EUROPE

Summer 2006

by Annemie Neyts-Uyttebroeck

Europe’s governments hide the importance of EU-level policymaking from their electorates “as if it were some dirty secret”, says former Belgian Europe Minister Annemie Neyts-Uyttebroeck. She calls here for a new openness as a first step towards connecting Europe with its citizens

There was a time when Europe’s citizens, the member states of the EU and its institutions were all three connected in a virtuous triangle. The member states’ governments and parliaments promoted the Union and its institutions as their own, as a joint venture they had all of them undertaken to ensure there would never again be a murderous civil war in Europe, to create economic growth and social welfare, and to erect a strong dam against the raging currents of communism.

Of course tensions remained – who can forget France’s “empty chair” policy or its veto of the United Kingdom’s first membership bid. But all in all, the virtuous triangle remained in place for the first 30 or so years of the European project. Those were the years when the European Communities, as they were then called, were seen as instruments for closer economic cooperation, and when all things political were seemingly left to national governments. All that has changed, and changed utterly.

The European Union has become a political entity, with a common currency and a fledgling common foreign and security policy, with an embryo common defence policy and task – developing cooperation in justice and home affairs. Its single market policy has been progressively deepened to a point where the European Commission has become the arbiter of fair competition and conducts trade negotiations on behalf of the world’s largest and most powerful trading bloc.

There have inevitably been clashes between the Commission and national governments. Rivalry has grown inevitably between national parliaments and the European Parliament, and just as inevitably, the media across Europe has generally lost track of EU decision-making processes that have grown in number and in complexity. The runaway development of television as an information medium has not helped; television does not like complexity and is impatient with protracted decision-making processes and talking heads. It likes sound bites and strong, forceful declarations, and lively debates with many participants who never get a chance to make their point.

The result is that the general public throughout Europe is not well-informed about the long and arduous negotiations that led up to the EU’s latest enlargement. The public must therefore be forgiven for believing that taking in 10 new member states all at once was a reckless act.

Successive treaty changes have not helped to win over public opinion, and nor has the often inflated rhetoric of the European Commission, not to mention the unreadable conclusions of the EU’s quarterly Summits. Somewhere along this path, the virtuous triangle between citizens, the EU member states and its institutions has become unravelled. Political leaders and opinion formers across Europe have been saying for years that the Union lacks efficiency, transparency and accountability, but then the Prime Ministers of the day are televised greeting each other jovially before the start of a meeting, and afterwards giving very different accounts of its upshot.

The same national leaders demand that the Union undertake ever more ambitious tasks – such as jobs, innovation, research, social protection and defence and security – yet steadfastly refuse to provide the necessary means. At Hampton Court last October they ordered the Commission to come up with a draft for a genuinely European energy policy, and then this spring they rejected the chief instrument needed to provide it – a Europe-wide energy regulator.

How many ministers in national governments tell the truth about the importance of EU decision-making? How many tell their parliaments and voters that they meet with their 24 ministerial counterparts very often, in some cases every single month, to take decisions that affect the everyday lives of all of Europe’s citizens? They generally prefer to keep quiet about this, as if it were some dirty little secret. Sometimes, when a decision is hailed as good, they take the credit. When a decision is seen as bad or when there is no decision at all, it is “Brussels” that gets the blame. EU member governments seldom acknowledge that no important decision can be taken in Brussels without their participation, and usually their consent; for even in cases of qualified majority voting, the Council generally tries to decide by consensus if not by unanimity.

Over the years, governments of all political shades have gradually divorced themselves from the Union, and have in fact come to disown the EU. So how can we expect Europe’s citizens to support the Union?

In most of the six founding states, the European Union is no longer seen as a common undertaking because most governments have preferred to side with their citizens and turn the Union into the proverbial scapegoat. In my view, therefore, the most worrisome disconnect is not between the Union and the citizens, but between the institutions of the member states and those of the EU.

So long as European affairs are pushed to the margins of national politics, and so long as European affairs are treated as just another a component of a nation’s foreign affairs, and for as long as European matters remain footnotes in the programmes of national political parties, with European news being relegated to the inside pages of our newspapers, it will remain extremely difficult to establish meaningful connections between the EU and Europe’s citizens. What we now need is recognition by all concerned that the connection between member states and the Union needs mending, and that that is a pre-condition for establishing the connection with citizens.

If the Union is to survive and thrive, its institutions and member states must openly acknowledge their permanent interdependence. They must also recognise that because of its very nature these are relationships that will remain subject to tension, so they should adjust their use of rhetoric to that reality. They also need to resist the temptation to side with their most strident supporters, diehard federalists on the one hand, or nationalists on the other. For its part, the European Union needs to acknowledge that it only exists thanks to the continued consent of all of its member states, and the member states should acknowledge how much the Union brings them in terms of strength, stability and international recognition. Together, they could then credibly tell Europe’s citizens that the construction of the European Union is the single most successful political undertaking in the history of humankind.