LONDON — Last month’s referendum in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union left George Soros, the legendary billionaire investor, dismayed. Two days after British voters narrowly agreed to exit the EU — “Brexit” — Soros penned an opinion piece bemoaning the result, concluding that while Britain’s vote was senseless and economically disastrous, the EU itself was “broken down.” It is, he wrote, a “flawed construction” that no longer satisfies the needs and aspirations of its citizens and is speeding toward a “disorderly disintegration.”
The Brexit vote was the latest, albeit biggest, crisis to rattle the nearly 60-year-old project in recent years. After decades of mainly producing peace, stability and economic growth in a continent rent by two 20 th-century world wars, the EU has struggled with the aftershocks of a poorly conceived currency, the euro, a monetary union that left it ill-equipped to deal with the effects of the global Great Recession of 2008. As a consequence, it’s been saddled with a weak recovery that’s created deep pockets of unemployment — particularly among youths — in many countries, risks sliding into deflation and remains stuck in low growth. Oh, and it’s also bungled the worst migrant crisis since World War II.
The only hope of saving the EU is “by thoroughly reconstructing it,” wrote Soros, adding his voice to the many now calling for EU reform. Indeed, the EU’s remaining 27 heads of state, meeting days after the U.K. referendum, also pledged to overhaul the institution.
There’s just one problem. Beyond the general agreement that reforms are necessary, there’s little or no consensus on what they should be.
“It’s not easy to identify how to reform the EU, because each member state wants something different,” says Richard Whitman, a professor of politics and international relations at the University of Kent.
Some members believe the EU would work better as a looser confederation and want less integration. Others think that deeper integration toward a federal system is the answer, but they also realize that that would be a tough sell to voters anytime soon, given the anti-EU mood in many countries.
Nevertheless, more political and fiscal consolidation could help fix some of the euro’s problems. A common currency that exists absent a political union causes more problems than it solves during economic downturns, when there’s no federal government to automatically handle the transferring of financial resources to the hardest hit regions.
But even among members who champion a more federalist EU, there’s scant agreement on what it should entail.
Countries racked by stagnant growth and high joblessness may favor a fiscal union that would allow increased public spending and acceptance of slightly higher levels of inflation during low-growth periods to jump start their moribund economies.
But that approach is anathema to Germany, the EU’s economic powerhouse and de facto leader, which still insists on strict adherence to tight fiscal targets and spending cuts to meet them.
A more federal EU might better handle its ongoing migrant crisis. More than a million migrants and refugees — mostly from war-torn Syria — streamed into Europe last year, and they continue to arrive this year by the tens of thousands. Compromise solutions have largely left poorer countries, like Greece and Italy, to deal with the problem with little assistance.
[READ: Greek volunteers at the spear point of the migrant crisis]
“You need more harmonization of asylum, but that’s hugely controversial” and difficult to achieve when each member is essentially doing its own thing, says Stefan Lehne, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, a Brussels think tank.
Ironically, the Brexit vote wasn’t directly fueled by the problems of the euro and the migrant crisis, given that the U.K. was mostly unaffected by them. It’s retained its own currency, the pound, and only a small fraction of migrants have made their way to Britain.
The main issue that drove Brexit was legal immigration from the EU, mainly young workers from Eastern and Central Europe. Free movement of labor is one of the single market’s cornerstone rights, Lehne says, and it’s highly unlikely that it will ever be up for debate.
[READ: Anger at EU immigration fuels the Brexit movement]
It’s also not a necessary reform because it’s not a problem elsewhere in the EU, he adds. When the EU added 10 new members in 2004 — including eight former Eastern Bloc countries — 12 of the existing members instituted “transitional controls” that effectively blocked immigration from them. The U.K. (as well as Sweden and Ireland) did not because it greatly underestimated how many immigrants it would attract from those regions.
Brexit’s other driving force was about sovereignty. There’s widespread sentiment in Britain that the EU is undemocratic, tone deaf to the issues of working people and imposes its will on national governments. And that perception is also strong and growing across Europe. A recent Pew Research Center poll found dwindling levels of support for the EU in many member states.
The EU’s growing lack of public approval also makes major reforms unattainable any time soon, even if an agreed set of solutions were reached. That’s because they would entail a treaty change, which would require referenda in at least four member countries — a risky proposition, as Brexit proved.
“A referendum would be a wonderful mobilizing tool for EU opponents,” Lehne says. “This is not an option.”
The EU is not as undemocratic as it can seem. The 751 members of the EU Parliament are directly elected. It works in tandem on legislation and budgets with the Council of the European Union, which is a separate body composed of cabinet ministers of member states, who are elected members of their own country’s parliaments. Yet another body, the European Commission, is made up one representative from each member country and runs the daily operations of the EU. It proposes legislation, then implements what’s passed.
Nevertheless, the EU is not a political entity. Indeed, it was structured to operate as a technocracy to avoid political dogfights, particularly in the council. “The raison d’etre of the organization is defusing tensions between countries by avoiding politics,” Whitman says. Its mode of operation is consensus. “The Council generally does not like to actually vote,” he explains, “because no country wants to be seen on the losing side.”
However, its sidestepping of legislative skirmishes has proved to be its Achilles heel. Politics can be messy, Whitman says, but it provides a necessary public outlet for opposing points of view and acts as a check on bad ideas. “It would be better if the council operated more like other political bodies and there were political tussles.” Whitman says that’s another reform unlikely to gain traction.
There is, however, one change that wouldn’t require a structural makeover that could potentially give the public a greater sense of involvement in EU lawmaking: focusing more attention on the EU Parliament. Lehne argues that the Parliament is an equal partner of the Council, but most citizens don’t understand that it’s their representative conduit to EU lawmaking. Voter turnout in EU parliamentary elections across Europe is always extremely low — some voters don’t even realize there are elections — mainly because they’re not a priority for national political parties.
“There are no real links between the Parliament and the public,” Lehne says. “That is the flaw.” But it, too, is one likely to go unrepaired, he adds, because national political parties don’t care about EU parliamentary elections. “They’re too worried about losing the next (national) election.” And these days, defending the EU seems like a sure-fire way to turn off voters.
More from U.S. News
Anger at Immigration Fuels the U.K.’s Brexit Movement
Brexit and the Future of the Governmental Unit
Brexit Can Lead the Way to a Stronger and Freer Europe
Is a Makeover Realistic for the European Union? originally appeared on usnews.com
