---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 21:56:43 -0800 (PST)
From: MichaelP <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: GUARDIAN comments of Euro resignations
=========================
This institution has failed. For we, the people, have not spoken yet
By Jonathan Freedland
Guardian Wednesday March 17, 1999
They looked like the Nuremberg 22, the accused lords of Europe herded into
a dock, their translators' headphones clamped to their ears, waiting for
the judgement that could destroy them. It took two months to come, but
come it did - with mighty force. For Monday's finding of incompetence and
corruption among the commissars of Brussels was not merely a condemnation
of the pocket-lining, expenses-fiddling, nepotists at the top. It was an
indictment of the very institution they served - if not of the European
project itself.
The scale of the problem was revealed by the reaction of the guilty. The
normal rule dictates politicians dodge blame until they can survive no
longer and are forced to resign. In an extraordinary act of political
chutzpah the Brussels politburo yesterday reversed the maxim. They
resigned at midnight, only for the Commission president to claim hours
later that his copybook remained unblotted, while Edith Cresson - she of
the all-expenses-paid clairvoyant and dentist - refused to concede she had
been anything more than 'careless'. In Europe, it seems, the politicians
resign first, deny later.
But the problem is deeper than a hiring policy which owed more to Family
Fortunes than equal opportunities. It's about more than a Commission which
was sleepily incompetent when it was not extravagantly corrupt. That's why
yesterday's demands for an entirely new set of commissioners or tougher
policing on fraud miss the point. Both those demands could be met, while
still leaving the basic problem untouched.
For the heart of the malaise is the fact that the European Union fails the
two basic tests of any political institution. It is neither effective nor
democratic. It isn't good at what it does, nor does it represent the
people whose money it spends.
For effectiveness, just look at the record. Besides a bureaucracy running
out of control, what else can the EU boast? It has serially failed to
construct if not a coherent defence and foreign policy for Europe, then at
least a robust response to successive crises in the Balkans. That's been
left to the Americans. Less forgivable is the single largest drain on EU
energies - and Europeans' money: the Common Agricultural Policy. It is now
a matter of near-global consensus that the policy is broken, an absurdly
dated subsidy for farmers. Yet on it goes, sucking up half the EU budget
and one in five ministerial meetings. Last week's attempt to solve it
ended in a trademark EU pile of fudge. Paralysis seems hard-wired into the
Brussels mindset. The European Central Bank is condemned for peddling
1980s solutions to 1990s problems, for presiding over slower growth in
Europe than in the US, but no one seems able to do anything about it. Like
the CAP, it remains trapped in gridlock.
There might be some compensation for these defects if the union was
democratic: then at least we could blame ourselves for choosing the
bunglers and pickpockets of the commissariat. But no. The famous
'democratic deficit' has given us a Commission which is wholly unelected
and a Council of Ministers which meets infrequently and in secret. With
the people shut out, the European Union remains what it has always been:
the project of the elites. Since its foundation, it has been the mandarins
and bosses who have plotted this adventure, doing next to nothing to win
public legitimacy. In Britain, the strategy for too long was entry by
stealth, hoodwinking the electorate to join a scheme whose merits were
never properly argued. Instead the arch-Europhiles have relied on a cheeky
form of post-Marxist determinism, insisting that integration and its
mascot, the Euro, are a simple matter of chronological inevitability.
But what these Hampstead Hegelians have missed is the distorting effect
the democratic deficit is having on the project. Without the disciplining
force of elections, the Eurocrats have pursued goals - from agricultural
subsidy to the Euro - which Europe's citizens don't want, making the Union
itself less effective.
Even the impeccable pro-European and founding director of the
ultra-Blairite Foreign Policy Centre, Mark Leonard, has written of the
'gulf' between Europe's decision-makers and the rest. He notes that 94 per
cent of the British elite favour the EU, compared to 48 per cent among
everyone else. How telling that the people most willing to identify as
Europeans are those nations outside the EU: the Poles and the Czechs. The
institution is such a failure it has managed to turn Europeans off the
very idea of Europe.
If this were any other body, we would know what to do. Mere tinkering with
sleazebusters and new faces would not be enough. As the saying goes: if it
is broke, fix it.
That means a long, hard look at the European Union from the bottom up.
Instead of a patchwork of treaties drawn up and amended over time, Europe
is crying out for a full-blown constitutional settlement. No more backroom
fudging, pretending that nothing profound is actually happening. It's time
to debate this truly enormous project where it belongs: out in the open.
My preference would be for the method adopted by the last people to dream
of building a new society from a diverse, fractious continent. Like the
first Americans, Europe needs a constitutional convention.
There it could debate whether to go the full way - and become a United
States of Europe with an elected, federal government - or to row back and
become a looser confederation of independent states. Whichever route is
taken, we need to talk about it. And not we the experts and governors, but
we the people of Europe.
There is an even more recent precedent. At the turn of this decade, the
trade unionists, clerics, citizens and politicians of Scotland gathered
for a constitutional convention which created the consensus for
devolution. Why not a similar process among all the nations of Europe?
Of course, it will be a shock. The ways of the Old World are pragmatism
and piecemeal change. But if we are to form a new Europe we need to learn
from the New World. If we are to reshape our continent, we have to have
the courage to do so as if from scratch - and out loud.
** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest
in receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes. **
--
For MAI-not (un)subscription information, posting guidelines and
links to other MAI sites please see http://mai.flora.org/
