The Cost of Non-Europe project

Politicians joining forces with experts?

Real calculations, real numbers and different areas of expertise are needed if people are to decide what is better for them – Europe or non-Europe, summarised Kristina Belikova in the July 2014 story The Cost of Non-Europe in the Gbtimes. She referred to Klaus Welle, the secretary-general of the European Parliament, at the Martens Centre reasoning why the Cost of Non-Europe project made this parliamentary term different (pages 8 and 9):

My twelfth argument is that Jean-Claude Juncker’s ten points are in fact the Parliament’s ten points. And this is not an issue of copyright. Because Juncker's five points were inspired by what Parliament had been elaborating under the heading of ‘Mapping the Cost of Non-Europe’. Do you remember? Based on parliamentary reports adopted in Plenary, we had produced an agenda of what should be done over the next years – a positive agenda for European integration. We had asked ourselves what could be additional benefits of European regulations. What is the value added if we were to get rid of 28 sets of different national regulations in order to have one set of European regulation instead. You remember: this is not new; this is the original approach that paved the way to the Single Market. As I have said: nothing new, nothing sensational. This is a well-established methodology coming from the 80's. And you may also remember that we had identified a potential of one thousand billion Euro, per year, of potential benefit if further European integration were to happen in the area of:

- a genuine digital Europe,

- an updating of our Internal Market in the field of services,

- an updating of our financial service regulations,

- a genuine energy union,

- a better cooperation in security and defence,

- and others.

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What needs to be done in the years to come and why is this important? This is important because at the end of the day, if you draw a line under the agenda for the next five years, this is a programme for growth without debt.  

This would have been impossible without the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS; overview), particularly its European Value Added Unit (EAVA), which provides European Added Value Assessments and Cost of Non-Europe Reports which analyze policy areas where common action at EU level is absent but could bring greater efficiency and a public good for EU citizens.

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In future blog posts we are going to look at what the Cost of Non-Europe Reports teach us about the potential of a seamless internal market (single market).

Opportunity knocks, when politicians join forces with experts.  

Ralf Grahn