common basis of a new framework, the framework was erected before enlargement.
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.
2
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.
