The many guises of democracy

Date: 13/11/1997

Much has been said in recent years about the need to combat the EU's 'democratic deficit. But, as Thomas Klau reports, there has been little debate about how to tackle a problem which will get worse once the euro arrives

WHEN nearly half of France's electorate and more than half of the voters in Denmark rejected the Maastricht Treaty five years ago, much was said about the need for more transparency and democracy in the political management of Europe.

Yet since then, despite the ongoing transfer of power from national to the European level of decision-making, there has been next to no significant debate about one crucial question: whether the EU's present constitutional arrangements provide, in terms of democratic standards, an acceptable institutional mechanism to define the key politics of European countries.

Democracy, admittedly, comes in many constitutional guises, but if its proper functioning requires the governed to have some understanding of how their rulers operate, the answer to the above clearly has to be 'no'.

'Elementary' matters such as the respective roles of the European Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament are a complete mystery to most citizens, including many politically educated newspaper readers.

Some might point out that few people are experts in the constitutional law even of their own country. Yet, by and large, citizens do know that their elected national parliament will vote on laws, their government will lead the administration and their courts of justice will rule in cases of litigation.

In other words, the essential principle of the separation of powers is clear and known to a majority of the population. Yet, say critics, in the institutional architecture of the EU, this defining principle of European and western democracy has been twisted out of all recognition.

The crucial right of legal initiative, normally the prerogative of parliament, belongs to the European Commission, a constitutional monstrosity with a brief that is part-legislative, part-executive, part-regulatory (the list goes on), and which most people wrongly believe to have a purely administrative function ('Brussels bureaucrats').

Furthermore, and in total contrast to the normal practice of European politics, the Commission is led by a body of men and women who are unelected political appointees who still see themselves as active politicians, but whose politics do not necessarily correspond to those of the government which appointed them.

Adding to the confusion, the main holder of law-making power is none other than the gathering of the national executives, ie the Council of Ministers - a purely legislative body in which ever-shifting alliances are formed behind closed doors according to principles which similarly ignore the traditional political divide.

Meanwhile, the European Parliament, while organised (up to a certain point) around more traditional left-right camps, acts as a sort of adolescent upper chamber, with increasing vetting powers on some issues and next to none on others.

In short, as any journalist or EU fonctionnaire knows, the more you try to explain Europe's institutional arrangements to ordinary citizens, the more confused and irritated they will get - which is why efforts to achieve so-called transparency are so often doomed to fail from the start.

For as long as 'Europe' was merely the political mechanism to fight out battles over specific issues such as milk intervention prices and agricultural set-aside subsidies, this did not matter very much.

Yet these days, the idiosyncratic and extremely arcane constitutional arrangement which has emerged in Europe over four decades has become the structure within which, increasingly, most crucial political matters are settled - and one which is completely impenetrable to the average citizen.

With the advent of monetary union in a mere 13 months, the day is near when all important economic policy decisions will be taken by a few politicians and senior officials operating, often secretively, within an institutional framework so staggeringly complex that only a tiny group of specialists will understand it.

To make things worse, say critics, governments have let themselves be pushed by central banks into weakening their own control of post-1998 economic policy even beyond the Maastricht Treaty's already restrictive provisions.

Thus, EU finance ministers decided at their informal meeting in Mondorf in September to staff more than half the future Economic and Financial Committee, a key body which will organise the EU's economic policy cooperation, with central bank representatives instead of ministry officials - a decision which, incidentally, no central bank official or minister bothered to report to journalists.

This means that the politically independent European Central Bank will have a central role in determining not only the monetary, but also the economic and budgetary policies of the territory under its control, a situation that will be unique in the world.

In the words of one senior official: "It is no longer a question of the ECB's independence from national governments, but rather the other way round."

Economic policy, however, is only one of the areas where the dynamics of European integration, coupled with the Union's specific institutional architecture, are weakening democratic and parliamentary control.

In a move which has triggered a major furore in Germany and other EU countries, governments have decided to grant Europol officials immunity from prosecution in member states, while denying citizens the right to take those same officials to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

And while the prospect of enlargement has led to a debate on the strengthening of the EU's decision-making process - which essentially means ending the national veto - there has been no serious discussion of the implications of settling almost all important political issues in Europe within a framework beyond the ken, and thus beyond the informed control, of the vast majority of citizens.

Instead, the institutional debate over the consequences of enlargement has been conducted almost purely in terms of efficiency, namely the preservation of the Union's ability to act.

Meanwhile, the fact that the considerable and ongoing extension of EU powers is dramatically weakening the effectiveness of democratic control exerted at purely national level has been largely ignored.

The Amsterdam Treaty does provide for some strengthening of Parliament's vetting powers, but leaves the essential institutional architecture of Europe untouched, while putting new policy areas such as the fight against unemployment under at least a degree of EU control.

While France - a country with a tradition of weak parliamentary control, of a shaky separation of powers and of a strong executive operating under self-made rules - has long been content to leave the constitutional arrangement in Europe largely unchanged, the EU's other long-established major democracy, the UK, has always been one of the most vocal critics of the democratic deficit in European decision-making.

Yet the UK's New Labour government under Tony Blair has actually spoken out against devoting too much attention to the EU's institutional arrangements, and is recommending instead that the Union focus on 'real issues' such as unemployment, the environment and crime.

Anyone who takes a serious interest in bringing Europe closer to the people will see this as bad news indeed.

With more and more issues formerly regarded as purely national affairs now being treated as matters of common concern, critics argue that it is high time to start thinking about a radical reshaping of Europe's institutions if democracy is to be kept from sliding into an ever-worsening crisis.

They insist the joint political architecture of the EU must soon be changed from an incomprehensible constitutional aberration into something that respects standard European practice.

The EU, in other words, urgently needs to move to confrontational politics around party political lines, operating within a recognisable institutional framework with reasonably distinct executive, legislative and judicial branches.

Major feature. Do the EU's present constitutional arrangements provide, in terms of democratic standards, an acceptable institutional mechanism to define the key politics of European countries?