Democracy likely to get short shrift as EU’s leaders watch and plot while the Convention unfolds

Date: 20/06/02

The prospects for engaging Europe's citizens in the debate on the future of the Union are still hostage to power politics, writes Kirsty Hughes.

OVER the coming week, we will see Europe's leaders trying to show that they are paying more attention to the European public.

In Seville, the summit will claim it is responding to public concerns as it attempts to tighten up on immigration. And it may also put some, but not all, of the Council of Ministers' law-making activities into the light of day.

Then on 24-25 June, the Convention on the future of Europe will open up to the public, listening to the views of about 50 representatives of civil society (albeit for only three minutes each).

Yet despite this flurry of activity, the real risk is that democracy is going to get short shrift both in the Convention and in the 2004 intergovernmental conference (IGC). This of course is not the stated aim. In their Laeken declaration last December, the EU's leaders emphasised that bringing the Union closer to its citizens was one of the three big challenges for the Convention to address.

But in a little-noticed comment to the Convention in April, Giscard d'Estaing bluntly rejected this. If we want proximity to the people, he said, we will not get this at continental level.

Blithely dismissing Laeken, he asserted that while 'people often say that Europe must be closer to its citizens, this is not exact - Europe must be more understandable by its citizens'.

Transparency, simplicity, comprehensibility are all certainly desirable.

But at the heart of the problem of the democratic deficit lie the issues of representative and participative democracy. And it is not only Giscard's attitude that suggests these will be ignored. The power politics already visible between Council and Commission and between larger and smaller member states demonstrate the likely potency of traditional turf battles, with scant attention paid to legitimacy and democracy.

Nor is Giscard's approach unfamiliar in Brussels, where the patronising view is often heard that if only the public understood the EU better, they would support the Union and its institutions much more. The opposite may well be true: if the public had a better view of its inter- and intra-institutional wrangles and machinations, they might well be seriously appalled.

Another equally patronising view, much-loved by the UK Blairites among others, is that the public has no time for institutional and constitutional debates and is only interested in outputs, delivery and efficiency. This may sound rather bemusing not only to the candidate countries who have spent the last 13 years building new political systems but also to Germany, to Scotland and to other parts of the EU.

Another view is that the EU's policies and outputs are in fact too technical and complex to be relevant and salient to the wider public. This too is rather bemusing: immigration and asylum, discrimination, interest-rate changes, email and telephone snooping powers, rules and recommendations on national budgetary policies - to name but a few - all seem highly relevant to Europe's citizens.

Then yet another argument is brought forward: the democratic deficit is exaggerated, the 15 member states are democracies and the Council and Parliament are highly legitimate institutions. But the Council legislates in private - and Seville is likely to go for tokenism here, opening up only part of the legislative process.

Imagine the outcry if a national parliament undertook half its legislation in secret. Moreover, nobody holds the Council as a whole to account - nor does anybody elect the Council as a whole.

Meanwhile the European Parliament, certainly the most democratic of the institutions, suffers from low visibility, falling turnout in elections, and ongoing legitimacy problems in multiple aspects of its behaviour, from dubious procedures for expenses to kow-towing to the European car lobby.

At the bottom of the legitimacy order, the Commission is appointed, not elected, and only weakly accountable to the European Parliament.

Some of the proposed solutions will only make matters worse. The UK is gearing up the big countries, with the critical absence so far of Germany, to support a new super president of the European Council.

It is perhaps indicative of the hubris and vanity of today's leaders that they think a former premier will have the credibility and legitimacy to head up the 21st century EU.

Looking at former premiers currently available should make one think again: Jospin, Kohl or Major, for example? Nor is this proposal simply part of the old intergovernmentalist versus federalist debate. Implicit in this proposal is the idea that the new super president would come from a large country.

Some of its supporters even argue that rather than representing a return to 19th-century big power politics, this is about democracy since the 75 of population in the 'bigs' represent the majority! What is deeply ironic about this, is that the UK - the long-time defender of intergovernmentalism and national sovereignty and opponent of centralisation - is actually taking the lead in doing down the sovereignty of the smaller countries and promoting centralisation around the bigs.

Another knock-on effect of the super president idea is that its supporters will oppose any moves to democratise the Commission. Election of the Commission president by the European Parliament, together with new powers to agree the appointment of Commissioners individually, not en masse, would be a big step forward.

But this would only serve to highlight the retrograde, undemocratic step of making the Council super president a former rather than a current premier. And it might even cast in a favourable light the idea of an elected Commission President also running the European Council.

And while this is all contentious with the smaller countries, there seems to be growing agreement among the member states that, despite their Laeken mandate to the Convention, they and not the Convention should decide how to reform the Council. This is driven not least by the fact that member states consider that the governmental representatives at the Convention are far too eclectic and motley a crew to be an effective power base.

So the hope for a bolder stance on democratic changes lies with the Convention members, and not with its chairman, nor with the member states.

They are in a position to propose substantive democratisation of the Commission, full opening of the Council in legislative mode, greater involvement of national parliaments and more participative democracy.

But even if the Convention does move in this direction, there remains a risk that it will focus on a small range of institutional reforms and not on genuine participation.

Laeken called for the creation of a European public area. But this will not happen without a step change in the behaviour of all the institutions and without some fresh and innovative thinking. The institutions need to recognise that strategies to promote communication and debate are a central part of their role. And this means two-way debate which will include criticism and disagreement, not simply one-way PR strategy and political spin. Dialogue with civil society organisations also needs to be put on a formal footing, not left to the vagaries of individual commissioners and presidencies.

And national politicians have to start owning up to their role in EU decision-making - something which the presence of TV cameras even during part of the Council legislative process will certainly help to encourage.

A small number of well-thought-out innovations could also have a big impact.

The Commission could, for example, announce that it would be online first thing every Monday morning to take questions from the European public (taking perhaps an hour of each Commissioner's time two or three times per year).

This would be a leap ahead of any national government. And the European Parliament could demand to hold weekly question times with both Commission and Council presidents, and find a way to involve representatives of national parliaments in these question times.

Such innovations would rapidly test the salience and interest of the EU to its public. Combined with a genuinely clear, sharp new EU constitution, this could represent a huge leap forward in building a real European political and public space. Nor should it be forgotten, as was underlined at a recent Transatlantic Center debate, that the creation of the US political culture and demos followed, and did not precede, the writing of the US constitution. Leaps forward are possible. Moreover, the fact that the future EU will not be a federal state on the US model, but will continue to be in effect some combination of the US and the UN, is all the more reason to emphasise and develop participative democracy and not simply institutional change.

The future of Europe Convention has a chance to lead by example here and not simply by its final decisions. It is meeting in public and it is establishing a series of consultations and dialogues with European civil society.

But it faces a number of challenges. It needs to demonstrate that these public consultations are not merely a formality. And it has to make sure that its new working groups, where the heart of the debate and the work will take place, are open to the public and not meeting in private, which is currently not guaranteed.

It also has to find a way to go beyond the organised networks of NGOs, interest groups, think tanks and others, to engage the wider public. But the Convention, with its 105 members, cannot engage the wider public on its own. This should be the responsibility of all governments and of all MEPs and all national MPs, not just those on the Convention.

But of course the governments are watching and plotting as the Convention unfolds, and waiting for their turn at the IGC. And even if they in the end agree with most of the Convention's conclusions, they may distance themselves nonetheless so as to preserve their bargaining power for the IGC. All of which suggests that the prospects for engaging Europe's citizens in the debate, in its conclusions, and in the future politics of the EU, are going to remain hostage as ever to the short-term power politics of the member states.

• Kirsty Hughes is a senior fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (www.ceps.be) and coordinator of the European Policy Institutes Network. She was deputy head of cabinet for Employment Commissioner Anna Diamantopoulou from 1999 to 2001 and is a former head of the European Policy Unit at the London School of Economics.

Major feature on the challenges facing the Convention on the Future of Europe. Author is a senior fellow at the Centre for European Poliocy Studies and coordinator of the European Policy Institutes Network.

http://www.ceps.be http://www.ceps.be

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