What Are The Challenges To European Integration

Introduction

Although European integration from mid 1940s has continuously forged a wide spectrum of unity among European states, the integration carries three institutional challenges towards the states. First, democratic legitimacy and sovereignty of European states are constrained due to political integration. As parliamentary sovereignty of a national parliament is contested by transfer of powers and the European Court of Justice (ECJ), its parliamentary supremacy diminishes. Second, a national government faces constant challenges from conflicting interests between the European Union (EU) and national governments over EU’s common policy. Third, economic integration carries major challenges towards a national treasury such as loss of full-autonomy

Despite the EU and its sub-bodies have received authorities over certain areas from European states, the transfer has not been followed with democratic legitimacy, which can be defined with a federative structure based on majority rule and territorial representation. Instead, the delegation of powers from each member state has been conducted by a few elites mostly through negotiations and treaties, and citizens from each state have been persuaded by the elites to accept the outcomes. In other words, there has been an inevitable trade‐off between output legitimacy and input legitimacy, between an emphasis on government for the people and an emphasis on government by the people (Katz and Wessels, 1999). Therefore, the shift of powers from a national parliament weakens its democratic legitimacy due to transfer of parliamentary powers to a few illegitimate delegates of EU, who are not elected and fully accountable by its

The challenges are clash of objectives of policy such as immigration policy and national interests between EU and its member states. As some institutional powers have been transferred from national governments to EU throughout a series of treaties and negotiations, cooperation such as the European Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) has remarked success over international military actions and foreign policy goals of the Member States (Stivachtis and Stivachtis, 2008). However, clashing objectives such as immigration policies of the Members have brought instability over the political convergence. Political conflicts can lead to compromise which political actors can gain benefits over the conflicts. However, the integration sometimes strictly enforces its resolutions over common policies even if changing circumstances and perspectives from national governments may require flexibility (Bickerton, 2012). From the Migrant Crisis, the members in the Schengen Area collude on different views on handling the crisis. Some Eastern European states refuse to accept more migrants, arguing that the crisis cannot be resolved by opening the border. Meanwhile, Western members like Germany accepted millions of migrants, pushing the Eastern members to abide by the Schengen. The crash is still not resolved, and even arouses political crisis as the EU plans on sanctioning those who do not