Introduction

This chapter expands the discussion of the previous one, introducing additional proposals that could gear the Brussels-based decision-making apparatus more towards the common good. It addresses the following questions: What institutional reforms at the EU level, if any, could facilitate the pursuit of the common good? Under what conditions would they be feasible? I argue that a revised supranational framework of representative, participatory, and consultative bodies is both desirable and feasible. More specifically, I present the following proposals: (i) enhancing the level of impartiality of the European Commission by clearly separating its legislative and supervisory tasks; (ii) directly electing the presidents of the Commission and the European Council; (iii) adopting transnational lists for the elections for the European Parliament and strengthening the links between the European and the national parliaments; (iv) creating an EU Citizens’ Assembly; and (v) launching an advisory body of former presidents of the EU institutions.

I claim that these institutional reforms would further orient the functioning of EU institutions towards the common good in a variety of ways. To begin with, a more impartial bureaucratic apparatus would be less vulnerable to the interests of the national administrations, thus being in a better position to realise the common good. Similarly, directly electing the presidents of the European Commission and European Council would make these officials accountable to all EU citizens, prompting them to put forward agendas that articulate the diversity of interests in a balanced manner. Furthermore, adopting transnational lists for the European Parliament would lead the political parties of the different member states to work together within common political platforms, turning each MEP into a representative of all European citizens rather than a representative of their compatriots. In turn, creating an EU Citizens’ Assembly would give EU citizens a meaningful chance to debate common challenges and shape the agenda of the other EU institutions. Finally, a body of former EU leaders could bring valuable expertise and organisational memory to enlighten the present-day choices. This renewed institutional setting would place the common good at the heart of EU policymaking.

Enhancing the European Commission’s impartiality

In Chapter 3, I have presented a strategy to strengthen the European Commission’s capacity to “promote the general interest of the Union” by upgrading the role of the Representations of the Commission in the member states.¹ Yet, what should be said about the “two levels of action” of the Commission based in Brussels, namely the College of Commissioners and the sectoral Directorates-General, which design and supervise the implementation of EU policies?² How should these two levels share the Commission’s extensive competences if they are to jointly promote the general interest?

In the previous chapter, I have also suggested that the decisions by the Commission’s bureaucratic apparatus should be impartial vis-à-vis the different member states. Yet why exactly is impartiality instrumental to the realisation of the common good in the EU polity? Isn’t there a trade-off between promoting impartial decision-making by the Commission, on the one hand, and making the latter more democratically accountable to its citizens, on the other hand? Furthermore, is there a need to change or to expand the Commission’s competences, as it has been argued?³ If so, would this be politically feasible? To sum up, what institutional reforms, if any, could strengthen the Commission’s role as an enabler of the common good in the EU?

Let me begin by explaining why impartiality is a core requisite for a Commission that effectively promotes the common good. By impartial decision-making, I mean that “official judgements and reports should be based on objective and relevant criteria, without bias or prejudice, and not take sides”.⁴ Impartiality involves treating every member state as an equal “rather than necessarily treating them in exactly the same way” since certain commonly agreed rules and goals “may be objectively judged to require different treatment”.⁵ Consider, for example, the uneven distribution of EU structural funds across the member states with a view to promoting social cohesion, as prescribed by the TEU.⁶ Ensuring impartiality in this sense is crucial given that, as we have seen in Chapter 3, the EU is a politically, economically and culturally diverse polity. Given that the governments of the EU member states often pursue conflicting national interests and their power to shape EU policy outcomes is asymmetrically distributed, only an impartial body can ensure the implementation of the common rules and policies and can adjudicate conflicting interests in a fair and credible manner. Given its autonomy from the national administrations, the Commission’s “second level of action” – that is, the sectoral Directorates-General – is well placed to perform this role.

A question that follows is how this need to promote impartial decision-making by a bureaucratic apparatus can be reconciled with the demands of democracy.⁷ To address this issue in the specific EU institutional context, we might find it useful to note that the Commission holds two powers of a very different nature: (i) legislative initiative and (ii) supervision and enforcement of the application of EU rules and policies by the member states. First, the Commission is the only body in the EU institutional framework that can present legislative proposals, even if it often does so at the request of the Council and the European Parliament.⁸ This prerogative means that the Commission is presently the leading EU actor as far as agenda-setting is concerned.⁹ Second, the Commission is responsible for overseeing the implementation of a wide range of EU laws, policies, and programmes by the national governments, and it can launch measures against non-compliant member states, notably infringement procedures. This supervisory role covers aspects as varied as compliance with the EU anti-trust rules, enforcement of the EU consumer protection standards and the use of EU funds under the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP). Accordingly, the Commission has been described as “the guardian of the EU treaties”.¹⁰

We might then ask to which of these different roles should the requirement of impartiality primarily apply? From the standpoint of the common good, there should be a clear preference for combining the adoption of common rules and policies through democratic processes with an impartial oversight of their implementation. On the one hand, many legislative choices in EU policy fields (such as trade, competition, and data protection) raise difficult moral dilemmas, which leave room for competing views of what the common exactly entails. Consider, for instance, the diverse understandings of the implications of free trade and the use of artificial intelligence. As I will argue in the following sections, this calls for further efforts to democratise policymaking at the EU level. On the other hand, any common law or policy will likely only succeed in advancing the common good if it is systemically applied by all the member states. Given that the distribution of the benefits and burdens of EU policies is often uneven, compliance will likely only be widespread if an impartial supervision mechanism is established. This observation suggests that a division of responsibilities within the Commission comprising the democratic use of legislative initiative by the College of Commissioners and the impartial oversight of the EU laws and policies by the several Directorates-General is desirable.

However, the current allocation of tasks between the “two levels of action” of the Commission fails to fully realise this principle. Indeed, the current mix of legislative and supervisory tasks across both levels has led an author to describe the Commission as a “politicised bureaucracy”.¹¹ This “dualism” may have far-reaching implications for the common good.¹² To illustrate the point, consider the rules put forward by the Stability and Growth Pact and the corresponding mechanism to address noncompliance with them – that is, the excessive deficit procedure. This framework was agreed by all the member states to ensure financial stability in the EU and to prevent negative externalities.¹³ Yet, given that, as has been observed, excessive deficit procedures are often exposed to political interference, there is the risk that special treatment may be granted to certain powerful non-compliant states.¹⁴ The same line of reasoning extends to the enforcement of EU competition rules. Given that the Commissioner for Competition is responsible for determining the permissibility of corporate mergers, the results of some merger efforts could be shaped by the sitting commissioner’s political ideology and the objectives of the government appointing them.¹⁵

A more effective use of the powers of legislative initiative and supervision for the common good could be achieved by ensuring simultaneously that (i) the College of Commissioners has a compelling democratic mandate to shape the rules that govern the EU polity but (ii) refrains from interfering in their application. This approach would imply two significant changes in the status quo. First, the Commission’s supervisory duties would exclusively be fulfilled by its Directorates-General. Leaving supervisory tasks with the EU bureaucrats rather than the cabinets of EU Commissioners would likely foster impartiality because EU civil servants are functionally and financially independent from the national administrations.¹⁶ Therefore, this would contribute to an impartial oversight of the common rules. It should be added that implementing this reform would not require an EU treaty change since it would merely imply a reallocation of competences within the Commission. Second, the College of Commissioners would have a stronger voice vis-à-vis the Commission bureaucracy when designing the common rules and policies to be enforced by the Eurocrats. As I will claim below, a more robust mandate granted through the direct election of the Commission’s president would facilitate the adoption of more ambitious measures for the common good.

A more difficult issue is whether the expansion of the current competences of the Commission would be desirable from the standpoint of the common good. To address this question, we might find it useful to distinguish two dimensions in which the distribution of competences in the EU polity could be revised. On the one hand, one might increase the fiscal capacity of the EU, namely by launching a supranational tax. As I have argued in Chapter 3, this is a critical condition for the EU to pursue the common good more consistently. Indeed, once equipped with autonomous sources of revenue, EU institutions would not need to undergo lengthy negotiations regarding interstate transfers each time a new EU policy was needed. Consider, for example, the launch of the Recovery and Resilience Facility to address the dramatic social and economic consequences of COVID-19, which required extended intergovernmental negotiations. On the other hand, one could delegate additional competences to the Commission in certain policy areas, including social policy, education and defence. Here, it is difficult to provide a single and categorical answer, particularly given the trade-off between enhancing supranational response capacity and maintaining a desirable degree of national autonomy.¹⁷ In Chapter 5, I will discuss strategies by which a balance between these two concerns could be struck in the three policy areas just mentioned. In any case, an expansion of the Commission’s policy competences should go hand in hand with a democratisation agenda, such as the one presented below.

Electing the presidents of the European Commission and the European Council

I have suggested that the Commission’s political leadership should have a strong democratic mandate to make use of the power of legislative initiative to advance the common good. However, the College of Commissioners faces important constraints that reduce its ability to pursue this goal. To begin with, the Commission’s president is selected through an untransparent bargaining process between the heads of the national governments that is typically conducted behind the scenes.¹⁸ This opaque process has often led to the nomination of individuals who are unknown to the wider public and whose agendas were not publicly scrutinised before their appointment. For this reason, the presidents of the Commission have a relatively weak mandate to pursue the common good, particularly when this implies significant changes in the status quo. Indeed, whatever ambitious proposals they may have will be vulnerable to strong opposition by the national governments, which can claim that such proposals were never consented to by their constituencies. Furthermore, each commissioner is allowed to recruit a limited staff of their choice, thus being largely dependent on the advice and guidance of the Directorates-General.¹⁹ This dependence means that the EU bureaucracy can, to a considerable extent, shape the political action of the College. These constraints are reinforced by the length of the EU legislative process, which leaves the College with a short window of opportunity to push its agenda forward.²⁰

At the same time, the lack of EU-wide elections where the political leadership of the Commission could be held accountable for EU policies transfers the task of rewarding and punishing these policies to the national elections, potentially fuelling interstate cleavages.²¹ To illustrate the point, consider the debate about austerity measures during the financial crisis of 2008–2012. Thus, the competing views on austerity were represented mainly by national politicians, notably the minister of finance of Germany, Wolfgang Schäuble, and the successive finance ministers of Greece, including Yanis Varoufakis, rather than by elected officials at the EU level and their challengers from other political parties. This model of “politicisation of European integration”, characterised by the aggregation of preferences regarding EU policies at the national level, makes transnational political compromises more difficult and reinforces the vacuum of agency described in Chapter 3.²² Given that “national politics are still the crucial arena for the politicisation of European integration”, domestic parties have strong incentives to support EU policies that benefit their constituencies.²³ Even the governments that would ideologically be willing to make more significant concessions for the common good have electoral incentives to pursue national interests at the EU level. As a result, there may not be any agent at the EU level with an effective mandate and appropriate resources to pursue the common good.

In view of this landscape, moving to direct elections for the Commission presidency would be a crucial step forward. In fact, candidates aspiring to become Commission president would be expected to present their priorities and policy proposals, which would be subject to public scrutiny. Given the EU demographics, they would likely need to advance a balanced agenda that accommodates different national perspectives to enhance their chances of being elected.²⁴ Furthermore, a requirement to achieve a majority in a two-round election in a pan-European constituency would give the new president a robust mandate to pursue reforms since the argument of a lack of a democratic basis would no longer be available.²⁵ The extension of the term of office of any president would now presuppose re-election, thus correcting the current lack of accountability of the Commission’s political leadership.²⁶ This effort to democratise the Commission’s leadership should go hand in hand with the allocation of appropriate resources to pursue its mission, namely the ability of EU Commissioners to build their own teams based on criteria of political confidence. Admittedly, launching elections could take some of the pressure to block costly EU policies for the common good away from national governments. National elections would not need to be used to assess the policies of the governments at the EU level because there would be several elections focused on EU affairs.²⁷

This line of reasoning extends to the European Council, which brings together the heads of government of all member states to provide “general political directions and priorities” to the Union, which may have a strong impact on the configuration of EU policies.²⁸ This applies particularly to periods of EU crises, in which the president of the European Council plays a critical role by orchestrating solutions and building consensus at the supranational level.²⁹ While most leaders sitting in the Council have been elected by their national electorates, its president is selected through the rather untransparent bargaining process mentioned above. If it is true that, since the creation of this public office by the Treaty of Lisbon, the president of the European Council turned out to be regularly selected amongst those elected national leaders, it is also true that the newly appointed presidents were scrutinised only by the constituency of a single member state. Again, by the time of their appointment, they were largely unknown by the European public, and most EU citizens never had the chance to scrutinise their vision for the EU. Therefore, along the lines of what I have argued regarding the Commission, democratic scrutiny would give the presidents of the European Council a stronger mandate to seek the common good.

Yet how would the elections for the presidency of the Commission and the European Council work in practice? Would they be feasible? Elections for Commission president could be held concurrently with the existing European parliamentary elections that select MEPs. Considering their collaborative functions in the EU’s legislative framework, it would be logical for the political terms of the Commission and the European Parliament to remain synchronised.³⁰ In turn, the election for the presidency of the European Council could take place at different times, given that the political cycle of the 27 member states that comprise it is not aligned with the EU’s.³¹ This division in electoral momentum across the Union would have the advantage of increasing the regularity of democratic scrutiny at the EU level and clearly separating the elections for the bodies that follow a supranational logic from the one that follows an intergovernmental approach. While reforming the procedures to appoint the leadership of EU institutions would require changes in the EU treaties, reforms to enhance the EU’s legitimacy could recruit widespread support among EU citizens. In fact, it has been argued that “people support reforms in these areas independently from their stance regarding the political conflict over Europe”.³²

Creating an assembly of EU citizens

As I argued in Chapter 2, the EU member states share a list of EU values that provide a common moral standpoint from which policy options can be assessed. However, as I have also suggested, the policy implications of these values are not always straightforward. Given their abstract nature, competing interpretations of what these public values entail in practice may exist. For instance, while all member states have endorsed the values of solidarity and liberty by ratifying the EU treaties, their citizens may have different views on how EU institutions should apply those values in practice. These differences may have significant policy implications in fields such as cohesion policy and trade policy. Furthermore, as Chapter 1 emphasised, many public choices are made under considerable epistemic uncertainty. For example, it is not known for a fact what specific set of public policies would effectively promote affordable housing in political communities where real estate markets are highly speculative.³³ Thus, it is not always clear which course of action would advance the common good. In light of these uncertainties, any agenda for the common good that is both effective and able to recruit widespread public support will need to incorporate multiple perspectives of ordinary citizens and identify paths to reconcile some of their disagreements.

These goals could be at least partially achieved by creating a permanent assembly of EU citizens that would bring citizens of the diverse EU polity together to “overcome their differences and find solutions that serve the greater good, including on politically sensitive and technical issues”.³⁴ This new body would facilitate the pursuit of the common good in at least three ways. To begin with, it would give EU citizens a meaningful chance to discuss their perspectives on what the common good entails in terms of concrete EU policies. While directly electing the presidents of the Commission and the European Council would be an important step towards generating pan-European debates between different candidates, EU citizens should also have much more say in the Union’s day-to-day policymaking processes.³⁵ Second, this body could challenge policy dogmas that are hard to contest and abandon, even when their shortcomings are apparent.³⁶ A case in order is arguably the governance and functioning of the Eurozone.³⁷ Persistent political dogmas and taboos could be broken by giving the floor to citizens beyond the Brussels bubble, thus opening the way to pursue the common good. Finally, an EU Citizens’ Assembly “would force EU policymakers to be exposed on a regular basis to public input from all corners of Europe”.³⁸

How would the Citizens Assembly work in practice? The mandate of this body would be to deliberate on transnational issues that national bodies of deliberative democracy cannot effectively cover.³⁹ Such matters typically arise in areas with high cross-national interdependencies, such as energy supply, migration and international security. More specifically, the functioning of this body could be conceived as follows. The members of the Citizens’ Assembly would propose topics for discussion to the chair and vice-chairs, who would be elected among them.⁴⁰ Once an issue is selected for debate in the plenary, the Citizens’ Assembly could ask the European Commission to present background information with a view to facilitating an informed debate.⁴¹ While this body would not have the power to adopt new legislation, it could cast a vote on whether to insert a particular discussion item in the agenda of meetings of the Council of the European Union at the ministerial level, where high-level political dialogues take place. This agenda-setting power would establish a direct link between the Citizens’ Assembly and the Council, thus allowing citizens to call EU ministers to address issues that they consider relevant. In turn, the Council would be required to report in writing on the outcome of its discussions, which could comprise a decision to ask the Commission to present a legislative proposal regarding the issues at stake.

Why would this configuration be desirable? As has been suggested, the ability to set the agenda is one of the most significant powers in representative democracies.⁴² Note that the power to set the agendas of the several thematic configurations of the Council of the European Union lies currently with the member states – more specifically, with the government that holds its rotating presidency. Now, the fact that political parties are exposed to lobbying by well-organised interest groups implies that the views and concerns of large but fragmented groups of citizens may eventually fail to be mirrored in the political agenda.⁴³ As Chapter 3 suggested, this is particularly the case in the EU political system, given the mediating role of national governments and the incentives to pursue their definitions of national interest. Therefore, giving the EU Citizens’ Assembly the power to add agenda items would have two advantages. First, it could lead to the discussion of certain proposals that are instrumental to the common good of the Union, but national governments fail to put forward given the political costs at stake.⁴⁴ Citizens could more easily advance important proposals that jeopardise the agenda of certain interest groups because, unlike national governments, they do not have to worry about recruiting support and securing funding for being re-elected.⁴⁵ Second, leaving the power to adopt legislation with the other EU institutions would avoid the charge of simply bypassing those elected bodies.

A question that follows is whether it would be feasible to launch a body of this sort. Admittedly, creating an EU institution with a role in EU decision-making would require treaty change. Yet this goal would likely be possible to achieve. To begin with, despite being conceived as a temporary initiative, the Conference on the Future of Europe has established a precedent of citizens’ participation at the EU level. To enhance its feasibility prospects, the Citizens’ Assembly could be granted the right to insert only a limited number of items in the Council’s agenda, which could be increased in the future. Furthermore, the specific details regarding the functioning of the Citizens’ Assembly, including the number of members, the duration of their membership, the work modalities (e.g., the frequency and format of the meetings) and the funding model to be adopted could be negotiated between the member states with the intention to maximise their support for the proposal. Similarly, the method to select the participants could be chosen within a range of possibilities, provided that it ensured political equality.⁴⁶ While obtaining appropriate follow-ups by the Council could be challenging, this could be gradually achieved as the Citizens’ Assembly consolidated its position in the EU political scene.⁴⁷

Reforming the European Parliament

Another set of reforms that could contribute to the pursuit of the common good is linked to the composition and functioning of the European Parliament. While the Treaty of Lisbon significantly increased the political weight of this EU institution, the question of how the common good of all EU citizens should be politically represented in the EU political system remains to be addressed.⁴⁸ Even if one conceives EU democracy as a union of democratic and sovereign peoples along the lines of the so-called demoicratic approach, this does not automatically do away with the claim that the EU demos as a whole should be given better representation.⁴⁹ Indeed, as Philippe Van Parijs has argued, the critical factual question for the EU is not only whether a common people currently exists, but “whether the circumstances (mobility, contact, interdependencies, etc.) are such that there should be a common demos”.⁵⁰ In what follows, I will claim that the problem of political representation in the EU should be addressed at two levels: the link between EU citizens and the MEPs and the relations between it and the national parliaments. Accordingly, I will present two proposals: (i) reforming the 1976 European Electoral Act to create a pan-European constituency and (ii) upgrading the relations between the national and the European parliaments.

Let us begin with the first proposal. The logic underpinning the proposal of electing candidates through a transnational constituency is that the MEPs would then represent all Europeans, not just their compatriots. This would offer a categorical answer to the question of who are “the people or institutions that can speak ‘on behalf of Europe’”.⁵¹ Furthermore, as I have argued in relation to the election of the presidents of the Commission and the European Council, transnational lists would significantly increase the incentives faced by political actors to present agendas oriented towards the common good, as opposed to national interests. Note that the idea of creating a pan-European constituency has gained some traction among policymakers in recent years. Following earlier attempts (in 2018) in the context of the debate about the redistribution of the parliamentary seats vacated by the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU, a new proposal to create transnational lists was put forward.⁵² While the European Parliament eventually rejected the 2018 proposal, it recruited considerable support across political parties.⁵³ In turn, despite failing to endorse this proposal in the European Council, the EU heads of government showed some openness to reconsider the issue in the future.⁵⁴

What could explain these mixed signals? More than an intense normative disagreement about the desirability of transnational lists, there are relevant practical concerns regarding its implementation. These concerns were addressed by a new proposal put forward in 2022, which remains the subject of difficult negotiations at the time of writing.⁵⁵ More specifically, there was a legitimate fear that small and medium-sized states would be underrepresented. For instance, by relying on transnational lists, the European parties could, in theory, obtain majorities in the Parliament by including only candidates from the most populated states in electable positions. Additionally, apprehensions were raised about rapidly transitioning to a unified constituency without incrementally assessing its effects on the operations of EU institutions.

The more detailed and nuanced proposal presented in 2022 addresses these issues in a compelling manner. First, it establishes the requirement of geographical balance within transnational lists.⁵⁶ Second, it creates a small pan-European constituency without replacing the existing national constituencies.⁵⁷ Thus, the Parliament would have both EU-wide and national constituencies. If successful, this mixed model could be adjusted in the future, notably by increasing the relative size of the pan-European constituency. Creating transnational lists along these lines would be a significant step towards more common-good-oriented policies.

A complementary institutional reform that could foster the pursuit of the common good focuses on strengthening the link between the European Parliament and the national parliaments.⁵⁸ In Chapter 3, I argued that the EU should play a more active role in the process of national interest formation through the Representations of the Commission in the member state capitals. Yet the European Parliament should also take part in this process, notably by providing inputs to the debates within the national legislatures. Given the level of interdependence between the member states, their parliaments make a few decisions that shape the future of the Union as a whole and bring about significant externalities. That they do so suggests that it is reasonable to expect them to take a European perspective into account throughout their decision-making processes. To illustrate the point, consider that the decisions on whether to assist financially distressed member states during the Eurozone crisis had to be voted by the parliaments of the member states. Note that a few parliaments had threatened to veto these bailouts, which could have led to the collapse of the Eurozone. However, a critical question that remains to be addressed is how to stimulate a greater weighting of criteria linked to the common good of the whole EU in the deliberation processes of national parliaments without jeopardising their democratic mandates.

A strategy for achieving this goal would be upgrading one of the existing interparliamentary forums at the EU level. While a few structures for cooperation already exist, their ambition is very limited. For instance, the Conference of the Speakers of the European Union Parliaments meets annually. The Conference of Parliamentary Committees for Union Affairs of the Parliaments of the European Union meets every six months in the country, holding the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union. A permanent structure of cooperation based in Brussels convening regular meetings between national and European parliamentarians would allow for higher coordination and frequent exchanges of views. As it has been argued, such a forum “should not duplicate the legislative work of the European Parliament” but instead “ask questions about, and write reports on, those aspects of EU and Eurozone governance that involve unanimous decision-making and in which the Parliament plays no significant role”.⁵⁹ For in-depth collaboration to occur in this body, it could be organised according to policy areas, bringing together parliamentarians working in similar parliamentary committees. While the conclusions of this interparliamentary body would not be binding, they would likely be fed into the national policy processes by their co-authors.

In the opposite direction, the existing early warning mechanism – the so-called “yellow card system” – could be adjusted with a view to strengthening the role of national parliaments in EU policymaking.⁶⁰ Introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon, this instrument allows a group of at least one-third of all national legislatures to request that the Commission amend or withdraw a legislative proposal if they deem it violates the principle of subsidiarity. However, this mechanism has been invoked on just three occasions.⁶¹ One of the reasons seems to be the short timescales national parliaments are given to invoke the measure, which can be particularly problematic in proposals with great technical detail. Accordingly, the European Parliament has called the Commission to grant additional time for national parliaments to respond to new legislative proposals.⁶² Another barrier may be linked to the fact that each national parliament is required to submit its own reasoned opinion to trigger the yellow card system without knowing whether the others will do the same. Instead, the upgraded interparliamentary forum could coordinate a single reasoned opinion subscribed by several parliaments. The combination of measures described in this section would contribute to the “Europeanisation of parliamentary democracy”,⁶³ facilitating the pursuit of the common good.

Creating an advisory body of former presidents of the EU institutions

The last proposal of this chapter is the creation of a new EU advisory board. Let me begin by outlining its main features. This body would be composed of the former presidents of the Commission, European Parliament and European Council and would have a consultative role. Building on their experience as EU leaders, the board members would provide advice regarding challenging EU political choices and political visibility to the agenda for the common good. They would meet periodically for strategic debates about the future of the EU, as well as thematic debates organised at the request of other EU institutions. Their input could be presented in the format of opinions and reports drafted with the assistance of a secretariat and possibly through meetings with the incumbent EU leadership. The composition of this board would surely be multinational and politically diverse, given that EU leaders are chosen across different EU member states and political parties. To avoid conflicts of interest, membership in this advisory board would be suspended if a member were to become the head of a national government. Note that the political weight of this body could be considerable, at least if the proposal for directly electing the presidents of the Commission and the European Council presented above was adopted. In this scenario, the board members would have formerly been elected through pan-European elections, making them widely known by the EU public.⁶⁴

Yet, how would this body contribute to the pursuit of the common good in the EU? Keeping track of the political dilemmas and choices of the past may help to make informed decisions in the present.⁶⁵ Indeed, nurturing the institutional memory of the EU would be a means to explore effective ways to implement EU policies for the common good that face persistent feasibility constraints.⁶⁶ Consider, for instance, the crucial lessons that can be learnt from the failed attempts to create a mechanism to ensure compliance with EU values, as discussed in Chapter 2. Maintaining links across different political cycles is challenging in the EU political system. This challenge is not only due to the far-reaching effects of the “New Public Administration” agenda, which reportedly led most modern bureaucracies to be increasingly unable to perform the role of preserving institutional memory but also to the fact that most presidents of EU institutions virtually disappear from the European public space once their mandates are completed.⁶⁷ This retreat is at odds with the practice of several democracies, which foresee formal and informal roles for former leaders.⁶⁸ Indeed, former EU leaders are in a privileged position to “tell the story” of how critical decisions were made during their terms of office and to provide nuanced recommendations to incumbent decision-makers based on their first-hand knowledge of the challenges underpinning EU policymaking.⁶⁹

In addition to providing valuable inputs to current decision-makers, former EU leaders could actively participate in constructing a European public space geared towards the common good. All over the world, former leaders have used their political capital to draw public attention to important causes and to push for much-needed policies and reforms that remain deadlocked due to adverse political and economic incentives. For example, in a recent meeting of the former leaders of the Commonwealth countries, a public statement was issued calling on their governments to equip the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria with appropriate financial resources to pursue its goals.⁷⁰ Similarly, in the context of the spread of COVID-19, a group of former heads of state has pressed the US government to commit US$5 billion to the global fight against pandemics.⁷¹ In turn, the 2022 meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, led by former US president Bill Clinton, brought together key actors to agree on 144 concrete commitments to action on climate change, health equity, inclusive economic growth, and the global refugee crisis.⁷² These examples illustrate how former EU leaders could put political pressure on the current ones to adopt bold measures for the common good.

It should be noted that creating a board of former presidents of EU institutions would not be a very demanding task under the current institutional setting. Given that this body would essentially have an advisory role, it would not change the EU legislative process and would, therefore, not require an amendment of the EU treaties. More specifically, the board could be set up under the existing rules for creating expert groups of the European Commission. Indeed, the Commission’s Directorates-General often launch panels of academics and policy experts to advise on specific policy matters. Given its cross-cutting nature, the advisory board could then be set up by the secretariat-general of the Commission, which would provide logistical support to the meetings and activities of the board. Within this framework, formal opinions and recommendations could be produced, and ad hoc informal consultations with the current EU leaders on specific policy issues could be organised upon request. Furthermore, a yearly high-level conference of former presidents of EU institutions could be set up in order to create momentum and mobilise resources in key areas linked to the European and global common goods. In this way, former leaders could actively participate in the EU public sphere.

Conclusion

I have argued that the EU institutional framework should be reformed to seek the common good more effectively. A combination of adjustments and upgrades in the existing institutions and the launch of new institutional forums could serve this purpose. First, splitting the legislative and supervisory roles of the Commission more clearly would enhance the latter’s impartiality. Second, electing the presidents of the Commission and the European Council would empower the EU’s political leadership to pursue ambitious reforms for the common good. Third, creating an EU Citizens’ Assembly would give citizens a stronger voice regarding issues that concern them all. Fourth, launching transnational lists for the European Parliament would generate a pan-European public debate and trigger the construction of common political agendas. At the same time, increasing the level of collaboration between the European and the national parliaments would allow for a better understanding of the rationale behind legislative proposals and potentially a higher legislative alignment. Finally, a new board of former presidents of the EU institutions could bring valuable expertise informing difficult public choices linked to the common good. I have argued that these proposals would be feasible if the concerns of member states could be accommodated throughout their design stage.