EUROPE

Autumn 2011

by Bruno Kaufmann / Bruno Kaufmann

Julian Priestley has made a brave attempt at mapping the options for increasing public interest in the EU’s democratic underpinnings. His article offers insights into the state of play within the European Parliament, the mainstream media and academe.

Priestley promises us “a chink of light in the EU’s democratic gloom” by promoting the idea of a quasi-presidential race for the top job at the technocratic European Commission. It’s a somewhat humble approach to one of the most challenging issues of our times indeed, because we’re not just talking about letting the European public “feel a little more democratic" but about taking a momentous new step in the history of modern representative democracy! The European Union in fact represents the first genuine attempt to bring “people power“ to a transnational level.

More and more issues are becoming transnational – energy, health, the environment and transport, to name just a few. Economic life became not just transnational but global quite a while ago; so we need common rules of the game, basic rights and above all participatory tools.
The European Union can offer a remarkable framework for developing this sort of modern democratic tool kit. Priestley is right, of course, when he stresses the European Parliament’s role in all this, and he is also right in his assessment of the limits of this type of transnational democracy. And there’s no way back, even if populists all over Europe are demanding what amounts to a roll-back to the cosy, homogeneous, nation-based welfare states of the 1960s and 1970s.

Looking forward, rather than back, there seems little doubt that well-functioning political parties at all levels are critical of this traditionalist vision, but are nevertheless concerned to safeguard the rights of national electorates in an updated Europe-wide democratic structure. I myself share Priestley’s own prudence when it comes to possible shortcuts and quick-fixes for addressing the lack of genuine democracy life at the EU level. Yet what he is proposing to fix the problem – an EU-wide election for the presidency of the EU Commission – is itself of a short-sighted nature.

Modern representative democracy must reach much further than this. As the Lisbon treaty acknowledges, the EU must combine indirect-parliamentarian representative democracy with direct-participatory democracy, together with strong legal-judicial pillars. Not only has the EU Parliament been elected directly since the late 1970s, but also people in more than 20 European countries have been able to vote on EU-related issues more than 50 times. In a modern democracy, voting on issues and voting for parties or persons complement each other, so the establishment of a pan-European referendum process is long overdue.

We also have the truly fascinating European Citizens’ Initiative to be further developed. It is an almost “super-democratic” feature because it combines more direct, more transnational and more digital approaches in a single tool. Let us therefore give this new incentive to better communication between citizens and and the EU institutions a fair chance, by optimising access to the new tool through the creation of a comprehensive participatory infrastructure ahead of the ECI’s formal launch next year.

Europe has endured more than a century of hot and cold wars, and the lesson to be drawn is that there is no future in being cynical, voicing complaints and resigning ourselves to pessimism. What instead we must do is to improve upon what we already have and further democratise our democracy.