New grand design for Europe is doomed to fail

Here we go again. Two years ago the French and Dutch public demolished Europe’s plans for a new constitution. Now the German presidency of Angela Merkel wants to resurrect it in the guise of a new treaty. Europe is on the verge of repeating history rather than learning from it.

As a pro-European I fear the consequences for the already strained relationship between Europe and its citizens.

It is true, of course, that Europe has grown topsy-turvy as successive countries have clamoured to share in its remarkable success. As the world’s biggest economic market, the European Union is a magnet for new entrants. The challenges of the modern world — global warming, global terror, mass migration, organised crime — require more cooperation between nation states, so if the EU didn’t exist we would have to invent it.

While modern Europe is geographically wide, however, its public support is shallow. People agree with the EU in principle but feel alienated from the practice. Turnouts at European elections are a joke.

Too often it seems as if an unaccountable elite takes decisions behind closed doors. Scepticism isn’t peculiar to Britain. Elsewhere in Europe public antipathy is common place. The results of the 2005 constitution referendums gave it voice.

Pro-Europeans usually point the finger of blame for such public ambivalence at external influences. The media are a favourite target — and of course sections of the press have waged an unrelentingly negative campaign against Europe. The blame game also fingers governments for failing to win over public opinion — and in the UK members of Tony Blair’s Government could have done more to make a consistent case for Europe. But these explanations are excuses: a soft comfort blanket that merely induces complacency.

It reminds me of how parts of the Labour Party, faced with successive election defeats in the 1980s, heaped blame on the public for voting the wrong way. The public was mistaken, not Labour. Eventually we cottoned on that since there were many more members of the public than there were of us, it was we who needed to change.

So it is with Europe. The EU needs to stop pointing and start examining its own part in the gulf that exists between public and Europe. There have been two principal failures: to demonstrate that both its relevance and its governance are in touch with the modern world.

With the best will in the world it is hard for people to see the EU as relevant when it is too concerned with changing its institutions and not enough with modernising its policies. The valiant efforts over recent years by the European Commission of President José Manuel Barroso to shift that focus are undermined by Chancellor Merkel’s decision to make a new treaty the centrepiece of the German presidency.

And yet the public mood across Europe is crying out for coordinated and effective action on security and terror, the environment and immigration. This is the territory that the EU should make its own and the priority for the new presidency.

Instead, Chancellor Merkel warns of “historic failure” without a new treaty, even though new accessions, new membership negotiations, a new budget and new peacekeeping operations have all proceeded happily without one. Of course some reform is needed but far better to make piecemeal change that is focused on securing greater external public participation than on grand internal institutional redesign.

It is not just what Europe does but how it does it that has failed to keep pace with the times. Europe's institutions were born out of postwar adversity. People expected little say and experienced precious little choice. Then deference was higher, expectations were lower. Now it is the other way round.

Unaccountable decision-making no longer works in an era when the public is far more informed and inquiring. The new democratic thirst that exists among citizens requires from the EU a more modern modus operandi.

So Tony Blair is right to demand a rethink about what Europe is for and to reorientate its spending and policy priorities accordingly. But that is just one side of the reform coin. The other side is to find ways of bringing the public into Europe's decision-making tent.

The European Parliament in particular needs to think about how the public’s voice can be better heard in its deliberations. For example, by better linking the results of consultation to decision-making, especially budget setting. Or by introducing a citizen’s right to initiate new laws, giving the people of Europe a direct say in place of the European Commission’s monopoly over initiating legislation. Or by revisiting the 2001 Laeken Declaration’s presumption towards subsidiarity by identifying powers that could be delegated to nation states, local government or even local communities.

None of this implies that Europe’s nations can or should go it alone. Quite the reverse. Europe can build a knowledge economy faster in concert. Europe can better defend itself against crime, terror and global warming by pooling sovereignty. Europe can more effectively shape the world order if it acts in unison on trade, defence and foreign policy. But cooperation between nations nowadays relies on the active cooperation of citizens.

Unless the EU is prepared to address the gulf between rulers and governed we risk a bureaucrats’ Europe, not a peoples’ Europe. It is time for Europe to face outwards not inwards, to empower the public not the politicians. Elitism is out. Engagement is in. Europe needs to learn the lesson.

The problem Europe faces is more or less the same problem that the American states faced after the American Revolution, when they were trying to figure out how to have a federal government they could tolerate. Then, there were widely disparate economic bases of the different states. Looming large was the difference in labor organization, with heavy plantation slavery in the South and a moral aversion to slavery in New England and Pennsylvania.

How, then, to unite the different parts?
Specifically, how does one simultaneously satisfy the desire for representative government, where majority will chooses the legislators, and the desire of distinct regions not to be dominated by the majority? The answer to that conundrum, in US history, was the bicameral legislature, with the popularly elected House apportioned purely based on population, while the more aristocratic, state-selected Senate representing each state on the basis of equality.

Thus, the majority of the population could win in one house, while the majority of the states prevailed in the other, and if they two went in different directions a compromise would need to be reached. The default was to the status quo, with no law being passed.

Of course there was nothing in the American Constitution which allowed any state a veto of Congress if the majority of the people’s representatives AND a majority of the states’ representatives went along with an act that a particular state really detested. The Southern Senator John Calhoun proposed the concept of “Nullification”, whereby states could individually ignore, thereby nullifying, acts of Congress within their territory. There isn’t any constitutional basis for this. In Europe, each state still retains the veto over anything Brussels does, because each state can refuse to enact a directive in to law, ignore decisions of the ECJ, etc.

We should remember that the American Constitutional structure failed over the issue of slavery. An issue that was so big that it was reconcilable caused the dissolution of the American union and a calamitous Civil War during which the Union, in order to win, stretched federal powers and beyond anything envisioned in the Constitution. After the Civil War, it was clear that the federal government was supreme over the states, and whatever residual powers were reserved to the states could not stand in the way of any federal civil rights legislation.

The problem of the veto was never resolved legally in American history. It was resolved on the battlefield. Even if the Federal government oversteps its theoretical bounds in the Constitution, the states have to obey anyway, because if they don’t, federal military power will enter the state and impose the federal law upon the state’s governments and, to the extent necessary, citizens. Such was the outcome of the Civil War, followed by reconstruction, followed by intervention by federal forces in the civil rights disputes of the 1950s and 1960s.

Europe is not there yet. The problem is the veto. Does a single state, or a handful of states, have the power to VETO a European directive, or ignore an ECJ decision, if it finds it strongly against that states’ interests? Right now, the answer is YES. So, the EU is really a confederation, not a federation. To get the full benefits of uniform policies across an area as vast as Europe would require a European federation, but THAT would mean a definitive renunciation of the power of any state to veto. It would REDUCE the status of European countries to that of American states. The Europeans are not there yet, although in many areas they have, by long negotiation and mutual agreement, arrived at a uniform set of European policies.

So, there is SOME federalization of policies in Europe: trade, tarriffs, the duty to impose a VAT and many civil rights. But it’s a voluntary federalization. Everybody has adopted the norms, because the benefits to each negotiating party made it worth their while. So far, nobody has reneged and pulled out of these treaties. The problem, of course, remains that anybody COULD pull out, if he wanted to. A strength of Europe is that there is no issue like slavery, which is already within the EU and which puts different parts violently at odds with each other over fundamental matters of human rights. The European Charter of Human Rights isn’t voluntary. All of the member states have adopted it. It is enforced by the European human rights court, and any new member who wants the trade benefits of being in Europe has to agree to the totality of the European human rights project. There is no national exception for THAT, and human rights are an area that IS keenly watched in Europe. So, for example, when the British military continued their age old practice of barring homosexuals, the European human rights court ordered the UK to eliminate its policy and admit gays into the British military without discrimination. This is a fundamental matter of human rights in Europe, and there is no national opt out on any detail of human rights. England, of course, submitted, because human rights are the one area that will get Europeans in a hue and cry in a hurry.

So, in this most-emotional of all areas: human rights, the Europeans have ALREADY solved the problem that tore America apart in the 1860s. The US Constitution, as originally envisioned, failed because human rights (and labor/property rights) were so fundamental that people valued them over the government and over peace. When America was formed the issue of slavery was already front and center, and was a primary driver of the bicameral legislative outcome, with the equal representation of states in the Senate. The seed of discord had already forced a compromise which, in the end, proved unworkable.

Europe doesn’t have that problem. European fundamental rights are uniform. In that sense, Europe is federal. What Europe is about is economic integration, and although money can stir passions, it nearly always drives towards compromise and dealmaking in the end. EVERYBODY loses, financially, if Europe falls apart. That is why the English decided that the not having gays in their military was not nearly as important as not having unfettered trade with Europe, and caved on the gay servicemen point.

The solution? More of the same. The European integration project has been slow and messy. It’s a confederation, not a federation, and that means that many things are not uniform. But it ALSO means that those things which ARE uniform are agreed upon by everybody. Coalitions cannot be put together that can ram a policy down some people’s throats. Right now, EVERY nation has a veto on EVERY policy. This drives policymakers mad, but actually, it has produced economic integration sufficient to make the largest economy in the world, and with new accessions, a rapidly growing one at that.

So, perhaps the answer is for politicians to be unhappy with their inability to swiftly enact new policies, and to allow the slow, almost vegetative, growth of policy cooperation on an ad hoc basis, as is done now. Europe works. It may be best to leave it as-is.

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