Subsidiarity: The Founding Principle The EU Can't Stick To | Danube Politics

Subsidiarity is meant to hold the peace between 27 often fractious nation-states.

It’s the basis of EU Law.

The principle that decisions are always taken at the lowest level of authority, - only matters which concern all, are governed by all.

The sense that Brussels does the Brussels things, and stays out of domestic politics.

That what happens with Irish tax law, Swedish social benefits, or Hungarian marriage laws, is at heart, the reserved right of the lawmakers voted in by each of those three unique polities.

Except that… this simply isn’t the case.

Because no one is any longer sure where subsidiarity begins and end. To give one example - Hungarian migration laws are being taxed at the rate of a million euros a day for the country’s failure to adhere to Europe’s common migration framework. So - who can enter your country is evidently no longer reserved power.

Now, there is the Digital Services Act, which attempts to force mass internet censorship on member states.

The European Public Prosecutor's Office in 2013 took away the exclusive privilege of nations to prosecute on their sovereign territory.

In the Common Agricultural Policy’s micro-regulation: Brussels prescribes field rotation schedules, hedgerow maintenance, and the percentage of farmland that must be left fallow.

Time and again, we see the principle of Subsidiarity dying by a thousand cuts.

So - should we hang onto it?

Is subsidiarity something that works - the best bolster we have against super-state overreach? Or is it now little more than a polite fiction, best dispensed with to reveal where true power lies?

Father Mario Portella is familiar with the subject on two levels.

Firstly, he is a Catholic Priest - and Subsidiarity is originally a Catholic doctrine, first sketched by Pope Pius XI.

Secondly, he has just published a paper for the Danube Institute, in the course of which he has traced the increasingly confusing story of subsidiarity across the history of the EU.

Father Mario is visiting fellow here at the Danube Institute. He’s also former Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Florence and Priest of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.