Now that David Cameron’s long awaited speech on the future of Europe lies a few weeks behind us, and we have been able to digest most of the reactions, it is time to make up the balance. One very positive thing is that the speech has stirred reactions in almost all the member-states, adding to the emergence of the type of European-wide public sphere and European society that Jürgen Habermas has been advocating for a long time. It also fits into the European public debate that both enthusiasts and critics of Cameron’s views can be found in all member-states.

My reading of Cameron’s speech is that it makes two main points. The first is that the British government wants to work towards a national referendum on the role of the United Kingdom in the European Union. This is primarily an internal matter for the UK and something that is difficult to comment upon by other European politicians.

Much more important is the second point. Cameron argues that we need to discuss the optimal distribution of competences among the European Union and the member states. He refers to the Dutch Prime Minister Rutte, who made a similar plea by suggesting to examine thoroughly what the EU as a whole should do and should stop doing.  Meanwhile, Britain already launched a ‘review of the balance of competences’ that is supposed to provide an objective analysis of where the EU helps and where it hampers. Cameron’s point is the following: ‘Let us not be misled by the fallacy that a deep and workable single market requires everything to be harmonised, to hanker after some unattainable and infinitely level playing field. (…) Countries are different. They make different choices. We cannot harmonise everything. For example, it is neither right nor necessary to claim that the integrity of the single market, or full membership of the European Union requires the working hours of British hospital doctors to be set in Brussels irrespective of the views of British parliamentarians and practitioners.’

Here we hear the distant echo of the American political scientist Charles Tiebout: harmonisation inevitably leads to a situation in which it is no longer possible to satisfy divergent preferences. This is a valid point. In the political process of European integration in the last few decades, there may have been insufficient attention for the question at which geographical level competences should be assigned: the national or the European. The famous principle of subsidiarity cannot offer much guidance in answering this question. The big challenge for legal scholars, economists and political scientists (preferably working together) is to develop more robust set of criteria that can help us in answering the question of who should do what.

In so far as Cameron’s speech at Bloomberg is inspired by any premeditated idea that certain competences do certainly not belong at the European level, this is clearly wrong. But this is not my (perhaps naive) reading of the speech. It seems that the British government is after an objective assessment of which competence belongs where. This is something one can only be enthusiastic about.