After the the Irish ‘No’ vote of June 12th
The President of the EU Commission
Had leaflets distributed
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the EU
And could win it back only
By a second referendum. Would it not be easier,
In that case, for the European Council
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Adapted from Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Solution’, 1953
After the failed referenda on the EU constitution in France and the Netherlands in 2005, the European Union is yet again in disarray concerning its future: Ireland, the country that has developed from Europe’s poorhouse into one of its most successful economies thanks in large part to the EU, has voted with a resounding ‘No’ against the Lisbon Treaty. This means that less than 0.2 per cent (around 860,000 Irish voters) of the EU’s 497 million population has voted against the treaty, triggering fears that a spill-over effect could take place in countries such as Poland or the Czech Republic. With this, the EU’s second attempt at restructuring its institutions is flagging. To add insult to injury, the Irish ‘No’ vote is not only blocking direly needed internal reform but it also threatens to derail the ambitious road map set out by the French Presidency, which was hoping to tackle vital issues such as immigration, climate change, energy security, defence, and the Mediterranean Union.
Ambitious plans, deficient participation
The urgency of institutional reform should be quite clear to everyone. In a world that is facing a quadruple crisis of food, oil, finance, and climate, and which is increasingly being shaped by rising powers such as China, India, and Russia, the EU needs effective decision-making procedures that can confront today’s challenges. An outdated Nice Treaty that does not reflect the new realities of an EU-27 naturally hampers this. The Lisbon Treaty, with its introduction of a European diplomatic service, foreign minister, long-term president of the European Council, as well as more simplified voting procedures, would therefore in many ways lift the EU out of the doldrums and give it the tools necessary to deal with today’s problems.
Therefore, in order to salvage the EU’s reform efforts, European heads of state convened in Brussels on June 19/20, 2008, agreeing to basically continue the ratification process and to provide Ireland with additional guarantees of its sovereignty in areas such as military policy, taxation, and family law. The benefit of an added list of guarantees is that it would not alter the principle text and therefore would not compel re-ratification by states who have already rubber-stamped the treaty. This would, by and large, eliminate many of the sticking points for Ireland and could lead, as was the case with the Nice Treaty, to a second Irish referendum. Currently the Council is planning to meet again in October 2008 in order to reassess the situation.
Trick or treat?
However, while this would tackle the EU’s institutional deadlock, which is absolutely necessary, it fails to address the fundamental underlying message of the Irish ‘No’ vote, which together with the French and Dutch votes, clearly suggests that Europeans feel disconnected from a European Union that is supposedly there to serve and benefit them. Whilst for the founding generation the gains were visible and staggering, ranging from peace between France and Germany to the freedom of movement for EU citizens and the internal market, Europeans now take these developments for granted and expect the Union to continue to bring them direct benefits. This fundamental element is, however, ignored by EU policy-makers.
Instead, the EU continues to ignore the will of the people – for the EU is always right and the people wrong – coming up with new ingenious ways to bypass voters simply because they did not vote as the EU would have liked them to.
Practical benefits vs. legalese
With this in mind, the EU needs to seriously address its democratic deficit and the disillusionment that many Europeans feel for the Union. Dealing with these issues will surely not be an easy task but it will, without a doubt, enrich European democracy and the very ideals that we stand for and wish to promote in the world. Instead of presenting the Europeans with a complex, unreadable 300 page über-legal treaty that the average person does not understand (a complaint repeatedly mentioned during the Irish referendum), which in itself to some extent does not further democracy, the EU needs to bring forth vision, direct participation and political will, into its processes, in order to win the hearts and minds of its citizens. The electorate has to be convinced of its added-value and the European Union therefore needs to provide its citizens with identifiable benefits in relevant areas such as social policy, climate change, energy security (for example the European Charter on the Rights of Energy Consumers), or the protection of individual freedom and privacy rights (for example the anti-discrimination directive).
Democracy - not technocracy
While it is of course important for the EU to deal with its institutional crisis and make the Union more effective by adapting its working instruments to the new reality of an EU of 27 member states in the 21st Century, it cannot afford to not address the serious disconnection between the EU and its citizens. The business-as-usual approach adopted by the European Council in order to manoeuvre the EU out of this mess needs to be seriously questioned and the more fundamental issue of the EU and its citizens needs to be taken up.
To quote Abraham Lincoln – ‘you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.’ Europeans will not accept institutional reform – no matter how urgent – if it does not bring them direct benefits and is done on the back of their democratic rights.
The European Union will not have a long-term future if it does not comprehend that technocracy cannot be placed above democracy. In this vein, the EU needs to be constructed for and by its sovereign – the Europeans themselves, and show its population that it has a direct interest in the European project.
Claude Weinber, Director, EU Regional Office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Brussels
Roderick Kefferpütz, Project Coordinator, EU Regional Office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Brussels.