THE AUSTRALIAN: THE leaders of the European Union hate elections to the European Parliament. Why? Because these caricatures of democratic decision-making expose the contempt with which the European public regards the oligarchy that runs the EU.
A survey of 27,000 EU citizens commissioned by the European Parliament indicates that on average only 34per cent of them planned to vote in the elections. In Britain, 30 per cent of the respondents indicated they would definitely not vote.
Voter apathy tells only part of the story. There is considerable evidence that lack of interest in the EU elections is fuelled by a powerful sense of distrust, dissatisfaction and frustration. One German survey of 12,000 Europeans shows 60 per cent of the respondents assumed that one reason why so many of them are not inclined to vote is because they are "being lied to in election promises". Almost half said they "cannot improve anything by voting". In Poland and Finland, about two-thirds of the respondents expressed this fatalistic attitude.
Typically the EU political elite presents voter apathy as the unfortunate consequence of public misperception. They suggest that their good works are not appreciated by a public that simply does not get what they do. Public disengagement is rarely presented as an indictment of EU institutions. "It's not that people are staying away from these elections because they are critical of the European Union and its political process," claims Hermann Schmitt of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research. From this perspective the public's lack of interest is interpreted as simply a problem of presentation. That is why the European Commission sought to woo young voters with cool election ads on MTV networks.
However, there is considerable evidence that public disengagement is not the unintended consequence of poor public relations but the outcome of a project that explicitly attempts to distance political decision-making from the gaze of European citizens.
The distinct feature of the EU's political process is that it is self-consciously founded on the principle of insulated decision-making. From the standpoint of the European political elites, one of the virtues of EU institutions is that they insulate them from the kind of public pressure and forms of accountability that they experience in their national parliaments. Consequently the EU is able to adopt policies that would often prove contentious and difficult to justify in a more open national parliamentary setting.
In effect, politicians can continually hide behind the EU's invisible decision-making process and claim "it wasn't my idea" before adding that "unfortunately we have no choice but to go along with this Europe-wide directive".
Insulated decision-making relies on institutions that are in effect outside the realm of public scrutiny. As Bruno Waterfield writes in an important study for the Manifesto Club, "a unique form of 21st-century statecraft has emerged" that allows "expanding areas of public authority to retreat into a closed, private world of bureaucrats and diplomats". In effect most EU legislation is formulated by the hundreds of secret working groups set up by the Council of the EU.
Most of the sessions of the Council of Ministers are held behind closed doors and the unelected European Commission has the sole right to put forward legislation. Yet most of the decisions taken by the European Council are concerned with subjects that were previously discussed in national legislatures. These are public-free institutions that are designed to bypass conventional forms of democratic accountability.
The inevitable consequence of the institutionalisation of insulated decision-making is that it diminishes the capacity of European politicians to motivate and inspire their electorate. What appears as a problem of presentation is actually an expression of a style of communication that is suitable for behind-the-scenes manoeuvring but not for public engagement. Invariably they come across as what they really are, bureaucrats, rather than as political leaders. Their ineptness has been exposed time and again as they proved unequal to the task of gaining support for the proposed EU constitution in national referendums.
Is it any surprise that they have decided that referendums are not needed for implementation of the Treaty of Lisbon? >>> Frank Furedi | Thursday, June 04, 2009
