Far from giving comfort to those who wish Europe to be simply a trading club, this week's crisis in Brussels provides further evidence, if any were needed, of the unstoppable momentum of political union. The European Commission started out as nothing more than a regulatory body, designed to sort out any technical obstacles to fair competition across a free trade area. Only as more trade barriers came down, only as European union became wider and deeper, did its duties and powers take on significance. Only over the past decade has it acquired real executive powers. Whether we like it or not - and the sceptics certainly don't - the Commission has become a kind of embryo European government. But it is a government without a politics, which means, in effect, a government without democratic accountability. And the prospects for a proper European politics have taken a huge step forward this week. The Parliament, for the first time, has forced the Commission's resignation; leading European names (Cresson, Monti, Marin, as well as Santer) have become familiar to British newspaper readers and television viewers. Now, the talk is of directly elected commissioners, of powers for the Parliament to sack individual commissioners, of US Senate-style hearings for new appointments.
In other words, the talk is of Europe's democratic deficit. It is as well to be clear about this. Europe already has a large degree of political union, much of it achieved when those who now call themselves Eurosceptics were in office. (The Single European Act of 1985 relinquished at least as much sovereignty as the Maastricht treaty.) The EU is now responsible for a third of all national legislation and for 70 per cent of business legislation. But this is a union of elites, largely immune to popular pressure or influence. It is a political union of sorts, but one that lacks a democratic dimension, and lacks above all the most effective democratic remedy for incompetence or fraud or simple arrogance, which is to "throw the bastards out". The sceptics, for all their huffing and puffing about unelected bureaucrats, have no interest in correcting the deficiency, since faceless and remote rulers are their best propaganda weapon. Indeed, the sceptics must bear much of the blame for the present mess, since it was under pressure from them that John Major insisted on a president who, in the form of Jacques Santer, lacked either vision or political clout, and who proved too weak to tackle endemic corruption. It was they, too, who resisted qualified majority voting, even on such issues as fraud, thus allowing any single country to veto an effective investigation.
The fear of the sceptics - left, right and centre - is that curing the democratic deficit will mean greater legitimacy for the European political project and thus an even greater loss of national sovereignty. This may be so, or it may not. Further extensions of the union would be decided exactly as they are now, by agreement between national governments subject, in some instances, to approval by referendum. The point is to ensure that the considerable powers already held by Brussels (and any powers acquired in future) are exercised democratically and efficiently, so that, for example, Europe may have an agricultural policy that makes sense and meets real needs. If the sceptics have a case against European integration, let them make it and not fall back on quoting faults in European institutions that are eminently curable.
But to pile all or even most of the blame for the EU's present condition on to the sceptics is like blaming stone-throwers for the fragility of a greenhouse. The "we know best" attitude has always sat at the heart of the European project, perhaps because its very earliest foundations were laid in a continent recently devastated by an excess of demagoguery and populism. After Hitler and Mussolini, there was a certain attraction in corpulent, anonymous, grey-suited bureaucrats. But those times are surely past. Europe needs a mature public debate on how it wishes to develop - perhaps, as has been suggested in some quarters, the kind of constitutional convention that led to the formation of the United States - and Britain in particular needs to confront the reality that the EU is about more than economic advantage. The alternative is to muddle on as before, adding bits here and there to European integration, allowing existing European institutions to adapt as best they may until we are left with a body such as the present European Commission, which proves quite inadequate for the tasks it must carry out. That may be an outcome that pleases the sceptics, but the peoples of Europe are entitled to something better.
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