Bureaucracy: the European obstacle to integration and inclusion

By MAX RAPA from DEFOIN

If you are a citizen of the European Union (EU), you will barely notice or experience any difficulties in moving to another Member State of the Union. Indeed, in more or less a week, most Europeans will have sorted out their banking account, accommodation and telephone number, but most importantly all the Union expats living within the EU will have accomplished all the working permits and will be ready to enter the labour market in their new host country.

In the last decades, this unifying and integrational process has become as something natural for us Europeans to the extent that we consider it as something obvious, automatic, given. Without a doubt, this European project, also known as the “European Dream”, that we have managed to create here in the Old Continent is something that no other continent has experienced before or has achieved to make. The privilege that we have, that is the possibility to live, work and travel everywhere and whenever we want is something undeniable.

However, as time goes by, many start to realise the disparities that this “European Dream” is composed of. Indeed, many migrants, refugees or asylum seekers have to wait months and months (if not years) for their visas or asylum application to be reviewed and eventually be approved. Meanwhile, these people are left in limbo in which they do barely have any rights to work or move freely. This is because the EU is technocratic bureaucracy and as every bureaucratic organisation, public or private, seeks to grow. Thus, as the EU and each of its Member States are modern technocratic bureaucracies which produce laws (these are their products), each crisis and event are dealt most of the time with a new set of excessively complex laws that are enforced by some unelected bureaucrats who often tend to muscle-out parliamentarians.

An example of this is the 2015 refugee crisis in Germany. To cope with the thousands of demands of the crisis, Germany decided to hire twice as many government officials. However, in an interview with Die Welt newspaper, the EU parliament ex-chief Martin Schulz, a German Social Democrat, accused the back then government of Angela Merkel of running a backlog of more than 300,000 unprocessed asylum applications. Another example, which has been admitted by the same EU, has been the case of Spain, where bureaucracy is the main obstacle faced by refugees to access university studies. Indeed, in September 2015, the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE in Spanish) urged Spanish universities to facilitate access to higher education for refugee or asylum seeker students who were university students in their countries of origin. A year after the signing of this statement, CRUE states that it has not yet compiled data on which centres have carried out initiatives on their own. The EU is the result of a marvellous European integration process between a wide variety of peoples and cultures that have one important thing in common: a tradition of Christian heritage.

The problem that arises from this process is that this result must be deeply reviewed in order to integrate the new variety of peoples and cultures that come outside the Union. We cannot longer base the European integration process on just traditional Christian foundations, especially if the Old Continent wants to be competitive in the rest of the world. If the European bureaucratic system will not change, we will face a slow decline of the “European Dream” and we will see a rise of anti-establishment movements in many countries such as Fratelli d’Italia in Italy, Law and Justice in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary. The EU response to this threat has been the development of an Action Plan on Integration and Inclusion 2021-2027. The proposal of the Plan seems rather valid as it targets and supports the integration and inclusion of people with a migrant background, but also gender or religious background.

The Plan consists of mainly four points: Inclusive education and training, improving employment opportunities and skills recognition, dedicated EU funding to promote access to health services for people born outside the EU and access to adequate and affordable housing. This ambitious Plan has been approved in 2020, but the question that comes to light regarding this is whether this would yet be another Plan that will be forgotten in the shades of the European bureaucratic messiness, or will it be the prove that efficient administration is possible in the EU? Only time will tell us.