will follow the directions of the principals. a simple example : the shareholders of a company choose a manager to run their company. but sometimes it happens in this model that the agent tries to turn the power structure around and to switch from one who simply follows directions to one who deliberately sets the agenda. this effort can often be successful because the agent is a relatively small group of people who hold all the relevant information and share very similar motivation, while principals tend to be much more numerous and less informed and their objectives are often highly differentiated. and so, corporate managers are often able to push through their will even if it goes against the interests of many shareholders ; international organisations often take steps that their founding members do not like to see ; and by the same token the eu administration is able to shape the integration process in ways that differ from what many member states previously intended. to give you just one banal illustration of this process : the remuneration of employees of international organisations and of eurocrats is invariably higher than the remuneration they would be able to earn in similar positions at home. therefore, the principals watch – with little joy, of course – a brain - drain in favour of their agent. thus, an agent gets dominance over its principals and principals even contribute to this dominance. the observation that agents try to become more powerful than their principals is usually considered to be beyond the boundaries of political correctness, so we rarely hear about it. the same holds for another hindrance to proper execution of the european integration idea, namely the asymmetry among different principals, that is, among different member states of the eu. in itself, a difference in the weight of a small state and a large state may make sense ; but if certain eu member states have a much bigger informal impact than others on the positions that the eu takes in international political or economic forums, the big - impact states may be tempted to “ nationalise ” the voice of the eu. many attempts at nationalisation of eu positions are due to what might be called the “ french complex ” : some leaders of bigger countries still have not fully absorbed the fact that their country is no longer the superpower it used to be and no longer leads the world, so they often try to abuse their eu - wide voice to support their national interests, positions and agenda. when they call for europe to speak with “ one voice ”, they often seem to expect that the single voice of 500 million eu citizens will be the voice of their national

the question of why the european union is not as economically powerful and efficient as it would like to be, is certainly complex. however, my suspicion is that one of the answers is that the eu has started concentrating too much – and in many areas almost exclusively – on the process of deeper and deeper political integration. it is almost a mainstream ideology which states that the answer or solution to virtually any problem in the eu is more integration. whenever we discuss problems with colleagues in brussels, the mainstream view typically argues : we need more eu integration to solve this. and if integration has not brought what we hoped for, it means we need even more integration. we probably did not have enough of it. well, i have some doubts about this approach, at least as regards the impact of political integration on the economy. the concept is based on a simple idea that the bigger the state, or the bigger the economy, the bigger also the wealth of the citizens of such a state or economy. this idea fails terribly when compared with simple statistics and facts. if you take a look at the correlation between the size of an economy and a measure of well - being such as gdp per capita, you will see that on average the bigger, or more populous, economies in the world are not generally richer economies. rather, it is small open economies ( including those in europe ) that tend to be richer, the only exception to this rule being the united states. so bigger does not mean richer. my own hypothesis is that instead of integration of jurisdictions, competition between them might sometimes be more beneficial to economic growth. countries should compete for investors, capital and labour force by making their tax systems, legal frameworks and other conditions as efficient and friendly as possible. competition is sometimes useful not only on the markets, but also among jurisdictions and states. political integration can, at some point, become an obstacle to competition, sometimes even intentionally. i think that the eu is, unfortunately, right now at this stage. what a shame. and why is that? well, when we choose the path of political integration, we have to watch out carefully for certain pitfalls – and i am not sure we have been careful enough in this respect. a major pitfall is the effect that we can observe whenever a group of people or institutions hires someone else to do a job for them. in economics, we call it the principal - agent model, or we say that a group of principals hires an agent. the idea is that the agent