Europe needs to strike a balance between regulation and simplification. To do so, Europeans need to agree on working together. This is not an easy condition to meet, particularly when it suggests a normalisation of extremist politics. Yet retreating from Europe is not an option. If anything, national politics is even more divided. Learning to find common ground and working together is the only sustainable way forward. Doing so will involve compromises, many of which will be difficult to accept. But there is no better alternative.

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The omnibus legislation packages reveal an important tension at the heart of the European Union (EU). European regulation is necessary to bridge national jurisdictions and create a common market. In that sense, the goal of European regulation should be to make it easier for firms and individuals to do business across national borders, not harder. But a market is not a goal in its own right. European regulation should work in ways that promote common interests that cannot be addressed effectively at the national level. Prosperity, innovation, and competitiveness are as important as sustainability, equity, and justice in this respect.

The problem is that everyone must compromise on the values that regulations protect and promote. National governments must compromise over which jurisdictions will have to make more adjustments to reach the common standards and, more important, whose firms and citizens will wind up paying higher adjustment costs. Political parties must compromise over whose values and interests will be most affected and what are the possible workarounds or alternatives. Civil society organisations need to adapt their mobilisation strategies to maximise their influence in shaping the values being promoted at the European level while minimising the setbacks they will experience in other jurisdictions. And that is before we begin to accept the fact that different countries, groups, and individuals all have different hierarchies of values.

This tension is hardly new to the European project. You could see it on full display during the ‘harmonisation’ debates of the 1970s and early 1980s and during the ‘relaunching of Europe’ with the Single European Act and the 1992 project to complete the internal market in the late 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, the tension between regulation, simplification, and values explains why the internal market remains a work in progress. It also explains why there are limits to the EU’s influence beyond Europe and why there are limits to the expansion of the European Union. Europeans tend to oscillate between periods of enthusiasm and pessimism about the European project. Just think about the rise and fall of the Lisbon Strategy; now think about the rise and fall of the Brussels Effect. The fundamental machinery behind European integration has remained much the same; the variation has more to do with the willingness of Europeans to embrace it.

That oscillation says a lot about how Europeans view each other as well their European project. Compromise is easier when you can perceive any concessions made as working toward the common good. The more values Europeans believe they share with one-another both in absolute and relative terms, the more easily they can work together and the more clearly they can recognise themselves in and identify with what they accomplish. When Europeans focus more on their differences with one-another, they are more prone to view concessions as ‘sacrifices’ or ‘losses’.  Just think about how the tension between ‘neoliberal’ Britain and ‘statist’ France shaped European politics during debates around the European Constitutional Treaty and Brexit. Or about the cleavage between North and South or ‘saint’ and ‘sinner’ during the sovereign debt crisis.

Today the cleavage is within European countries as well as between them. The debate over the omnibus packages pits left and centre against right and far-right. The questions it raises are which Europeans have a legitimate right to participate in making European legislation and whether all Europeans can identify with the rules that only some Europeans make. There are no easy answers. Confronting the normalisation of extremist groups is just as complicated as integration. Working together with the extremes involves compromises that many refuse to make because of the sacrifices that would require in terms of fundamental values on all sides.

But not working together is not a viable alternative. Europeans need shared regulation if they are to achieve objectives related to prosperity, innovation, and competitiveness. And they need to achieve those objectives if they are to promote sustainability, equity, and justice in an increasingly hostile global environment. Abandoning Europe and retreating to the national arena is not viable either. The same differences and tensions operate in those smaller political spaces, only the resources available to address them or to use in pushing back against the outside world are significantly diminished. A retreat from Europe will only exacerbate domestic conflict. Just look at the impact of Brexit on the politics of the United Kingdom.

The debate over the EU’s omnibus legislation will not satisfy everyone in Europe, neither will the legislative process nor the outcome. European policymakers need to have a frank conversation with their voters about the stakes that are in play and the realistic alternatives. They need to sketch a positive future and show how that future can be more inclusive both within and across countries. And they need to make steady and demonstrable progress in achieving those – and many other – shared objectives. The effort required is enormous and so the argument for embracing Europe as a common project will have to be compelling. Fortunately, it is.

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This essay was originally prepared as part of a European Council Expert Debrief prepared by the Trans-European Policy Studies Association with support from the European Union. The picture at the top of this post refers to the larger collection of essays which is freely available for dowload from TEPSA. That collection includes the (better) edited version of this essay. Many thanks to Jim Cloos and Allegra Wirmer for their many great comments and suggestion. The usual disclaimer applies.