A Euromassacre

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While the episode is particularly humiliating for France--Cresson, after all, is an ex-Prime Minister--no member state can escape collective responsibility. The report argues that the whole catalogue of grievous mismanagement "can be traced back to the mismatch between the objectives assigned to the Commission" and the resources it has to achieve them. On the one hand, member states were all too ready to hand unpleasant tasks like monitoring the safety of Eastern Europe's nuclear power stations to the Commission without ensuring the resources were at hand to complete them. Indeed, it was by happily arrogating such roles that Santer's predecessor, Jacques Delors, transformed the Commission from a policy shop to a full-scale administration. As for Santer himself, the member states in 1994 selected him expressly as a weak President who wouldn't stand up to their demands. They can't be too surprised that he has turned out, as Liberal leader Cox says, "more of a punching bag than a boxer."

The reform efforts will no doubt be aided by the fundamental shift in power from the Commission to the European Parliament. "There's no question that Parliament is stronger," says Green deputy Edith Muller. "Now we have to be better." While the Parliament streamlined salaries and tightened rules on expenses last December, it has to take further steps. "Parliament is a large, soft target with an exposed underbelly," says Cox. "We're right to throw stones, but we're in a glass house, and some might rebound."

The general alarm sounded last week might have a salutary effect on what Schroder still insists is the prime objective of the Berlin summit: getting the Union's financial arrangements in order for the addition of new members as early as 2003. There is an added onus on heads of government to compromise for the sake of sparing the institution a further shock. The lack of a functioning Commission in itself won't slow the enlargement process, argues Michael Emerson of the Centre for European Policy Studies, since "the machinery is in place and there are no political decisions to be taken." In fact, he says, the crisis could even accelerate reforms.

The ignoble collapse of the European Commission might advance the most elusive goal of the project of European integration: "to move toward greater democracy and transparency in the functioning of Europe," as French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin told the National Assembly. Perhaps more Europeans will learn the names of the European parliamentarians who represent them--they may even vote, an exercise that many deemed pointless in the past. To skeptics, last week's events are proof of the E.U.'s perfidy; to idealists, they are a sign of hope. The effect on ordinary Europeans depends on whether the window that's been flung wide on the E.U.'s institutions remains open, and whether real change is seen to be going on inside.