Creeping Competencies
For competence read authority
Competencies have been creeping from member states to the EU and as such they have created uncertainty about the balance of power among the different levels of EU governance. They also have brought about uncertainty about the demarcation and distribution of accountability among the actors that operate at the various levels of the European Union.
But the phenomenon of ‘creeping competencies’ is a direct consequence of the Monnet Method: which has the added benefit, to the EU, of allowing a great deal of misdirection to take place over the eventual outcome of any transfer of authority to the EU.
The strategy behind the Monnet ‘method’ was the imprecise and gradual redirection of authority from the national governments to the EU government, in the process of which ambiguous amounts of sovereignty would pass from one level to the other.
The important objective for continued integration was to guarantee that the direction of this process was only one way i.e. from national governments to the EU, thus we have the invention of the acquis or ratchet, which is the EU rule that once authority is passed to the EU it cannot be returned to the nation state.
Other inventions of the system are combined to facilitate an ongoing process of integration. The integration process because it is on diverse fronts a little bit here and a little bit there, is accompanied by a massive amount of misdirection, this shows itself when changes in member state are explained as modernisation or money saving measures, when in reality they are quite simply changes to bring member states into line with EU proposals. The reorganisation of the British Army is one such measure as explained Here the reorganisation of the post office and British telecom although presented as necessary for the business were no more than the British Government putting into practice the agreed policies of the Union. One case was the old 192 directory inquiry number which was changed and the system opened, up so that now instead of having one single number to dial if we needed to find a number, we have several diverse companies each offering to sell us the number we require, this has actually had the effect of a massive drop in directory enquires, so there is less money being shared amongst the many instead of adding to the profits of BT. A nonsense unless looked at from an EU point of view which is intent upon opening up the market place to all members of the EU.
We see that last week the announcement that Britain is cutting back on its consular activities and true to form Mr Straw said the money would save £6 Million a year which would be redirected to other Foreign Office departments, what he did not say was that at the same time as Britain is cutting back on its consular activities the EU is beginning to put in place its own Here
So integration has been and will continue to proceed in different areas of authority, at different times, in different amounts, all seemingly as separate unconnected events, but each one is part of the jigsaw of European integration.
Of course as from the very beginning of this process the whole concept of the EU as a state will be denied and denied and denied, each time someone has suggested the reason for this or that policy is EU integration, they have been roundly accused of spreading malicious lies, in order to create alarm and undue anti-EU feeling amongst the population, and each time those voices of warning have been shown to be correct, and those accusers have been shown to be untrustworthy in their claims.
