IGC 2000: The Constitutional Agenda

My principal theme today will be to identify some of the items on the Constitutional Agenda of the Union which in my view should be addressed in the coming IGC. I will first say some words on Democracy. Europe remains faithful to the idea of an ever closer union among the peoples of the continent and rightly continues to reject the idea of one people, of nation-building and of European statehood. This fateful decision, welcome for its respect for the distinct identity and cultural and political richness of the States and nations which make up Europe, is at the source of the Union’s democratic dilemma. The federal state model—not feasible and not desirable—would, however, have given Europe a smorgasbord of well-tried institutional arrangements, whether Austrian, Swiss or German, American, Canadian or Australian to mention but a few, from which Europe could choose and adapt the one most suitable for itself. The federal state model would guarantee that the norms and habits of Western liberal democracy would be no more compromised in a United States of Europe than in the federal state from which the model was adapted. Instead, the originality of the Europe has been in constructing a polity which to date has achieved a level of legal and material integration far exceeding that obtained by any historical confederation, and yet has managed to maintain the distinct political identity and essential sovereignty of its Member States and their nations in a manner which has defied the experience of all federations. The institutional arrangement at the center of which we find Commission and Council of Ministers, Parliament and European Council has been adept not only at achieving this remarkable result by ensuring a working balance between the Community and its Member States but also, to judge by the results of European integration, at achieving this result with a remarkable level of efficiency at a surprisingly low cost. (After all, the Commission employs, albeit with inflated wages, less officials than any medium-sized European city.) But the price of rejecting a federal state model and charting its own unique experience has been that there is no ready-made democratic blueprint for a European Union. As an IGC approaches one immediately turns to institutional reform, which then overwhelms other items and becomes the central issue in the to and fro among the institutions themselves. This is inevitable, but certain dangers have to be noted. Though all institutions profess that their own pet agendas are exclusively in the interest of the Union and above all the citizens of the Union, in fact as one gets into the thick of it they all adopt keen corporatist attitudes, concerned mainly with protecting their own interests and power. Additionally, they display their blind spots or Achilles’ heels. For example, the Commission’s historical conundrum has always been, on the one hand, its self-understanding as a political institutions couple, on the other hand, with a lack of the kind of legitimation which political institutions require in the Member States and, indeed, in our societies. The historical response of the Commission has been to seek legitimation through results rather than through process, legitimation by outputs rather than inputs—a belief that if it can deliver the substantive economic and social goods, who can complain? Two millennia ago one called that ‘bread and circuses’. The Commission has the typical impatience of the Philosopher-King toward ideas which would increase voice, if the trade-off is a reduction of efficiency. It is interesting to note that in the recently-released Prodi proposals there is some acknowledgment that process might, after all, be important. Parliament’s Achilles’ heel has been its hegemonic attitude toward democratic legitimation. Parliament has not been charitable towards proposals designed to enhance democracy in which it did not play a central role. The trajectory of increase in the powers of the European Parliament in the last 15 years has not been matched by an increase in its own popular legitimacy nor in any appreciable or measurable empowerment of European citizens and their ability either to shape policy or take Euro-politicians to task—i.e. the two principal paradigms of democracy: representation and accountability. To drop the jargon, because of the particularity of European governance, individuals cannot exercise these two most elementary and primitive forms of democratic process. They cannot to the urns and, by their vote, ‘throw the scoundrels out’ of government. They cannot go to the urns with the knowledge that, if a sufficient number of fellow citizens vote as they do, there will be an appreciable impact on key European socio-economic regulatory and redistributive policies. Enlargement will not only mean a growing burden on the decisional processes of the Union. It will bean, too, a continuous decline in the specific gravity of each individual. It will also render more visible that one cannot easily presume the existence of a European society as a basis for a trans-European political discourse. From a policy perspective one must go beyond the institutional matrix. The institutions must be ready to discuss proposals which have as their objective the empowerment of individuals in the political process (instead of just throwing rights at individuals—power is what citizenship is really about) and the enhancement of a true European political discourse: not the old Maastricht-type discourse of ‘yes or not to Europe’, but a discourse of the policy options which are on the Union agenda, a political discourse which should take place both within Member States and across Europe. Such apolitical discourse does not take place today. What policies? I have explored these elsewhere. I turn now to my principal theme: the European Constitutional Agenda.

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