[Comment] We need a movement for democratic change
PETER SAIN LEY BERRY
13.06.2008 @ 08:43 CET
EUOBSERVER / COMMENT - Readers of this column will know that I support the Lisbon Treaty. I believe that the European Union has to adapt to changes in Europe and to the modern world, to make itself more efficient and streamlined and to take steps to bring itself closer to ordinary folk.
Not that the treaty is perfect - far from it. I would have preferred something that better addressed the EU's democratic deficit, as envisaged in the Laeken Declaration of 2001 (which kicked off the current constitutional progress) and which is well worth re-reading. It includes the conclusion:
"However the Irish vote, the EU must open a new constitutional process designed to address the lack of democratic control" (Photo: EUobserver)
"The Union needs to become more democratic, more transparent and more efficient. It also has to resolve three basic challenges: how to bring citizens, and primarily the young, closer to the European design and the European institutions, how to organise politics and the European political area in an enlarged Union and how to develop the Union into a stabilising factor and a model in the new, multipolar world."
Lisbon, it seems to me, makes only a limp attempt to address these points. Nevertheless, it is still worth supporting. Even a limp attempt is better than no attempt at all.
As I write they are voting in Ireland, the only country holding a referendum on whether the Lisbon treaty should be adopted. Opinion polls suggest the result could go either way - a ‘yes' or a ‘no.' Much will depend on turnout and late swings. The ‘no' camp has acquired considerable momentum in the last week or so. This could continue; or there could be a swing back to the Government's line. Dublin, it seems, is in a ferment.
The orthodox view is that a ‘yes' vote, even by the narrowest of margins, is all that is required to keep the treaty ratification process on track. Having avoided the referendum trap, Europe's other member states have either ratified the treaty or are well on their way to doing so. Lisbon will be implemented and we shall have a species of European President - perhaps the most visible of the Lisbon provisions - come December. Whereas, a ‘no' vote would throw Europe into turmoil, leaving it bogged down by cumbersome procedures, steadily becoming less able to react to global pressures, losing influence and opportunity.
But is this the only view? For in a sense Ireland has already given us its result and it is this: that even in a country that is the embodiment of the prosperous modern European state, which acknowledges that it owes its transformation to the EU, substantial numbers of ordinary folk feel a deep suspicion about the direction in which the European elite wishes to take them.
Looking for consensus
Whether this suspicion constitutes the majority or minority opinion is not wholly relevant. When one is constitution making - and Lisbon is, of course, constitutional in its effect - one hopes to achieve a broad consensus. Which it is clear in Ireland there isn't.
Governments elsewhere - whose peoples might reasonably have expected a referendum - have deliberately engineered to avoid one, believing that the people would vote this treaty down as the French and Dutch did in 2005. No broad consensus, then, in those countries either.
Which leads to the conclusion that either the European and national elites have been incompetent in explaining the need for reform, or we have to accept that Lisbon - and by extension the whole European machinery of government - lacks the foundation in the popular will that is necessary give it legitimacy. As democrats this should give us pause for thought. Again this was recognised at Laeken.
"Citizens undoubtedly support the Union's broad aims, but they do not always see a connection between those goals and the Union's everyday action. They want the European institutions to be less unwieldy and rigid and, above all, more efficient and open."
Even if the result of today's vote is a ‘yes,' this feeling of unpopularity among large sections of the population will not go away. Rather it will increase - because, in my judgement, the basic problem that people have with European government is that there is no way whatsoever of changing its direction.
In our member states citizens have the power to elect a government that will enact certain laws and repeal others. They have the power to dismiss a government if it fails their expectations. But with so many of today's problems - climate change, migration, trade, peacekeeping and so on - demanding a transnational approach, delivered in our case by the European Union, the voters are powerless. The European Parliament does not provide European government, they can't kick out the Commission and if they dislike the man chosen as European President they have no chance of sacking him.
As Mark Mardell, the BBC's Europe Editor pointed out the other day, should Mr Mandelson succeed in securing a new world trade deal that includes a reduction in European farming subsidies, what can Brian Cowen, the Irish Taoiseach, do about it? Mr Cowen has pledged to veto anything that cuts Irish farm subsidies, but whether he has the legal power to do this is questionable. And that he should veto a new world trade round to protect a few thousand farmers is unimaginable.
This steady disenfranchisement will continue. My conclusion, therefore, is that whatever happens today, the EU must open a new constitutional process designed to address the lack of democratic control. The biggest mistake we can make in the event of a ‘yes' vote would be to think that the EU will now be well for years to come. No, we need to continue the process of debate and reflection, asking how the Union can be made more democratic.
This time it should be a bottom up, rather than a top-down process. We, too, need perhaps our Movement for Democratic Change with small groups of people at every level throughout the Continent discussing how change might look and how it might be brought about.
At the same time we might also reflect on wider issues: Europe's boundaries, how an eventual Union of 42 states might be governed; what the Union's competences should be. But the primary mission must be democratic change. If, win or lose, the Irish referendum of 2008 can be the catalyst for such a Movement, then Ireland will be continuing her fine tradition of giving the world far more than she ever takes from it.
The author is an independent commentator on EU affairs.
