An excellent and helpful post on EU Law Blog earlier this week set out the way the Reform Treaty categorises the competences of the EU under three broad headings: those things only the EU will have power to do and that member states will have given up power in entirely, the areas of the EU’s “exclusive competence” – customs and international trade negotiations are the best-known of these; those competences shared between the EU and member states, in which member states will be able to act to the extent that the EU has not – like the internal market, social policy and the environment; and finally the areas in which the EU can only act to support member state policies – like education and culture.
This clear categorisation of competence is one of the best things about the treaty – it doesn’t involve any significant shift in competence away from member states, but is I think a fair attempt to define where competence is already. But much better to see the lines drawn in black and white. It may even help avoid the kind of creeping competence mentioned in the post.
By the way, I don’t know who writes EU Law Blog (the “about link doesn’t work for me at least) but I love the way he or she uses a diaeresis in words like coöperation and coördinate. I think that’s really cool.
I think there are real problems with the categories of competence, but I haven’t got time to stop and explain, but I’ll be back.
Please do, Bondwoman! I’m chuffed to have you here, and I’d be interested to know your thoughts.
Now too squiffy to elaborate. I really do have problems, but i can see why they are superficially attractive. I may not be back until Sunday. Sorry. http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/conferences/treatyofrome/conference.aspx.
Gosh, the suspense! I’m looking forward to your sober reflections, Bondwoman…
Well my problem is not so much with the list of different areas where the EU does things, but rather with the idea of “categories of competence”. One of the best ideas of the so-called Penelope document that the Commission put before the Convention in 2003 was that the treaties should contain lists of “principal areas of activity” and “secondary areas of activity”. This gives a better idea of where the focus of EU law and policy making lies, without using the restrictive idea of categories of exlcusive, shared and complementary competence, whihc are actually very hard to apply in practice. And don’t fit with the traditional approach to competence, which is to ask whether there is a legal basis which can validly be used for the specific type of measure proposed. But the member states had signed up to the idea of categories of competence, and that’s why we ended up with some idiocies about competition law, for example.