How multi-speed can Europe be?

As European leaders head to Rome this weekend to contemplate the EU’s future, there is an elephant in the room, and it is not actually Brexit. It is the question of whether the EU is ultimately reaching the zenith of the harmonising push begun with the creation of the single market thirty years ago. The logic of Brussels has always been that unity follows uniformity. One of the more interesting subtexts in Rome will be the idea that one path to unity may be to accept – even encourage – differences. In Versailles a few weeks ago when France, Germany, Spain and Italy met and formally restarted the multi-speed debate, French President François Hollande proclaimed that “unity does not equal uniformity”.

For a long time, the European Commission and most member states often resisted such a conclusion. Nearly every piece of legislation under former European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso emphasised harmonisation, with Barroso himself suggesting the EU treaties be amended to give EU authorities more power. Sometimes – as after the banking crisis – this has had a clear and relatively convincing rationale. Sometimes it seemed more like a habit. The Commission under Jean-Claude Juncker has put more emphasis on doing less and better regulation. There has been more of an emphasis on growth through moderated liberalisation, in areas like Capital Markets Union and the Digital Single Market, rather than a drive for regulatory harmonisation. But the Commission’s bias to harmonisation (under its direction) remains exceptionally strong.

Nevertheless, the Rome declaration explicitly raises the possibility that Europe might be a loose convoy on a shared journey rather than flying in formation to a fixed destination. Words like “undivided”, “unity” and “solidarity” spill across the pages. But so does the suggestion that member states can “act together, at different paces and intensity where necessary, while moving in the same direction”. This puts a multi-speed Europe explicitly on the table.

So what does a multi-speed Europe actually mean? In some respects, a multi-speed Europe already exists. The Schengen area, the Eurozone and the “enhanced cooperation” procedure all attest to this. Yet it has never been formally recognised as an EU principle. If finally laid out, it might make it easier for Germany and France to pursue aspects of a European Defence Union, facilitate the plans of Greece and Malta to introduce a “Social Pillar” and reduce fears over EU enlargement – always a delicate issue - if possible for some member states to move forward in certain areas despite the potential inability (or unwillingness) of newer members to do so.

It is a fair question to ask whether the line-up of election-facing leaders and caretaker governments in Rome are in much of a position to make big decisions about the future of the EU as many will change over coming year. But the underlying question of how to think about the need or desirability for further European integration remains. Scepticism about talk of a multi-speed EU in Rome is nonetheless probably warranted, but for a different reason.

This is that the EU is still primarily a consensus-building machine. Experience has shown that the idea of “different paces and intensity” is politically problematic. Even states like the Benelux countries, that have expressed support for the idea, can balk at the reality. States don’t like being left behind. They fear that enhanced cooperation can create path dependencies in EU policy that then become hard to change, especially if they are set in capitals like Berlin and Paris. The Visegrad 4 and the Baltics all fear that multi-speed means less influence over the long-term trend in policy. Even if the principle is agreed, agreeing where and how to use it is likely to be the basic political problem. Unity (not least in the face of a departing UK) may or may not need uniformity. The question will be whether major policy change needs it.