Cost of insularity and the future of Malta in Europe
Europe needs to reconnect with citizens and listen better to their needs and aspirations.
All the European politicians I have met over the past years, from Tajani to Juncker to many others in between, recognised this need and will tell you in private that unless the Union bridges the gap with citizens, it is doomed to failure. The jury, however, remains open as to how we should be doing that.
A process of reflection has just been launched this week precisely to cultivate a wider discussion on how the Union needs to adapt to the future. The so called Future of Europe Conference is meant to involve an as wide as possible array of citizens and bodies to come up with ideas taking the Union into the next phase – that of delivering to citizens, which I submit, the Union is already largely doing on many fronts while at the same time being closer to citizens.
From the Maltese perspective, any debate on the Future of Europe has to start from a stock taking of our role in the project on several fronts. Personally I have tried to do such an exercise from the first day that I accepted the call to be a candidate for the European Parliament elections. Before that, I was an EU official keen on better understanding the Union and doing my little bit to make it more efficient. Although I felt some unaddressed needs and room for improvement in Malta’s experience of Europe, I lived those lacunas from a distance. As a candidate for an MEP seat, it was a different matter altogether. I realised that if you are approaching people with the prospect of asking for their support, you need first of all to sincerely understand how your potential future role can make a difference to their challenges. This is what I try to do, and the picture revealing itself in front of me tells a story of a dire need to adapt EU legislation and, most importantly, the way we implement and apply it in these islands, to our particular realities, with a more sincere engagement to make Europe work for Malta.
You see, in Brussels, European bureaucrats are very good willing and most are the top experts in their fields. However, it is not strictly speaking their immediate job description to ensure that whatever they concoct fits well within Malta’s needs and capabilities.
There are of course two sides to this. On the one side, we, the Maltese and Gozitans, should take a more active role in ensuring to pitch our specific needs to Brussels whenever necessary.
The recent road-haulage Directive can be taken as an example on how not to proceed in lobbying Malta’s efforts in the EU machinery. The Directive, which now imposes returns home for Maltese drivers and limits to their stops in the EU mainland impacts the Maltese companies way heavier than it does the French or the Poles, for whom a home return is a simple highway drive. Maltese attempts to modify the legislation intervened extremely late in the day when the ink had set and the book was sent for binding. Our transport Minister made a scene that he will go to Brussels to stop this when the compromise was already sealed. He was met with polite ‘receipts’ in Brussels. The same goes for our MEPs whose valiant 6-strong amendments in the Transport Committee in its last sitting on the dossier could not counter the fact that not a single amendment was presented on such in the first, second and third sitting, where the thing was still fluid.
Then there is the second aspect which should, to my mind, be addressed in a systemic way by the European Commission itself. Since the late 90s the Commission started feeling the pressure of delivering proposed legislative solutions which were impact assessed on their economic, social and environmental aspects. The early 2000s saw a beefing up of Commission efforts on this culminating in an impact assessment board which had the power to basically veto any proposed legislation which was not carefully examined for different impacts across Member States. Fast forward to 2021 and now you have a fully fledged impact assessment system which not only examines Commission amendments but is now also examining impacts of proposed modifications to Commission proposals by the European Parliament.
The system is therefore designed to detect where a proposed step by the Union can have a disproportionate impact on social, economical or environmental terms, but this does not cater for different impacts on different territories. So much so that the Commissions’ modus operandi is not normally meant to extend such impact assessment exercises to cover all EU territories and realities. The impact assessment is meant to simply provide a snap shot of impact on ‘European Society’ and not on particular territories.
I submit that this procedure should be changed to allow for a systemic safeguard of the particular situation in islands and regions which are not connected to the EU mainland.
Cohesion between regions is a declared pillar and objective of the EU project. Such also is the promotion of less favour regions which, due to their geography, are less likely to make full use of the single market. Malta and Gozo are clearly within those categories, but the legislative procedure in Brussels hardly caters for any early alert mechanism to signal particular impact on Malta and Gozo which would plead for a differentiated approach or for corrective mechanisms in such proposed legislation.
To my mind this is a main point which Malta needs to address to secure its future of continued enjoyment and increased contribution to the European Project. For this reason, I have taken the personal initiative to submit a written contribution to the Future of Europe Conference to include an impact assessment mechanism which the European Commission would be obliged to undertake for main legislative initiatives to assess the ‘Cost of Insularity’ in its proposed measures before proceeding to any legislative proposals.
Such a systemic safeguard would firstly allow Malta and Maltese organised civil society and private actors to identify in advance proposed measures which would need particular vigilance or lobbying efforts, not to mention the effect to sensibilise the same EU machinery, to measures which would indeed result in disproportionate additional burden to territories like Malta and Gozo.
You can support this idea or others in the context of the Future of Europe debate through the portal www.futureu.europa.eu