Europe’s governments value the opinion of their peers more than that of ?their citizens. That isn’t democracy
By Christopher Bickerton
A substantial majority of Irish people voted yes to the Lisbon treaty on 2 October. Leaders and officials across Europe were relieved and hoped that this would mean that the treaty would finally come into force. Since then, people say that the European Union must stop looking inwards and turn outwards, to what the EU can do in the world. The Economist wrote that “it is time for the world’s biggest economy to rise from its slumber and play a global role” (1). Charles Grant argued in the Financial Times that an advantage of having Tony Blair as the new president of the European Council would be that “he might inspire the EU to shift its focus from sterile institutional debates towards global challenges such as climate change, energy security, nuclear proliferation and the Middle East” (2).
That the EU’s attempt to bring itself closer to its citizens can be dismissed as sterile shows the contempt many commentators have for the democratic process. How can we know what goals the EU should pursue if there’s no proper mechanism for translating people’s views into policy? To say that we should look outwards rather than inwards is to say that we know what people want better than they know themselves. This patronising attitude is difficult to square with the democratic principle that governments represent the people, but it is central to explaining much of what has gone wrong in Europe over the last decade.
With the second referendum in Ireland, it is thought that the economy pushed people into the Yes camp. A European Commission poll found that a quarter of those surveyed switched their vote from a No in 2008 to a Yes in 2009 because they thought the Lisbon treaty would help the Irish economy (3).
The economy was a major factor in the campaign, although it was used cynically by both sides. The Yes side spoke of what the Lisbon treaty could address, as if it had been explicitly written to deal with the economic crisis. In fact, it is, as Wolfgang Münchau put it, “a pre-crisis treaty for a post-crisis world” (4). The No side was also cynical in invoking the treaty’s impact on jobs, producing the best billboard of the campaign: the one that said, alongside a large photo of the Irish prime minister, Brian Cowen: “The only job Lisbon will save is his.”
‘Trust us’
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