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Birth Of An Empire
In the first of a new series, EURSOC considers the future of post-Lisbon Europe.
“We are a very special construction unique in the history of mankind... sometimes I like to compare the EU as a creation to the organisation of empire. We have the dimension of empire.” - European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, July 2007.
Despite the rejection of the Lisbon Treaty, Europe’s federal project is complete; the next stage is defining the EU’s role on the world stage.
The Lisbon Treaty should have died on Friday June 13th; the European Union’s own rules said as much. The clumsily-disguised rewrite of the European Constitutional Treaty (itself a revision of the European Constitution) needed to be ratified by all 27 member states to enter law. The Irish said no, but their vote was quickly over-ruled, not only by the leading figures of the European Union, but by heads of government of the most powerful member nations, Germany, France and Britain.
In any case, an Irish no - or indeed an Irish yes - was immaterial. The "no" meant Nicolas Sarkozy was unable to mark the treaty’s final hurdle of democratic obstacles with a fireworks display at Versailles, but as some observers have remarked, over 80 percent of Lisbon has already been put in place. Well before either the (rejected) Constitutional Treaty was ratified, the EU was enacting legislation proposed within. This didn’t stop, as it should have, when the French and Dutch voted against the Constitution. The legislation continued in the three years while the treaty was re-ordered: Why should it stop for the Irish?
This process, as EURSOC and now the Daily Telegraph have noticed, is not simply undemocratic. It is anti-democratic.
Europe’s parliament is dominated by federalists. The parliament’s make-up does not reflect the level of scepticism for integration felt on the ground in EU nations. Its members sign up to federalist groupings, they “go native” whether to shore up their status or defend their perks.
An MEP can claim democratic legitimacy on being elected with just 20 percent turnout in his region, yet when over 50 percent of Irish voters reject Lisbon they are derided as misinformed.
Power in parliament is shared between two large blocs, the European Socialists and the European centre-right. Both vote on opposite sides on matters related to the staffing of committees and the direction of finance and funding, but on constitutional issues they can be relied upon to form an insurmountable obstacle, an enormous federalist bloc.
The truly anti-federalist parties are marginalised, denied funds and at times prevented from speaking in parliament. William Hague MP complained that a Europe built without the consent of the people lacks legitimacy: A European functionary can point to the directly elected European Parliament, with its 80 percent support for federalist integration, and say “there’s your democracy; there’s your legitimacy.”
We’re unlikely to hear further debate on ever closer union. France takes over the six-month presidency of the EU next week, and the phrase that resounds most from France’s radio and television debate is “L’Europe qui bouge” - the Europe that moves and works. That’s a Europe that progresses, that integrates further and gains power, in opposition to the Europe that stagnates, constrained by the wishes of its people.
As the FT’s Gideon Rachman, one of the few mainstream media commentators with a grasp of the implications of Lisbon points out, Europe has "sacrificed democracy in the name of efficiency."
The new EU is built on the principle that on the highest level of political action, technocracy has replaced democracy. We have the choice between getting things done (that is, building a European state) or bending to the will of the people, which risks stalling the engine of ever-closer union. Our representatives have consented to the former on our behalf, but when was it decided that technocracy was a better model than liberal democracy for the EU’s future? Was it after France’s “petit oui” to Maastricht in 1992, which is said to have signalled the end of Europe’s “permissive consensus?”
Europe is too important to be left to voters. The Lisbon Treaty, as we wrote earlier this year, is anti-Constitutional just as the new phase of European politics is anti-democratic: All students of Hayek are aware of where technocracy leads.
Unlike traditional constitutions, it doesn’t lay out the state’s responsibilities and limits. It is a self-amending treaty, which reserves itself the right to reserve new powers in response to changing circumstances in the name of ever-closer union. It makes national constitutions subordinate, even while granting them certain temporary powers. And now, with the blessing of Britain’s Gordon Brown, it will be the highest law in any land in which it is observed.
Federalists have lost the debate with the people, but won the war. Maverick MPs, bloggers and columnists can continue to complain and criticise, but nothing will prevent the EU growing in power and influence. Lisbon gives it the right to legislate as required: National governments have signed away their right to prevent this.
Let them squabble; Europe has moved on. The earnest federalism that kept Jacques Delors and François Mitterrand burning the midnight oil has ended with the fait accompli of the Lisbon Treaty. The EU’s new powers mean that the ever-closer union will continue apace and beyond scrutiny, despite the protests of citizens. Europe’s leaders are now considering a greater prize.
The Geopolitical Phase
One only has to look at the chatter of Europe’s paper-writers and thinktankers to see that the focus has shifted. Rather than discussing the dynamics of ever-closer union or means of winning the people over to the merits of the European project, the talk now is of geopolitics and Europe’s place in the world.
Europe and Russia “need a new paradigm grounded in reality”, writes one former ambassador, now lecturer in Europe's World policy journal, a publication which carries advertising sponsorship from both the centre-right EPP-ED and Party of European Socialists.
Another column in the same issue - by a former Lithuanian president - urges Europe to say “No” to Russia; another still suggests a shared economic space between Europe and Russia. Another writes of the EU, Russia and “the crisis of of the Post-Cold War European Order.”
There’s no shortage of debate from the other side of the Atlantic, either. “Why EU and US geopolitical interests are no longer the same” is the title of this issue’s top story, while another analyses “The pressures for a new Euro-Atlantic security strategy.” “Supposing the United States became isolationist” ponders another.
There is a definite sense of the new giant - a potential superpower - rising from its previous supine cowering between the US and the Soviet Union.
Even the definition of Europe’s borders suggests a changing game. Turkey is due to join the EU in the next decade: Ominously, it shares a border with Syria, Iran and Iraq. To the south of the European continent, there is much debate on how to incorporate the Arab nations of north Africa into the European model. Nicolas Sarkozy’s “Mediterranean Union” model was greeted with scepticism in Berlin, but it is only the most publicised of many such schemes. To the East, the EU rubs against oil-and-gas giant Russia; to the north, European nations have claims to natural resources under the Arctic ice which Russia (and the US, and Canada) also lay claim to.
Debates about Eurosceptics in Britain, sovereignty in Belgium and nationalism in Poland now seem wearyingly provincial in Brussels. The EU’s visionaries have grown up, and they want to play with the big boys chess set now.
