril

Lola Avril is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Eastern Finland.

Emilia Korkea aho 1
Emilia Korkea-aho

Emilia Korkea-aho is professor of European law at the University of Eastern Finland.

Pics 2
Antoine Vauchez

Antoine Vauchez is the Centre national de la recherche scientifique research professor in political sociology at the Université Paris 1-Sorbonne.

You are here: Home / Politics / After ‘Qatargate’: how to protect democracy in the EU

Most Popular Posts

Visentini,ITUC,Qatar,Fight Impunity,50,000 Visentini, ‘Fight Impunity’, the ITUC and QatarFrank Hoffer
Russian soldiers' mothers,war,Ukraine The Ukraine war and Russian soldiers’ mothersJennifer Mathers and Natasha Danilova
IGU,documents,International Gas Union,lobby,lobbying,sustainable finance taxonomy,green gas,EU,COP ‘Gaslighting’ Europe on fossil fuelsFaye Holder
Schengen,Fortress Europe,Romania,Bulgaria Romania and Bulgaria stuck in EU’s second tierMagdalena Ulceluse
income inequality,inequality,Gini,1 per cent,elephant chart,elephant Global income inequality: time to revise the elephantBranko Milanovic

Most Recent Posts

transition,deindustrialisation,degradation,environment Europe’s industry and the ecological transitionCharlotte Bez and Lorenzo Feltrin
central and eastern Europe,unions,recognition Social dialogue in central and eastern EuropeMartin Myant
women soldiers,Ukraine Ukraine war: attitudes changing to women soldiersJennifer Mathers and Anna Kvit
military secrets,World Trade Organization,WTO,NATO,intellectual-property rights Military secrets and the World Trade OrganizationUgo Pagano
energy transition,Europe,wind and solar Europe’s energy transition starts to speed upDave Jones

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Discover the new FEPS Progressive Yearbook and what 2023 has in store for us!

The Progressive Yearbook focuses on transversal European issues that have left a mark on 2022, delivering insightful future-oriented analysis for the new year. It counts on renowned authors' contributions, including academics, politicians and analysts. This fourth edition is published in a time of war and, therefore, it mostly looks at the conflict itself, the actors involved and the implications for Europe.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

Social policy in the European Union: state of play 2022

Since 2000, the annual Bilan social volume has been analysing the state of play of social policy in the European Union during the preceding year, the better to forecast developments in the new one. Co-produced by the European Social Observatory (OSE) and the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), the new edition is no exception. In the context of multiple crises, the authors find that social policies gained in ambition in 2022. At the same time, the new EU economic framework, expected for 2023, should be made compatible with achieving the EU’s social and ‘green’ objectives. Finally, they raise the question whether the EU Social Imbalances Procedure and Open Strategic Autonomy paradigm could provide windows of opportunity to sustain the EU’s social ambition in the long run.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound webinar: Making telework work for everyone

Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.

To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.


WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube