Conceptus on: the European Union: a Politically Incorrect View

Conceptus on:

The European Union: A Politically Incorrect View

By Alberto Alesina and Roberto Perotti

National Bureau of Political Economics

Working Paper N. 10342

http://www.nber.org/papers/w10342, retreived 27.04.2009

In this paper the two authors try to assess the main problems in European political structure and its policies. The authors divided the paper into six parts in a logical flow. The first and last parts, like in any classical working paper are the introduction and conclusion, where main ideas and problems are assessed and final statements are summarized, respectively. The second part introduces the current institutions and the decision making process in the EU. Part three states basic problems, which occur in the structure of European institutions it also covers the main problems in the approaches to government. The fourth part illustrates several examples of EU polices, which are caused by facts described in part three. This part is also accompanied with examples, which can be found in text boxes in the text flow. Part five suggests possible solutions to the problems pointed out in the previous section (part four). The working paper is also accompanied with a short abstract and some basic information about the authors.

1 Introduction

The authors point out two different views on how the EU should integrate and which have a major impact on the evolution of the EU:

• the federalists or super nationalists, who would like the RU become a super national entity and,

• The intergovernmentalists, who would like the EU to be a union of independent governments.

They also briefly assess two major conflicts in the institutional structure and functioning of the EU.

1) The problem of overlapping jurisdictions and,

2) the clash of two views of government – the dirigisme (common in Southern and parts of continental Europe) and the laissez fair attitude (Anglo Saxon).

2 Current Institutions and Decision Making

This part illustrates basic...