Europe : power to the citizens !

Why are even the most ‘European’ of our compatriots uneasy about the way the Union works? ‘Brussels’ seems like a shadow theatre, where citizens are spectators rather than actors. One day in December 1999, after a debate behind closed doors and without any prior consultation, the European Council suddenly declared that Turkey could join the European Union. Any objections? Move along, there is nothing to see; even the National Assembly was curtly refused a vote. Three months ago, Frits Bolkestein was unknown to 99.99999% of our compatriots. He proposed a ‘directive’: what is it about? We hear dreadful things about it, from the right and the left. If anybody has reservations, how are they to express them? A mystery. This is intolerable. This is the kind of Europe we do not want. Yet it is the same Europe that is turning the page with the Constitution, in order to give the citizens their rightful place: in the front row.

To understand an organisation, or a living being, we must go back to its birth. In the early days of European integration, in the 1950s, there was enormous distrust between leaders and there was still a terrible hatred between peoples. All decisions, therefore, had to be taken by government representatives. Not by just any of them: by the foreign ministers, whose negotiations were prepared by ambassadors. Since their Excellencies believed that every matter was a matter of state, meetings were held behind closed doors. And since national pride was at stake, important decisions could only be taken unanimously: you could not expect France to bow to a German ‘diktat’ supported by the Benelux countries! The daily management of the ‘common market’ was entrusted to a Commission conceived as a bench of experts who were chosen for their competence and promised to act independently of their national interests. MEPs interested in the European project were invited to hold debates but had no real input, as was already the custom in many international organisations, such as the Council of Europe, WEU and NATO: a social rite, like the Strauss waltzes that once graced the Congress of Vienna.

So long as the European Community was restricted to a trade agreement and a small number of partners, the advantages of the system in terms of efficiency outweighed the obvious democratic deficits. That all changed with the 1986 treaty, which transformed a simple customs union into a ‘single area’, within which people can move as freely as goods and where competition rules must be harmonised. In order to prevent any one state from giving preference to its producers on the basis of technical standards, safety requirements or state aid, here comes the Union laying down the law! In 1992, the French Council of State reckoned that 56% of laws applicable in France were now decided in Brussels rather than in Paris! In a democratic system, however, laws cannot be drafted like commercial contracts: they are debated and put to the vote of the representatives of the citizens to whom they apply. In their desire to continue controlling the system for as long as they could, the governments only grudgingly agreed to a very slow and gradual transformation of that system, handing over, treaty by treaty (1986, 1992, 1997, 2000) increasing margins of influence to the European Parliament, while irritably observing the inevitable but equally slow and gradual transformation of the Commission into a European executive. So, 18 years after the creation of a genuine European legislative power, we remain entrenched in an opaque system, where the most important decisions still require the unanimous agreement of the governments, whose representatives continue to debate behind closed doors, and where 80% of final Council decisions are actually taken at ambassadorial level!

The Constitution does not just speed up the extremely lily-livered process initiated by the treaties. Behind the new balance of powers among the institutions, it in effect gives power to the citizens, who will have a complete armoury at their disposal for obtaining information, expressing their views, exerting influence and, ultimately, deciding.

1st guarantee: representatives of civil society (unions, professions, NGOs, etc.) will henceforth be systematically involved in the preparation of all proposals (Article 46 for civil society, Articles 48, 211 and 212 for the social partners).

2nd guarantee: national parliaments will have the power to prevent the Union from stepping outside its areas of competence when a Commission proposal is published (Article 11). Like them, the Committee of the Regions has the right to initiate proceedings before the Court of Justice in the event of such abuses. That puts an end to the real or imaginary threats to local services or regional traditions such as force-feeding!

3rd guarantee: the Council of Ministers is becoming a glass house. When it deliberates on a draft law, its meetings will be public. That spells the end of the shameful practices under which, for reasons of secrecy, too many ministers arrived late and left early, then presenting any popular decision as their own personal triumph and systematically blaming ‘Brussels’ for any unpopular decisions they had in fact accepted, if not requested, unbeknownst to their compatriots. Henceforth, the ministers are committed to transparency and honesty. Moreover, the considerable extension of qualified majority voting will restore the efficiency that the decision-making system needs.

4th guarantee: the European Parliament has obtained full legislative power, on an almost equal footing with the Council of Ministers (Article 20) and will have the final say on the entire budget (Article 404). The European political parties (the EPP for the right-wing parties, together with the UMP and the CDU, the PES on the left) will, therefore, finally be forced to submit genuine common legislative programmes in all Union countries.

5th guarantee. The European Parliament will elect the President of the Commission following its own election (Article 27). In other words, those same political parties will have no choice but to nominate their candidate for this office in advance: that means that via the election of Parliament, the citizens themselves will be electing the head of the EU executive, in the same way as the English elect their prime minister or the mayor is elected by a local majority. Overnight, the President of the Commission, who used to be an international senior official, will acquire a legitimacy comparable at least to that of a head of government. It is surprising that this change, repeatedly demanded during the Convention, has hitherto been so underestimated in the referendum debate.

6th guarantee: thanks to the radically new right of collective petition (Article 47), citizens will have exactly the same right of political initiative as their elected representatives in the European Parliament (Article 332) and the governments themselves (Article 345). The task of uniting one million citizens out of an electorate of nearly 400 million will not prove too difficult for parties, unions and associations that can mobilise support beyond their national frontiers. Exceptional situations call for exceptional procedures: it is inevitable that European power will always be further removed from the grass roots than national or local power. That procedure is a vital means of reminding leaders that popular aspirations are real.

7th guarantee: citizens can refer the matter directly to the Court of Justice if the Union is infringing their rights, in particular the new rights provided for under the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Basically, the question put to the French on 29 May can be summarised as follows: citizens, do you want to take charge of Europe?

You’re on!

Alain Lamassoure, 23 April 2005