Tackling the legitimacy gap

By Dan O'Brien

Date: 16/06/05

The French and Dutch referenda have intensified debate about how to reconnect electorates and European elites. But if this debate is to have any chance of success, the nature of the problem must be clearly defined. And nowhere is definitional clarity needed more than in the distinction between the EU's (small) "democratic deficit" and its (very large) "legitimacy deficit".

These terms have often come to be used interchangeably, yet they are profoundly different. An absence of democracy allows rulers to take actions arbitrarily, for their own benefit or for the benefit of those they favour. The result of a democratic deficit is that people with power abuse it to the detriment of the rest.

In the EU system it is hard to find examples of people's interests being ridden roughshod over in the half century since the project was launched because checks and balances abound. Member governments are all democratically elected and so too are both legislative bodies, indirectly in the case of the Council of Ministers and directly in the case of MEPs. Member countries check and balance each other, the institutions scrutinise each other and a healthy tension exists between the states and the institutions.

What's more, many of the obvious democratic flaws have ready solutions and almost no one disagrees that the changes contained in the constitution to address them - citizens' initiatives, more say for national parliaments and public scrutiny of legislating ministers - should all urgently be implemented and be seen to be urgently implemented.

But televising 25 ministers debating the regulation of, say, the chemicals industry in a halting interpreter monotone will not engage voters, give a sense of ownership of the project or reassure them that the whole enterprise has not run out of their control - all needed to bolster legitimacy.

This shows that different types of deficits require different solutions. While democratic deficits can be addressed by reforming institutional structures, narrowing a legitimacy deficit is harder because changing voters' perception involves a permanent change in the behaviour of politicians. And engineering such a change is daunting not only because it would require inventive, determined and sustained political leadership of a sort that seems in woefully short supply in Europe, but because the EU's mostly technocratic functions will never easily engage voters.

The (relatively) easy part of changing politicians' behaviour is what they should stop doing: expediently blaming Brussels for unpopular decisions and policies that they themselves have often been involved in making; doing things at EU-level because it is less politically difficult than at national level; and speaking in impenetrable euro jargon when talking about the Union.

The much harder part is what politicians should start doing to change the way they make the case for Europe, not least because here there are not many ideas about. Among the few is Ireland's permanently instituted "National Forum on Europe" - a sort of travelling circus that pitches up in towns and cities across the country with MPs, MEPs, Eurocrats and academics in tow. They take the floor to listen and be quizzed. People roll up to inform themselves, argue their point, and be reassured that their voices are being heard.

But there is little to suggest that EU leaders see the need to put reconnecting with voters to the top of their agenda by coming up with more ideas like this. The Commission's "1,000 debates" initiative - an attempt to generate discussion in town-hall forums in all member countries - has flopped because politicians have not run with the idea. Despite the shock of the French and Dutch rejections of the constitution, EU leaders are now expending their energies fighting each other over the tiny, 1% of GDP, EU budget, and referenda are being busily derided even though they are the one proven way of getting politicians to sell Europe, and voters interested in buying.

Leaders ignore or underestimate voter alienation at their peril. Legitimacy deficits, like weaknesses in a building's foundations, are usually only exposed when things go badly wrong. If the EU were to face a real crisis it might not withstand the shock. The entire edifice could conceivably be at risk. The referenda have provided a salutary wake-up call. They should not be ignored.

• Dan O'Brien is senior Europe editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Analysis feature in which the author, who is senior Europe editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit, suggests the French and Dutch referenda on the Constitutional Treaty for Europe in May/June 2005 intensified debate about how to reconnect electorates and European elites. But if this debate was to have any chance of success, the nature of the problem must be clearly defined. And nowhere was definitional clarity needed more than in the distinction between the EU's (small) 'democratic deficit' and its (very large) 'legitimacy deficit'.

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