The wisdom of Mr and Ms EU

By Ilana Bet-El

Date: 08/06/06

As EU leaders gather for their summit next week, they may wish to reflect, yet again, on the disparity between what they claim is the will of the various nations they lead - and the facts of the matter.

This time last year the leaders of France and the Netherlands were told in no uncertain terms by their electorates - each in its own way beset by economic worries, unease over globalisation and increasing racial tensions - that the convoluted, indeed largely incomprehensible document called an EU constitution was unacceptable to them.

In response, all 25 EU leaders, shrouded in gloom, decided to shelve the constitution in its entirety - and enter a one-year period of reflection on the Union, which has effectively been extended into a second. In other words, rather than understand the opinion of their citizens, they decided to assume the EU, rather than the constitution, was all negative.

But the European Voice Survey of EU Citizens published last week shows that they were badly wrong. The average citizen reflected in the survey, while not understanding the EU in its totality and certainly believing it could communicate itself far better, is far from willing to reject it. In fact, said citizen trusts it more than his or her own government - which should give the summit participants a moment of collective embarrassment - and wishes it to deal with precisely those issues which have always been considered sacred to the nation state, notably immigration, foreign affairs and defence. While these came after the environment, energy and trade as issues of preference for EU involvement, they were ranked well ahead of the existing EU domains of activity, such as agriculture and competition policy.

How to explain this apparent anomaly between results just one year apart, when the EU is apparently still in a state of doom and reflection? I suggest it can be brought down to the simple issue of citizen involvement.

Despite promoting the constitution as a joint endeavour of national governments, the EU institutions and the European public, it was nothing of the kind. Governments took good care to frame and direct the public consultations - which in any case were held with a number of hand-picked civil society organisations and conducted in the usual impenetrable EU lingo - as much as the subsequent intergovernmental conference (IGC) which shaped the final document. Indeed, as a senior UK diplomat told me at the time: "We'll make sure the IGC will mop up whatever we can't fix in the public phase."

Well, the IGC fixed it so well as to create a document that was clearly unacceptable to the public, inasmuch as it understood it, as the subsequent referenda made clear. The EV survey, on the other hand, did precisely the opposite: it framed a set of clear questions on a wide number of issues, and asked the EU public for answers. The questions were sufficiently nuanced as to provide a wider range of opinion and interpretation.

All these clearly show that Mr and Ms EU, who are still perceived by national media and leaders as being beset by economic worries, unease over globalisation and increasing racial tensions, want EU help and leadership in solving these problems. They seem instinctively to understand, far more than their leaders, that nation-states alone can no longer deal with the major issues of our times. Europeans want the EU to work for them. To make this happen the EU must communicate better - and national politicians must listen. That will make a change.

• Ilana Bet-El is an academic, author and policy adviser based in Brussels.

Author looks at public opinion across the EU on the Constitutional Treaty for Europe and European integration in general. The European Voice had commissioned a survey the results of which were presented on 30 May 2006.