On the Character of the EU and its Budget; Look into the Future

Abstract

The paper aspires to find the reasons for allegedly slow and inefficient decision-making in the EU and in doing so also tries to predict what the future challenges mean for the organisational structure of the EU. It argues that, due to asymmetric challenges, consensus should remain a European asset and that increased heterogeneity of preferences due to rising EU membership is in fact not the major culprit of inefficient decision-making. The paper shows that at least in the medium term the combination of another two factors should be blamed instead: firstly, the blurred division of responsibilities and secondly, the budgetary procedure, which gives incentives to the Member States to approve policies without (sufficient) value-added to the EU. The paper makes a concrete proposal how the budgetary process should be improved in order also to remedy the decision-making inefficiency problem.