The Max Watson Lecture

The EU has more than once gone through a phase of reflection on how to deal with decision making in a grouping of countries with heterogeneous preferences: Europe à plusieurs vitesses, concentric circles, majority voting, and even a federal Europe are attempts to deal with the trade off between efficiency and legitimacy in decision making. In an EU of 28 this dilemma has proven to be more pronounced than ever, and politically even more difficult to deal with. Brexit would deepen some of the present divides, and therefore accentuate the need for reforming the way Member States organise their affairs. There is a need for more differentiation and for allowing for a higher degree of heterogeneity among Member States’ integration strategies whilst retaining and strengthening core elements of membership. A Europe of such „clubs“ would be more diverse, but stronger. It might even offer a perspective for the UK in the longer run.

Thomas Wieser was President of the Euro Working Group and of the European Financial Committee of the European Union until February 2018. Before becoming President of the EWG/EFC, he was Director General for Economic Policy and Financial Markets in the Ministry of Finance, Vienna. There he was in charge of macro-economic policy, international and EU affairs, financial market legislation, and export credits and guarantees. Wieser has a strong academic background in Economics: after a degree in Economics (University of Innsbruck), he pursued post-graduate studies in theoretical and mathematical economics, and taught at the University of Colorado (Fulbright scholarship) as well as the Institute of Advanced Studies, Vienna.