The great debate

Date: 14/06/03

The EU's constitutional convention was to bring the Union closer to the people. It has done the opposite

YOU have to hand it to Valery Giscard d'Estaing. The chairman of the European Union's constitutional convention has proved that even at the age of 77 he is a master politician. Using a mixture of regal hauteur, bullying, negotiation and selective listening, he now looks likely to force the disputatious rabble on the convention floor to agree to a single text for an EU constitution, which will be presented at a grand summit meeting in Greece on June 20th.

Technically, the convention could then be deemed a success. But in one crucial respect it is already a gloomy failure. For it has failed to achieve its proclaimed objective of sparking a wide public debate and making the Union more comprehensible to José Público. In the EU's announcement in December 2001 that it was to set up a constitutional convention, its very first declared aim was that “European institutions must be brought closer to their citizens”. The convention's debate should be “broadly based and involve all citizens”. The main debates have indeed been held in public and were open to any passing journalist or somnolent student. But there has been barely a flicker of discussion among ordinary people across the continent. As the convention delegates joke: “We said we would have a public debate but instead we've had a debate in public.”

A recent Spanish opinion poll found that a good 90% of Spaniards were unaware of the convention's existence and only 1% knew its goal was to write a constitution for the EU - and by extension for Spaniards. When Mr Giscard d'Estaing published his first full draft, the event was not even mentioned in Bild, Germany's biggest-circulation newspaper. The British tabloids, by contrast, have run front-page stories claiming that a “blueprint for tyranny” is being drawn up in Brussels.

Many Europeans know so little about the EU that the convention's debates would mean nothing to them. A poll taken for Britain's Foreign Office in 2001 discovered that a quarter of Britons did not know that their country was actually a member of the European Union, and 7% thought that the United States was in it. In Germany, a founder member of the Union whose serious papers devote acres of space to EU affairs, another recent poll found that 31% of the public had never heard of the European Commission, the EU's most important institution.

In theory, the new constitution will improve matters. One of its aims is to simplify and democratise the EU. Many different treaties are being rolled into a single text. The language is to become simpler: European directives will now be called European laws. The directly elected European Parliament will be involved in more decisions that were once confined to the more secretive Council of Ministers. But the appearance of simplicity is largely an illusion. Almost everywhere you turn in the new treaty, baffling new legal procedures and language spring from the text.

Take the attempt to decide whether EU countries will forge a common foreign policy by majority vote or by unanimity. At present it is apparently proposed that the EU's members could unanimously decide to take a decision by a majority vote. As for the election of members of the European Parliament, this will be decided on the basis of “degressive proportionality”. Even where the constitution makes an apparently unambiguous claim, the reality is almost invariably more complicated. So, for instance, the EU will have legislative powers to pursue “economic and social cohesion” across the Union. But leaf forward a couple of hundred pages to part three of the constitution and you discover that this apparently sweeping power is tightly defined to cover only regional-aid policies.

This failure to connect with people is due not just to the opacity of the constitution's legal structure or the obscurity of its language. The widespread ignorance of the basic functions of the Union revealed by opinion polls shows that most voters are completely indifferent to the EU, even though, in most of its countries, it already makes more than half the laws. The reaction of most conventioneers is to shrug this off and plough ahead. Some argue that a further centralisation of powers in the EU, combined with more powers for the European Parliament, will in time create genuine pan-European politics.

Waiting for a European demos

That is highly dubious. If voters simply made a cold analysis of a politician's views and then voted accordingly, Europe's democratic deficit could be made good quite easily through institutional changes. In fact, all national democracies in Europe rely on a sense of community, a shared culture and, almost always, a common language. This allows voters to act as much more than desiccated policy-analysis machines. They respond to politicians by asking “Do I like this person?” or “Do I trust him?” As soon as a British, Italian or French politician opens his mouth, his compatriots will know many things about him: his social class, region, personal style, and so on. Such cues, so important in making personal and political judgments, barely operate across Europe's linguistic and cultural barriers.

The European Union is a success, despite this lack of a shared political identity, because for most of its history it has been concerned above all with relatively apolitical matters of economic management: the creation of an internal market, the management of competition policy, and so forth. But over the past decade the EU has moved decisively into new and much more sensitive areas - foreign policy, fiscal and monetary policy, immigration. This process will be accelerated by the new constitution, which entrenches or expands the EU's powers in all these areas. But though the convention has proved all too capable of giving the European Union more powers, it has signally failed to show it can create a genuine European debate. As a result, far from narrowing that democratic deficit, the European convention may well make it wider.

The European Union's constitutional convention was to bring the Union closer to the people. Article argues that it has done the opposite.

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