BRUSSELS SKETCH

Trump and May can do it. The EU? Not so much

Brussels can only dream of swift, decisive action. And that’s probably for the best.

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While Donald Trump gives a jaw-dropping demonstration of the executive powers of a U.S president and Prime Minister Theresa May shows how little the U.K. parliament constrains her powers, the EU’s ventures into new policy areas once the domain of its member countries exposes its inability to act decisively and swiftly.

Trump’s executive powers are not untrammeled. On Friday, a U.S. district judge in Seattle ordered a nationwide halt to the travel ban that Trump had announced a week earlier. Nevertheless, the chaos that was created at U.S. airports and the swift defenestration of Sally Yates, the acting attorney general, were surely ample demonstration of the lively and immediate powers of the president, particularly in the wake of his withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Trump is pulling on the levers of power to undeniable effect.

The United Kingdom, meanwhile, has been engaged in its own gentler exploration of executive power. The country’s Supreme Court ruled that May could not rely on the crown prerogative to trigger Article 50 of the Treaty on the European Union. Withdrawing from the EU meant making changes to domestic law and such changes needed explicit parliamentary approval.

In practice, May’s exercise of executive power doesn’t seem much affected. In the wake of the ruling, her government promptly submitted a bill to parliament seeking approval for invoking Article 50. The very brief bill is undergoing such cursory scrutiny that the prime minister expects to be able to inform her EU partners on March 9 that the U.K. wants a divorce.

The EU, on the other hand, can only dream of such swift action. Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, called last week for “assertive and spectacular steps” in response to various external threats (China, Russia, the U.S. and radical Islam) and the internal threat of anti-EU, nationalist and xenophobic sentiment. But Friday’s EU summit in Valletta couldn’t live up to the rhetoric.

On the refugee crisis, the government leaders agreed on a wish list of improvements that they want, but the next step is that the government of Malta, in close cooperation with the European Commission and the high representative for foreign and security policy, will “present a concrete plan for implementation to this effect to the Council [of Ministers] at the earliest opportunity, to take work forward and to ensure close monitoring of results.” They will review progress in March and again in June. This hardly bears comparison with a U.S. presidential order.

No one should be surprised. The EU was not constructed to move quickly, but slowly with great deliberation. It struggles to respond quickly to fast-moving events, as we saw during the credit crunch and eurozone crises and the migration crisis of 2015. When those crises hit, leaders found that the levers of power were missing. So they fell back on national action, and they convened emergency EU summits, which are a way of trying to harness the emergency powers of national governments while maintaining a semblance of collective decision-making.

For the last several months, the EU has struggled to put together a workable refugee policy. Countries of Central and Eastern Europe are refusing to accept quotas for the distribution of refugees among the member countries. Such quotas are regarded by the Commission and several South and West European states as a necessary accompaniment to securing the EU’s external borders. But neither Tusk nor Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the Commission, has the power to impose such quotas. Even if they wanted to, they could not issue decrees on immigration policy of the sort that Trump issued on January 27.

Journalists, straining to make the complexities of the EU more comprehensible, frequently describe the Commission as “the EU’s executive.” In reality, the Commission is only a half-formed executive. In some areas of policy — competition, trade, agriculture — it has acquired meaningful powers and can make itself swiftly felt. But in many other areas, its power lies principally in its prerogative to initiate proposals for legislation, which still require the consent of the member countries (through the Council of Ministers) and the European Parliament.

Last Wednesday, by coincidental irony, the European commissioners’ meeting included a discussion of the use of “delegated and implementing acts” — by which the Commission seeks to make minor and/or technical changes to existing legislation. In a national setup, such changes would routinely be carried out by the executive. In the EU, however, they are the stuff of institutional turf wars: the Parliament being most reluctant to give up its say-so. It was another reminder of the constraints on Commission decision-making.

The pattern that has emerged from the crises of recent years is that the EU’s constituent parts are persuaded by painful experience that there should be greater coordination at the center — on, for example, food safety, on banks, on coping with the inward flow of migrants, on combating terrorism. But while the center acquires greater responsibility, it doesn’t necessarily acquire greater freedom of action. There is no single EU institution — much less a single individual — that has the clear executive powers to act independently (an arguable exception, in the field of finance, is the president of the European Central Bank).

In part, the EU is hampered by its infamous ‘democratic deficit.’ Whereas Trump and May can claim electoral mandates for their actions, Tusk and Juncker cannot convincingly do so and must associate themselves with the mandates of the national governments and the European Parliament before taking action.

Security, finance and migration are dossiers that go to the heart of the nation-state’s duty to defend itself and its citizens: These issues have been the preserve of national governments precisely because they are politically and electorally sensitive. So it is unrealistic to think that in these areas the national leaders will give the EU a blank cheque to act as it thinks best, even though these are the very policy areas where circumstances might cry out for swift decision-making.

It is well to remember, however, that speed and decisiveness do not invariably ‘trump’ delay and deliberation. Watching developments in Washington and London is to be reminded that where the executive is powerful, that power should be balanced by procedures for redress. The U.S. president’s travel ban was challenged in federal courts. May’s attempt to bypass parliament went to the U.K.’s Supreme Court.

By contrast, one of the reasons that I would hesitate to give individual EU leaders greater executive power is that I doubt the capacity of EU courts to provide swift and effective redress against any abuse of such power. Better that the EU remain slow and ineffective than that it resort — as others are doing — to democratic despotism.

Tim King writes POLITICO‘s Brussels Sketch.