The women and men who run the European Commission held a brainstorming gab session on the EU’s future Tuesday, but the College of Commissioners has a way of making even routine conversations sound smart. So officially, it was a meeting in “seminar format,” meaning no lectures by President Jean-Claude Juncker, or lab experiments by his chief of staff, Martin Selmayr. Just learned friends exchanging views.
The goal was to discuss two of five reflection papers planned in response to Juncker’s broader White Paper from February, laying out potential scenarios for the EU’s future. Sort of like a book club, where the members sit around discussing their own writing, pondering what more they want to write about it all.
“We basically spent the time today discussing two reflection papers on which we are currently working,” said Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis, whose title is nearly as long as the White Paper: vice president in charge of the Euro, social dialogue, financial stability, financial services and capital markets union. Say that five times.
When the College meets in “seminar format,” there are special rules: Absent commissioners cannot be replaced by their cabinet chiefs; and there are no formal minutes or formal decisions taken, essentially encouraging frankness.
Of course, this being the EU, there has to be some accounting, and therefore Dombrovskis was tasked to provide a read-out of the meeting to journalists. Story-time, it was not.
“The monitoring of social trends and coordination of national economic and social policies had been greatly reinforced over the last years, notably through European Semester,” Dombrovskis said. “But the world is changing fast and we need to adapt and develop the EU’s role in this changing context.”
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Glad they cleared that up. (Note the enduring allegiance to academic references: European Semester is basically just a monitoring process of economic policies, more status report with recommendations than report card requiring a parent’s signature, but we digress.)
Dombrovskis noted that he and Commissioner Marianne Thyssen, who is responsible for employment, social affairs, skills and labor mobility, would be presenting the final reflection paper on the social dimension of Europe.
And he offered an important caveat, that the social dimension would push into new dimensions: “In the reflection paper, social will be seen in a broader sense as ‘societal,’” he said, adding, “So we want to look beyond traditional economic, social and employment areas to include education and skills, health and consumer affairs, digital and research agendas.”
He said it would also take into account the new demands of “the world of work,” especially “digitization and robotization.”
This much of what Dombrovskis said was understandable: “It’s notably one of the areas where the EU cannot take the risk of over-promising and then under-delivering.”
Gotcha.
The topic of the second reflection paper was the economic and monetary union, a subject that Dombrovskis said was previously addressed in a “Five Presidents’ report” published in 2015.
Noting that much work has been done, he said: “Now, we should clarify how we bring this work forward in a context of Phase 2 of the Five Presidents’ report. And first of all, we were framing today as a debate with a set of guiding principles: there is a clear need to keep the balance between solidarity and responsibility, or between risk reduction and risk sharing.”
Like, totally, dude. No argument here. Balance is key.
Another highlight, he said was a discussion about “what are the right convergence benchmarks we set, how we operationalize them and enforce them.”
And just in case you were wondering, the seminar was a success. “We attach a great deal of importance to this debate, and today’s exchange of views was an important contribution,” Dombrovskis said.