Bonfire of Bureaucracy in Europe

‘On these repetitive long flights I thought’, he told EBR, ‘what shall I do? After a while, I had heard all the music and had seen all films worthwhile seeing. Why not write a book in the plane, on my laptop? So this book is launched because, for many hours, I had nothing better to do’.

Eppink’s election as MEP was his fourth return to the European Parliament. He started as an assistant in the 1980s, he came often to the European Parliament as a journalist for the Dutch quality paper NRC Handelsblad in the 1990s and he returned as a member of the cabinet of European Commissioners Bolkestein and Kallas in the past decade. In 2009 Dutchman Eppink was elected to the EP for a small Flemish party in Belgium, Lijst De Decker, and is now a member of the parliamentarian group European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), dominated by the British Conservatives. Eppink states that he and the ECR group are not anti-Europe but that their attitude on Europe is a critical one. And being critical is what ‘Bonfire of Bureaucracy in Europe’ is about!

One thing is clear: Eppink is a well informed insider in the European process. He promises in the introduction of his book to describe the workings, growth and power of the European bureaucracy. He also promises not to criticise any specific person, ‘since the system has now become much stronger than any mere individual. In Brussels, power is not vested in people but in institutions.(...) The machine has a huge weight but there is no effective counterweight; there is no legitimate opposition, not even in the European Parliament’.

In seven chapters with titles that speak for themselves (for instance: an ever prouder parliament; the ever bigger bureaucracy; the ever more powerless people) Eppink dwells upon the proliferation of rules, regulations, legislation, agreements, the number of parliamentarian committees, intergroups, delegations, more European institutions and more memberstates, and not to forget the swelling number of overpaid Eurocrats (the European civil service of whom nobody knows the number nor what they are doing exactly). These ‘fonctionaires’ even went to the European Court in Luxemburg after EU government leaders vetoed their pay rise following cuts in wages and numbers of their own civil services.

MEP Eppink’s question to the European institutional elite consisting of ‘politicians, functionaries, officials, journalists, diplomats and lobbyists of all kinds’ is: are we doing the right thing? ‘For the European institutional elite the right thing is more, faster, bigger. Are we not building another Tower of Babel?’ His advice is threefold. In the first place let’s admit that the new orthodoxy of the ‘ever closer Union’ is not correct. There is a limit and European cooperation is mainly a matter of nation states. Then, he wants to make a clearer distinction between what Brussels has to do and what member states do. Let the EU focus on core tasks like the single market, the monetary union for those who are members, environmental, immigration and foreign policy. ‘But the phrase ‘less Europe’ sounds heretical in Brussels’. Thirdly, Derk-Jan Eppink’s credo is: let’s keep the EU budget limited and say no to EU taxation. In his opinion the taxpayers must take action themselves. For this reason he launched a European Citizens’ Initiative against an EU tax (www.noeutax.eu).

‘Bonfire of Bureaucracy in Europe’ makes you think about what’s going on in ‘Brussels’. Do we need more? Do we need less? Or is it ok as it is? A book worth reading for all Europhiles, Eurosceptics and agnostics.

Bonfire of Bureaucracy in Europe by Derk-Jan Eppink.
Published by Lannoo nv, Tielt (Belgium), www.Lannoo.com
D/2010/45/289 – ISBN 978 90 209 90935 – NUR 697