The finance minister, a passionate advocate of deeper European integration, has said he wants to concentrate on a small number of far-reaching reforms:
The European commissioner for economic and currency affairs is to become equally powerful as the commissioner for competition. The competition commissioner is entitled to make decisions independently and does not require the agreement of the other commissioners in making those decisions. If the currency affairs commissioner were truly independent when it came to decision-making, it would depoliticise that office holder's position. That would enable the commissioner to make decisions based on content rather than interests.
In order to strengthen the position of the currency affairs commissioner, individual Member States would have to hand over part of their budget sovereignty to Brussels. Under Schäuble's proposal, the currency affairs commissioner, by now one of the most powerful positions in the EU, would be equipped with veto power over national budgets. The procedure might look like this: If a eurozone Member State sent its budget proposal to Brussels and the commissioner felt the deficit in the draft was too high, then the country's parliament would be asked to prepare a new draft. Member States would retain the power to decide which revenues to increase and which spending to cut. But the proposed change still represents an improvement over the status quo. Under current rules, the European Commission's power is limited to making recommendations to Member States on improvements to budgets.
Schäuble also wants to create more democratic legitimation for European policies by including the participation of the European Parliament at a fundamentally earlier stage in all important processes. The representative body of the people would also be changed so that votes would only include members of the European parliament from the countries that would be directly impacted by proposals considered. For decisions relating to the eurozone for example, only members of parliament from the 17 nations in the common currency area would meet to vote -- and not MEPs from all 27 EU countries. Although critics will note that this ultimately cements the idea of a two-speed Europe, the advantage of the proposal is that it would enhance democracy without making decision-making processes that are already very difficult to understand any more complicated.
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