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Journalism of Courage
As many suspected would happen one day, the Brussels bureaucracy of the European Union has been found out and a long-playing farce has turned into a near-tragedy. The EU looks set for a protracted political crisis resulting from the en masse resignations of its 20 commissioners after the damning findings of an independent inquiry. There is no exact analogy for such a situation in a modern nation state; the closest Indian analogy, perhaps, would be the resignations en masse of all the secretaries of the Union government. But the European Commission is actually sui generis. It is more than a powerful bureaucracy. Commissioners who are the political appointees of member governments of the 15-nation European Union have responsibilities for drafting and implementing legislation, exercise enormous executive powers and manage an annual budget running to hundreds of billions of dollars. Although none of the 20 commissioners is accused of being personally corrupt, the inquiry report cites fraud, cronyism andmismanagement in their departments. The most serious indictment of the commissioners is that they were not prepared to take responsibility for their actions and had lost control of the 19,000 strong Brussels bureaucracy.
In short, if there were supposed to be checks and balances in the system, they clearly did not work. So the remedy seems to lie in systemic reform. Unfortunately, existing structures of the EU are not designed to bring about basic reform at short order. Members of the elected European Parliament have been the driving force behind the exposure of the depths of unaccountability in the powerful Commission. They now appear determined to reject an interim, facing-saving compromise. With elections scheduled for June, European MPs can be expected to stick to their hard line and understandably so. After all they cannot afford to go to their constituents and say the EU executive is a shambles but with nothing better in sight, it should carry on as before.
