by Tony Judt
But Giscard’s text—which after some discussion was adopted as a Constitutional Treaty in Rome in 2004—did provide a working blueprint for the practical management of the Union’s affairs: improved systems of coordination on defense and immigration; a simplified and unified summary of EU law; a Charter of Fundamental Rights for EU citizens aimed at further strengthening the authority of the European courts; a clear and even ambitious account of the Union’s formal competence and authority.
Above all, the proposed constitution would have served to reduce—over time—the top-heavy system of national representation in the Commission; and it devised a system for voting in the European Council that proved, after a certain amount of haggling, to be acceptable to all parties as well as demographically equitable. Whether the new dispositions would produce clear-cut majorities on difficult issues remained uncertain: all the more so since for truly contentious topics like taxation and defense it was nonetheless agreed—at British insistence but to the unspoken relief of many other countries—to retain the old Gaullist device of national vetoes. And no-one was in any doubt that for all the careful distribution of weighted votes, real power still lay with the biggest countries—as Ortega y Gasset had already concluded in 1930, ‘Europe’ was for practical purposes ‘the trinity of France, England, Germany’. But at least—and always assuming that the constitution was to be ratified in every member-state, which proved to be an unforeseen impediment—it would now be possible to reach decisions.
By 2004, then, the European Union had—to the surprise of many observers—seemingly overcome, or at least alleviated, the practical difficulties of governing an unwieldy and inchoate community of twenty-five separate states. But what it had not done—what neither Giscard’s Convention, nor the various Treaties, nor the European Commission and its multifarious reports and programmes, nor the expensive publications and websites designed to educate the European public about the Union and its workings had even begun to do—was to address the chronic absence of interest on the part of the European public.
If the technocrats who built the institutions of the new ‘Europe’ had shown a haughty unconcern for the opinions of the public at large, this sentiment was now being repaid in kind and in earnest. Reflecting bleakly upon his Labour Party colleagues’ obsession with the techniques and rules of party-political management, the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee used to advise against the ‘fundamental fallacy’ of believing that ‘it is possible by the elaboration of machinery to escape the necessity of trusting one’s fellow human beings’.356 But this was just the premise on which the institutions of post-war European unity had been built, with consequences that were at last becoming apparent. The EU was suffering from a serious ‘democratic deficit’.
With each direct election to the European parliament the turnout fell; the only exceptions to this rule were those occasions where national and European elections coincided and voters who had been mobilized around local or national issues took the occasion to vote in the European polls as well. Otherwise the decline was unbroken—in France it fell from 60 percent in 1979 to 43 percent in 2004; in Germany from 66 percent to 43 percent; in the Netherlands from 58 percent to 39 percent.357
The contrast between the level of interest that electors exhibited for national politics and their growing unconcern for the parliament in Strasbourg is especially revealing. At the European elections of June 2004, the first since the Union’s enlargement, the vote in the UK was down by 20 percentage points from the most recent national elections, in Spain by 23 percentage points; Portugal saw a drop of 24 percentage points, Finland 39 percentage points, Austria 42 percentage points and Sweden 43 percentage points (from an 80 percent turnout in Sweden’s own elections to just 37 percent for the European vote).
The pattern is far too consistent to attribute to local circumstances. Moreover—and with more serious implications for the Union’s future—it was closely replicated in the new member-states of the East, even though this was their first opportunity to vote in an election to the parliament of Europe that they had waited so long to join. In Hungary the turnout in the June 2004 European elections fell short of the last national elections by 32 percentage points; in Estonia by 31 points; in Slovakia, where the latest national elections had seen a 70 percent turnout, the share of the electorate that bothered to come and vote in the European elections was 17 percent. In Poland the turnout of just 20 percent represented a 26-point decline from the national elections of 2001 and was the lowest since the fall of Communism.
Why were Europeans, ‘old’ and ‘new’ alike, so profoundly indifferent to the affairs of the European Union? In large part because of a widespread belief that they had no influence over them. Most European governments had never held a vote to determine whether or not they should join the EU or the euro-zone—not least because in those countries where the issue had been put to a national referendum it was rejected, or else passed by the narrowest of margins. So the Union was not ‘owned’ by its citizens—it seemed somehow to stand apart from the usual instruments of democracy.
Moreover there was a widespread (and accurate) sentiment among European publics that of all the institutions of the EU, the 732 elected Members of the European Parliament were the least significant. Real power lay with a Commission appointed by national governments and a Council of Ministers comprising their representatives. National elections, in short, were where the crucial choices were to be made. Why waste time selecting the monkey when you should be paying attention to the choice of organ grinder instead?
On the other hand, as was becoming increasingly clear to even the most casual citizen, the ‘faceless’ men and women in Brussels now wielded real power. Everything from the shape of cucumbers to the color and wording of a person’s passport was now decided in Brussels. ‘Brussels’ could give (from milk subsidies to student scholarships) and ‘Brussels’ could take away (your currency, your right to dismiss employees, even the label on your cheese). And every national government had at one time or another over the past two decades found it convenient to blame ‘Brussels’ for unpopular laws or taxes, or economic policies which it tacitly favoured but for which it was reluctant to take responsibility.
In these circumstances, the Union’s democratic deficit could easily turn from unconcern into hostility, into a sense that decisions were being taken ‘there’ with unfavourable consequences for us ‘here’ and over which ‘we’ had no say: a prejudice fuelled by irresponsible mainstream politicians but fanned by nationalist demagogues. It was not by chance that in the same European elections of 2004 that saw such a sharp falling off in voter interest, many of those who did bother to turn up at the polls gave their support to overtly—sometimes rabidly—anti-EU candidates.
In western Europe the enlargement itself helped trigger this backlash. In Britain the Europhobic UK Independence Party and the white-supremacist British National Party between them took 21 percent of the vote, promising to keep the UK clear of ‘Europe’ and protect it from the anticipated onrush of immigrants and asylum-seekers. In Belgium the Vlaams Blok, in Denmark the Dansk Folkeparti (People’s Party), and in Italy the Northern League all played on a similar register—as they had done in the past, but with rather more success on this occasion.
In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National took a similar position; but French doubts over European enlargement were not confined to the political extremes. It was an open secret that the French political establishment had long been opposed to expanding the EU and thereby diluting French influence: Mitterrand, Chirac and their diplomatic representatives had all worked hard to postpone the inevitable for as long as possible. Public opinion echoed these sentiments: in a poll taken four months before the new members were due to join the Union 70 percent of French voters declared the EU ‘unprepared’ for their arrival, while 55 percent opposed their inclusion altogether (compared to 35 percent of EU voters as a whole).358
But antipathy towards the EU also played a part in Eastern
Europe. In the Czech Republic, the Civic Democratic Party—aligned with Václav Klaus and loudly skeptical of the EU and its ‘over-mighty’ powers—was the clear victor in 2004, winning 38 percent of the country’s European Parliamentary seats. In neighbouring Poland Euroskeptic parties of the far Right actually did better than the ruling center-left coalition—not surprisingly, perhaps, considering that in a Eurobarometer poll taken a few months previously only just over half the Polish electorate thought that the European Union was a ‘good thing’.
And yet, taken all in all, the EU is a good thing. The economic benefits of the single market have been real, as even the most ardent British Euroskeptics had come to concede, particularly with the passing of the passion for ‘harmonizing’ that marked the Commission Presidency of Jacques Delors. The newfound freedom to travel, work and study anywhere in the Union was a boon to young people especially. And there was something else. In relative terms, the so-called ‘social’ element in the EU budget was tiny—less than 1 percent of the European-area GNP. But from the late Eighties, the budgets of the European Community and the Union nevertheless had a distinctly redistributive quality, transferring resources from wealthy regions to poorer ones and contributing to a steady reduction in the aggregate gap between rich and poor: substituting, in effect, for the nationally based Social-Democratic programmes of an earlier generation.359
In recent years the citizens of Europe had even acquired their own court. The European Court of Justice (ECJ), set up in 1952 under the same Treaty of Paris that established the European Coal and Steel Community, had started out with the limited task of ensuring that EC legislation (‘Community law’) was interpreted and applied in the same way in each member-state. But by the end of the century its judges—originally one from each member-state—were authorized to settle legal disputes between member-states and EU institutions, as well as to hear cases brought against lower court decisions or even against national governments. The ECJ had, in effect, assumed many of the powers and attributes of a pan-European Court of Appeals.360
As the example of the Court suggests, the rather indirect and often unintentional manner in which the Union’s institutions emerged had its advantages. Very few lawyers or legislators in even the most pro-European states of the European ‘core’ would have been willing to relinquish local legal supremacy had they been asked to do so at the outset. Similarly, if a clearly articulated ‘European project’, describing the goals and institutions of the Union as they later evolved, had ever been put to the separate voters of the states of western Europe it would surely have been rejected.
The advantage of the European idea in the decades following World War Two had thus lain precisely in its imprecision. Like ‘growth’ or ‘peace’—with both of which it was closely associated in the minds of its proponents—‘Europe’ was too benign to attract effective opposition.361 Back in the early Seventies, when the French President Georges Pompidou first took to speaking airily of a ‘European Union’, Foreign Minister Michel Jobert once asked his colleague Edouard Balladur (the future French Premier) what exactly it meant: ‘Nothing’ replied Balladur. ‘But then that is the beauty of it.’ Pompidou himself dismissed it as ‘a vague formula . . . in order to avoid paralyzing doctrinal disputes’.362
Of course it is this formulaic vagueness, combined with the all-too-precise detail of EU legislative directives, which has given rise to the democratic deficit: it is hard for Europeans to care about a Union whose identity was for so long unclear, but which at the same time appears to impinge upon every aspect of their existence. And yet, for all its faults as a system of indirect government, the Union has certain interesting and original attributes. Decisions and laws may be passed at a trans-governmental level, but they are implemented by and through national authorities. Everything has to be undertaken by agreement, since there are no instruments of coercion: no EU tax collectors, no EU policemen. The European Union thus represents an unusual compromise: international governance undertaken by national governments.
Finally, while the European Union has neither means nor mechanisms to prevent its member-states coming to blows, its very existence renders the idea somehow absurd. The lesson that war was too high a price to pay for political or territorial advantage had already been brought home to the victors after World War One, though it took a second war to convey the same lesson to the losing side. But just because a third intra-European war would have been catastrophic and perhaps terminal does not mean it could not have happened, at least in the early postwar years.
By the end of the century, however, the elites and institutions of the European Union were so intertwined and interdependent that armed conflict, while never impossible, had become somehow inconceivable. That is why ‘Europe’ was such an object of desire to aspirant members like Latvia or Poland, an escape route out of their past and an insurance policy for the future. But it is also, ironically, why the EU’s own leaders proved so fatuously helpless when confronted with the reality of war in the Balkans.
Its humiliation over Yugoslavia363 is a reminder that the European Union cannot escape the defects of its virtues. By not being a state the Union has been able to bind some 450 million people into a single, loosely articulated community with remarkably little dissent. But because it is not a state—because its citizens’ primary loyalties remain to the country in which they find themselves, whose laws they obey, whose language they speak and whose taxes they pay—the EU has no mechanism for determining or enforcing its own security interests.
This does not mean that ‘Europe’ has no common foreign policy. On the contrary, the European Community and its successor the EU have for many decades been extremely effective in advancing and defending their interests in international forums and against foreign competitors. But those interests have from the outset been defined in overwhelmingly economic—or more precisely, protectionist—terms. European economics ministers and trade commissioners have engaged in open combat with Washington over tax breaks for American exporters or import restrictions on European products.
More controversially, the EU has also fought very effectively to maintain high external tariffs in defense of Europe’s subsidized farmers—restraining open trade in commodities like sugar, for example, to the detriment of farmers in Africa or Central America.364 But whereas the separate member states of the EU—even the most powerful ones—have been pleased to pass on to Brussels responsibility for presenting their economic case in the World Trade Organization and elsewhere, they have reserved for themselves the vital attribute of any modern state. The European Union has no army.
In part this is an accident of history. In the early 1950s there were many who thought that in future the Western Europeans could and should organize their military affairs collectively—at an August 1950 meeting of the Council of Europe’s Consultative Assembly, Paul Reynaud of France even argued the case for a European Minister of War. But the defeat of the proposal for a European Defense Force (see Chapter 8), and the incorporation of West Germany into NATO, put an end to such ideas for a generation; instead Western Europe snuggled comfortably under the American nuclear umbrella.
Following the end of the Korean War and the retreat from empire, every Western European country cut its defense budget. With the fall of Communism, spending on the military reached new lows. In the late Eighties the average share of defense spending in NATO members’ budgets had already declined to 3.4 percent of GNP; by 2003 Denmark was spending just 1.6 percent of GNP on defense; Italy 1.5 percent; Spain a mere 1.4 percent. Only the French and British spent substantially more, though in neither case did spending now exceed 5 percent—negligible by historical standards.
Moreover, none of the armed forces of Europe was under ‘European’ control or likely to be in the foreseeable future, despite plans announced in 2000 for a European ‘Rapid Reaction Force’. Although there had for some years been a European Commissioner for External Relations, since the Treaty of Amsterdam his functions were duplicated (and his
authority thereby diminished) by a High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, answerable only to the EU Council of Ministers. And neither the Commissioner nor the High Representative had any authority to initiate his own policy, despatch armed forces or speak for the foreign policies or ministers of the member-states unless previously instructed. Henry Kissinger’s sardonic question of an earlier decade—‘If I want to phone Europe, what number do I call?’—had lost none of its force.
But these limitations—the fact that in spite of its size and wealth the EU was not a state, much less a great power—paradoxically served to enhance its image, at home and abroad. In this respect at least the EU was indeed coming to resemble Switzerland, a repository of international agencies and cooperation, an exemplar of ‘post-national’ strategies for problem solving and social cohesion: not so much a network of institutions or a corpus of laws but rather a set of values—‘European values’—embodied in the new Charter of Fundamental Rights.
If the values and norms of this new Europe were under pressure at the end of the twentieth century it was not from the established nation-states against which the European idea had been traditionally but misleadingly juxtaposed. Instead, both the EU and its various member-states were now facing an unprecedented wave of economic and social challenges brought upon them by forces largely beyond their control, most of them associated in one way or another with what it was becoming customary to designate as globalization.