The Conscience of Europe
By Erlend Paasche for ISN
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (CoE) on 29 September elected the Norwegian Thorbjørn Jagland secretary general for a five-year term. It was a good result, as Jagland is both an ardent supporter of pan-European multilateralism and possesses the political know-how requisite to make it work.
He may even have the visionary zest that the unwieldy council needs at its 60th anniversary. His term may be a make or break, as the consensus-driven organization needs to redefine its goals to remain a major player of Europe and not just a waiting room for membership in the EU. The CoE spends less in a year than the EU does in a day, and lacks the EU’s political and economic muscle. Moreover, the Council’s line of work rarely offers headline-grabbing breakthroughs.
Being the older of the two, the CoE emerged from the ashes of World War II and was initially envisioned as the chief vehicle for European post-war integration. As time passed, the economic dimension of that vision befell the EU, but it still falls mainly to the Council to promote what goes beyond the rules of the market, such as democracy, human rights and the rule of law. It is hence often called ‘the conscience of the continent.’
The big worry is that the increasingly overlapping geographical outreach and the mandates of the EU and CoE lead to duplication of effort and institutional turf wars. Lately, the EU has moved into the field of democracy promotion as well as monitoring elections and human rights – which all form the very raison d’être for the CoE.
Partly, the Council itself is to blame for this. Failing to streamline its work into those core activities, it has taken on everything from trafficking, cybercrime, promoting sport and youth programs to landscape preservation, thereby spreading itself too thin.
Jagland was recently quoted as saying that “I am not calling it a crisis, but [the CoE] is an old organization, and old organizations need to reform and adapt to a changing world, and that is the challenge for the Council of Europe.”
If he fails in reforming and focusing on what the Council does best, its core activities, it will embolden those who argue that the Council should be replaced by an EU with a broader remit. Yet this would be misguided. The Council has the best system in the world for monitoring human rights and its necessarily intergovernmental approach slowly does bear fruits. It was Council protocol that banished the death penalty on the continent, for instance.
As an embodiment of soft power, the Council also needs an EU with a stick to deal with those of its 47 member states who most flagrantly violate their legal obligations, including Russia.
It would thus be good for Europeans if Jagland were to live up to his words.