The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  The ensuing debacle came as a brief thunderclap to the Western elites. The Constitution—more than five hundred pages long, comprising 446 articles and 36 supplementary protocols, a bureaucratic elephantiasis without precedent—increased the power of the four largest states in the Union: Germany, France, Britain and Italy; topped the inter-governmental complex in which they would have greater sway with a five-year presidency, unelected by the European Parliament, let alone the citizens of the Union; and inscribed the imperatives of a ‘highly competitive’ market, ‘free of distortions’ as a foundational principle of political law, beyond the reach of popular choice. The founders of the American republic would have rubbed their eyes in disbelief at such a ponderous and rickety construction. But so overwhelming was the consensus of the continent’s media and political class behind it, that few doubted it would come into force. To the astonishment of their rulers, however, voters made short work of it. In France, where the government was unwise enough to dispatch copies of the document to every voter—Giscard complained of this folly with his handiwork—little was left of it at the end of a referendum campaign in which a spirited popular opposition, without the support of a single mainstream party, newspaper, magazine, let alone radio or television programme, routed an establishment united in endorsing it. Rarely, even in recent French history, had a pensée quite so unique been up-ended so spectacularly.

  In the last days of the campaign, as polls showed increasing rejection of the Constitution among the voters, panic gripped the French media. But no local hysterics, though there were many, rivalled those across the border in Germany. ‘Europe Demands Courage’, admonished Günter Grass, Jürgen Habermas and a cohort of like-minded German intellectuals, in an open letter dispatched to Le Monde. Warning their neighbours that ‘France would isolate itself fatally if it were to vote “No” ’, they went on: ‘The consequences of a rejection would be catastrophic’, indeed ‘an invitation to suicide’, for ‘without courage there is no survival’. In member-states new and old ‘the Constitution fulfils a dream of centuries’, and to vote for it was a duty not just to the living, but to the dead: ‘we owe this to the millions upon millions of victims of our lunatic wars and criminal dictatorships’.10 This from a country where no democratic consultation of the electorate was risked, and pro forma ratification of the Constitution was stage-managed in the Bundesrat to impress French voters a few days before the referendum, with Giscard as guest of honour at the podium. As for French isolation, three days later the Dutch—told, still more bluntly, that Auschwitz awaited Europe if they failed to vote yes—threw out the Constitution by an even wider margin.

  Such two-fold popular repudiation of the charter for a new Europe was not in reality a bolt from the blue. The Constitution was rejected, not because it was too federalist, but because it seemed little more than an impenetrable scheme for the redistribution of oligarchic power, embodying everything most distrusted in the arrogant, opaque system the EU appeared to have become. Virtually every time—there have not been many—that voters have been allowed to express an opinion about the direction the Union was taking, they have rejected it. The Norwegians refused the EC tout court; the Danes declined Maastricht; the Irish, the Treaty of Nice; the Swedes, the euro. Each time, the political class promptly sent them back to the polls to correct their mistake, or waited for an occasion to reverse the verdict. The operative maxim of the EU has become Brecht’s dictum: in case of setback, the government should dissolve the people and elect a new one.

  Predictably, amidst the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, Europe’s heads of state were soon discussing how to cashier the popular will once again, and reimpose the Constitution with cosmetic alterations, without exposing it this time to the risks of a democratic decision. At the Brussels summit in June 2007, the requisite adjustment—now renamed a simple treaty—was agreed. To let Britain disavow a referendum, it was exempted from the Charter of Fundamental Rights to which all other member-states subscribed. To throw a sop to French opinion, references to unfettered competition were tucked away in a protocol, rather than appearing in the main document. To square the conscience of the Dutch, ‘promotion of European values’ was made a test of membership. To save the face of Poland’s rulers, the demotion of their country to second-rank in the Council was deferred for a decade, leaving their successors to come to terms with it.

  The principal novelty of this gathering to resuscitate what French and Dutch voters had buried was Germany’s determination to ensure its primacy in the electoral structure of the Council. Polish objections to a formula doubling Germany’s weight, and drastically reducing Poland’s, had—for reasons that voting theory in international organizations has long made clear, as experts in such matters pointed out—every technical consideration of fairness on their side. But issues of equity were no more relevant than issues of democracy to the outcome. After blustering that demographic losses in the Second World War entitled Poland to proportionate compensation in the design of the Union, the Kaczynski twins crumpled as quickly as the country’s pre-war colonels before the German blitz. Brave talk forgotten, it was all over in a phone-call. For the region where Poland accounts for nearly half the population and GDP, the episode is a lesson in the tacit hierarchy of states it has entered. The East is welcome, but should not get above itself. For these purposes at least, Deutschland is once again über alles.

  Not that crumbs are unavailable. As the British, Dutch, and French rulers, so the Polish too received, with the postponement of their demotion, the fig-leaf needed to dispense them from submitting the reanimated Constitution to the opinion of their voters. It was left to Ireland’s premier Ahern—along with Blair, another of the conference’s recent escapees from a cloud of corruption—to exclaim, in a moment of unguarded delight: ‘90 per cent of it is still there!’ Even loyal commentators have found it difficult to suppress all disgust at the cynicism of this latest exercise in the ‘Community method’. The contrast between such realities and the placards of the touts for the new Europe could scarcely be starker. The truth is that the light of the world, role-model for humanity at large, cannot even count on the consent of its populations at home.

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  What kind of political order, then, is taking shape in Europe, fifteen years after Maastricht? The pioneers of European integration—Monnet and his fellow-spirits—envisaged the eventual creation of a federal union that would one day be the supranational equivalent of the nation-states out of which it emerged, anchored in an expanded popular sovereignty, based on universal suffrage, its executive answerable to an elected legislature, and its economy subject to requirements of social responsibility. In short, a democracy magnified to semi-continental scale (they had only Western Europe in mind). But there was always another way of looking at European unification, which saw it more as a limited pooling of powers by member-governments for certain—principally economic—ends, that did not imply any fundamental derogation of national sovereignty as traditionally understood, but rather the creation of a novel institutional framework for a specified range of transactions between them. De Gaulle famously represented one version of this outlook; Thatcher another. Between these federalist and inter-governmentalist visions of Europe, there has been a tension down to the present.

  What has come into being, however, corresponds to neither. Constitutionally, the EU is a caricature of a democratic federation, since its Parliament lacks powers of initiative, contains no parties with any existence at European level, and wants even a modicum of popular credibility. Modest increments in its rights have not only failed to increase public interest in this body, but have been accompanied by a further decline in it. Participation in European elections has sunk steadily, to below 50 per cent, and the newest voters are the most indifferent of all. In the East, the regional figure in 2004 was scarcely more than 30 per cent; in Slovakia less than 17 per cent of voters cast a ballot for their delegates to Strasbourg. Such ennui is not irrational. The European
Parliament is a Merovingian legislature. The mayor in the palace is the Council of Ministers, where real law-making decisions are taken, topped by the European Council of the heads of state, meeting every three months. Yet this complex in turn fails the opposite logic of an inter-governmental authority, since it is the Commission alone—the EU’s unelected executive—that can propose the laws on which the Council and (more notionally) the Parliament deliberate. The violation of a constitutional separation of powers in this dual authority—a bureaucracy vested with a monopoly of legislative initiative—is flagrant. Alongside this hybrid executive, moreover, is an independent judiciary, the European Court, capable of rulings discomfiting any national government.

  At the centre of this maze lies the obscure zone in which the rival law-making instances of the Council and the Commission interlock, more impenetrable than any other feature of the Union. The nexus of ‘Coreper’ committees in Brussels, where emissaries of the former confer behind closed doors with functionaries of the latter, generates the avalanche of legally binding directives that form the main output of the EU: close on 100,000 pages to date. Here is the effective point of concentration of everything summed up in the phrase—smacking, characteristically, of the counting-house rather than the forum—‘democratic deficit’, one ritually deplored by EU officials themselves. In fact, what the trinity of Council, Coreper and Commission figures is not just an absence of democracy—though it is certainly also that—but an attenuation of politics of any kind, as ordinarily understood. The effect of this axis is to short-circuit—above all at the critical Coreper level—national legislatures, which are continually confronted with a mass of decisions over which they lack any oversight, without affording any supranational accountability in compensation, given the shadow-play of the Parliament in Strasbourg. The farce of popular consultations that are regularly ignored is only the most dramatic expression of this oligarchic structure, which sums up the rest.

  Alongside their negation of democratic principles, two further, and less familiar, features of these arrangements stand out. The vast majority of the decisions of the Council, Commission and Coreper concern domestic issues that were traditionally debated in national legislatures. But in the conclaves at Brussels, these become the object of diplomatic negotiations—that is, of the kind of treatment classically reserved for foreign or military affairs, where parliamentary controls are usually weak to nonexistent, and executive discretion more or less untrammelled. Since the Renaissance, secrecy has always been the other name of diplomacy. What the core structures of the EU effectively do is to convert the open agenda of parliaments into the closed world of chancelleries. But even this is not all of it. Traditional diplomacy typically required stealth and surprise for success. But it did not preclude discord or rupture. Classically, it involved a war of manoeuvre between parties capable of breaking as well as making alliances; sudden shifts in the terrain of negotiations; alterations of means and objectives—in short, politics conducted between states, as distinct from within them, but politics nonetheless. In the disinfected universe of the EU, this all but disappears, as unanimity becomes virtually de rigueur on all significant occasions—any public disagreement, let alone refusal to accept a prefabricated consensus, increasingly being treated as if it were an unthinkable breach of etiquette. The deadly conformism of EU summits, smugly celebrated by theorists of ‘consociational democracy’ as if it were anything other than a cartel of self-protective elites, closes the coffin of even real diplomacy, covering it with wreaths of bureaucratic piety. Nothing is left to move the popular will, as democratic participation and political imagination are each snuffed out.

  These structures have been some time in the making. Unreformed, they could not but be reinforced by enlargement. The distance between rulers and ruled, wide enough in a Community of nine or twelve countries, can only widen much further in a Union of twenty-seven or more, where economic and social circumstances differ so vastly that the Gini coefficient in the EU is now higher than in the US, the fabled land of inequality itself. It was always the calculation of adversaries of European federalism, successive British governments at their head, that the more extended the Community became, the less chance there was of any deepening of its institutions in a democratic direction, for the more impractical any conception of popular sovereignty in a supranational union would become. Their intentions have come to pass. Stretched to nearly 500 million citizens, the EU of today is in no position to recall the dreams of Monnet.

  So what? There is no shortage of apologists prepared to explain that it is not just wrong to complain of a lack of democracy in the Union, conventionally understood, but that this is actually its greatest virtue. The standard argument, to be found in journals like Prospect, goes like this. The EU deals essentially with the technical and administrative issues—market competition, product specification, consumer protection and the like—posed by the aim of the Treaty of Rome to assure the free movement of goods, persons and capital within its borders. These are matters in which voters have little interest, rightly taking the view that they are best handled by appropriate experts, rather than incompetent parliamentarians. Just as the police, fire brigade or officer corps are not elected, but enjoy the widest public trust, so it is—at any rate tacitly—with the functionaries in Brussels. The democratic deficit is a myth, because matters which voters do care strongly about—preeminently taxes and social services, the real stuff of politics—continue to be decided not at Union but at national level, by traditional electoral mechanisms. So long as the separation between the two arenas and their respective types of decision is respected, and we are spared demagogic exercises in populism—putting issues the masses cannot understand, and which should never be on a ballot in the first place, to referenda—democracy remains intact, indeed enhanced. Considered soberly, all is for the best in the best of all possible Europes.

  In an unreflective sense, this case might seem to appeal to a common immediate experience of the Union. If asked in what ways they have personally been affected by the EU, most of its citizens—at least those who live in the Eurozone and Schengen belt—would certainly not mention its technical directives; they would probably answer that travel has been simplified by the disappearance of border controls and the need to change currencies. Beyond such conveniences, a narrow stratum of professionals and executives, and a somewhat broader flow of migrant workers and craftsmen, have benefitted from occupational mobility across borders, though this is still quite limited, with less than 2 per cent of the population of the Union living outside their countries of origin. In some ways, more significant may be the programmes that take growing numbers of students to courses in other societies of the EU. Journeys, studies, a scattering of jobs: agreeable changes all, not vital issues. It is this expanse of mild amenities that no doubt explains the passivity of voters towards rulers who ignore their expressions of opinion. For nearly as striking as repeated popular rejection of official schemes for the Union is lack of reaction to subsequent flouting of it. The elites do not persuade the masses; but, to all appearances, they have little to fear from them.

  Why then is there such persistent distrust of Brussels, if so little of what it does impinges on ordinary life, and at that quite pleasantly? Subjectively, the answer is clear. There are few citizens who are not banally alienated from the way they are governed at home—virtually every poll shows how little they believe in what their rulers say, and how powerless they feel to alter what they do. Yet these are still societies in which elections are regularly held, and governments that become too disliked can be evicted. No one doubts that democracy, in this minimal sense, obtains. At European level, however, there is all too obviously not even this vestige of accountability: the grounds for alienation are cubed. If the EU really had zero impact on what voters actually care about, of course, their distrust could be dismissed as a mere abstract prejudice. But in fact the intuition behind it is accurate. Since the Treaty of Maastricht, the Union has by no means been confi
ned to regulatory issues of scant incidence or interest to ordinary folk. It now has a Central Bank, without even the commitment of the Federal Reserve to sustain employment, let alone its duty to report to Congress, that sets interest rates for the whole Eurozone, backed by a Stability Pact that requires national governments to meet hard budgetary targets. In other words, determination of macro-economic policy at the highest level has shifted upwards from national capitals to Frankfurt and Brussels. What this means is that just those issues that voters do indeed usually feel strongest about—jobs, taxes and social services—fall squarely under the guillotines of the Bank and the Commission. The history of the past years has shown that this is no academic matter. It was pressure from Brussels to cut public spending which led the Juppé government to introduce the fiscal package that detonated the great French strike-wave of the winter of 1995, and brought him down. It was the corset of the Stability Pact that forced Portugal—a small country unable to ignore it—into slashing social benefits and plunged the country into a steep recession in 2003. The government in Lisbon did not survive either. The notion that today’s EU comprises little more than a set of innocuous technical rules, as value-neutral as traffic-lights, is an idle one.