Enforcement of EU law has become an afterthought
Jul 3rd 2025For a continent with a masochistic penchant for regulation, Europe is oddly not very good at crafting it. Over 2,500 new legal acts come out of the European Union machinery in any given year, or roughly one every hour of every working day (the summer offers some respite, but not much). A belated realisation that this regulatory fire-hose may have dampened growth has resulted in a slew of recently adopted EU rules being sunk before they have even been set afloat—to the delight of companies dreading being submerged in yet more red tape.
But even the stuff already on the statute books poses problems. The club’s 27 national governments are sometimes loth to live by EU rules, never mind that they helped craft them. The European Commission in Brussels is meant to ensure that any such transgressions are punished. Alas, it has all but given up, in the manner of a policeman who would rather doze off than fight lawlessness. As a result, the single market at the heart of the union is misfiring.
Defiance of EU law comes in matters big and small. Remember the edict in European treaties stipulating that national governments had to keep debt to under 60% of GDP? Euro-wallahs don’t. Once considered vital to the good functioning of the euro, the so-called stability and growth pact is honoured mainly in the breach these days. Around half the countries, representing three-quarters of EU economic output, merilly flout it, some flagrantly. Take France, which basically met the 60% criterion when the rule was enacted in 1999. Its debt now runs at 114%, with huge budget deficits in coming years (also banned in theory) likely to swell the figure. The commission has found imaginative ways to let this profligacy go unpunished. Sometimes the truth has slipped out. Asked in 2016 why yet another incontinent budget coming out of Paris should be waved through, its president at the time, Jean-Claude Juncker, merely explained: “Because it’s France.”
Other rules are ignored with just as much aplomb. To avoid illegal migrants submitting asylum applications in many different European countries, the EU member in which they first set foot is meant to process their application for protection. In practice the system hasn’t worked in years. Germany made 75,000 requests for other EU countries to take back asylum-seekers for processing in 2023, but managed to offload just 5,000 or so. This is largely because places like Greece in effect refuse to take migrants back, fearing no consequence for their defiance. The response from Brussels has been an ear-shattering shrug.
The EU project that requires most rule-crafting—and thus enforcement—is the single market. In theory it should allow the free movement of goods, services, labour and capital across the bloc. Not so in practice. National capitals often do a shoddy job of “transposing” the laws into their domestic statute books; authorities in each member state later enforce them differently. It ought to be possible, say, for a tin of paint made for the Spanish market to be sold in France, much as one made in Ohio can be sold in Michigan. But national regulation around recycling labels to be included on each tin—different in Spain and France, for no good reason—means that in practice each place needs its own tin design. A compendium of such cross-border niggles compiled by the European Round Table for Industry, a business lobby group, runs to 290 pages of undiluted frustration.
It is the commission’s job to crack down on such misbehaviour. It bills itself as “guardian of the EU treaties”, a sort of lesser superhero in the Marvel universe. It can embarrass governments by publicly airing their dodgy ways and apply to EU courts to levy fines. Two decades ago it used to bring several thousand “infringement proceedings” every year against countries disobeying rules. Now the figure is down to the mere hundreds and still falling. Enforcement of single-market rules is down by 75% since 2011.
What happened? Flagging enforcement is not likely to be down to less rule-breaking. Instead, the commission is less interested in playing bad cop. Once a proudly technocratic body happy to enforce EU rules without fear or favour, since Mr Juncker the body has refashioned itself as a “political commission” (his successor Ursula von der Leyen speaks even more grandly of a “geopolitical commission”). Launching infringement proceedings annoys the national governments that decide how much power to cede to EU bodies. The commission partly sacrificing its role as guardian of the treaties is thus a calculated gambit, posit R. Daniel Kelemen and Tommaso Pavone, two academics: a little forbearance when it comes to enforcing existing rules buys goodwill from national governments, and lets the Brussels machine propose yet more legislation. One mustn’t mind it will probably, in turn, be ignored.
Cop out
Commission types insist that enforcing the rules remains a priority, just that it is sometimes done behind the scenes. A recent blueprint to complete the single market promised “proactive and fast legal action” against EU states that flout the law.
Alas, the reality of lackadaisical enforcement is clear for all to see. Letting countries like Greece defy the rules on migrants has resulted in Germany (among many others) reinstating border controls with other EU countries. Unchecked fiscal profligacy was at the root of the euro-zone crisis starting in 2009. Most irksome of all to a continent on the economic skids, the single market doesn’t work well: administrative barriers to trading services between EU countries are equivalent to a tariff of 110%, according to the IMF. Trade between EU countries is only half the level of that between American states. “For the single market to function, member states have to feel the commission breathing down their neck,” says Luis Garicano, an economist and former member of the European Parliament. That would require waking it up, first. ■
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