Postwar

maintaining parity with Germany (despite a population disparity of twenty million people) while countries like Spain and Poland, the latter accorded observer status at the meeting, sought to maximize their own future voting strength in the Council by selling their backing to the highest bidder.

The unseemly scramble for influence at Nice, as leading European statesmen like Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder spent sleepless nights bargaining and bickering for status and influence in their common European home, illustrated the price that was now being paid for previous neglect of constitutional niceties. By bringing the Union to a new low, Nice led directly to the establishment of a ‘European Convention’: a sort of unelected constituent assembly authorized to produce a practical system of governance for an enlarged ‘Europe’ and, it was hoped, some credible account of the purposes of the whole thing. Following a certain amount of (by now familiar) lobbying from Paris, the presidency of the Convention was assigned to the ageing but ever- vainglorious Valery Giscard d’Estaing.

After two years of deliberations, the Convention emitted something more than a draft but decidedly less than a constitution. Shorn of its portentous Giscardian preamble (immediately and unfavourably contrasted with the elegant brevity of its Jeffersonian predecessor) the Convention’s document offered little by way of classic constitutional proposals—no sweeping definitions of individual liberty, no clear statement concerning the division of powers, etc. In this respect, as many had predicted, it was a disappointment.

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’.[368] 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.[369]

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.