After the Victory: Hyper-Liberalization of the EU?

It was their election to win, and they did so in quite an impressive way. Thanks to the logic of the first-pass-the-post system, the Conservative’s share of 34% of overall votes was easily translated into a majority of seats:


Running a majority government after  all the years of a coalition may encourage the true conservative partisans in the Parliament to demand unfettered conservative policies, and foremost, to get eventually rid of the interferences from Brussels. The referendum will now come, and maybe even sooner as initially indicated. So far, it is not clear what Cameron and his troops exactly have in mind when they ask for a renovation of the EU. It must be more then fiddling with one of the basic principles of the EU, i.e. free mobility of labor. Commission President Juncker and others already made clear that they are not willing to open this box, but then again this may be only smoke and rhetoric. The timing for the Conservatives to fundamentally move back the deep level of European integration may actually be good. It seems fair to state that the EU is in a deep identity crisis: Functional challenges demand more integration across various policy arenas; political realities in probably all member states indicate that the electorates have no propensity at all to hand over more powers to Brussels. Rather, we see the strengthening of anti-EU sentiments and the rise of anti-EU parties across the board. Right or wrong, the EU is widely seen as a project that went astray time ago. In this situation, the Tories may actually capitalize from the political discomfort and find many more allies then currently expected to trim back some of the deepening principles of the past. This sentiment may even get stronger if GREXIT would come around; for a minimum GREXIT would show that advanced schemes of integration do not work, at least not for all. The interest to reduce the EU to a hyper-liberalized trade block is not only shared by the Tories but finds quite some echo across Europe. Such a strategy, by the way, does not exclude restrictions of criss-border labor mobility, in the contrary, both seem to machine excellent political tandem.

Sure, one can count on the self-interest of the Brussels institutions and their political representatives who will eagerly defend their vested arenas. Like always, the critical actors are sitting in the European Council. It needs not much soul-searching to see that the majority of members states governments is presented by right of center parties who tend in ideological-normative terms to small state phantasies and thus may be pretty perceptible for demands to scale back integration, or at least to offer many more opt-out opportunities, making the EU to a pick-and-chose institution.