The somewhat shameful disarray of the “winners” of the referendum setting in motion the United Kingdom's leaving the European Union and the utterly hypocritical hesitation waltz by the political “leaders” who job it is execute the decision are confections that leave a bitter taste. No democrat can be happy that any dictatorship by the (narrow) majority, imposing its will through the use of the weapon that is a referendum, can play with the fate of a country and its people, our European fellow-citizens. Shame, then, upon those leaders who have ignominiously given in to the demands of nationalists and other populists more generous with lies than with reason!
The problem is that leaders of this sort are not confined to the United Kingdom. The message today from the chorus of supposedly reasonable political leaders is that we really have to wait, to delay until some future date all possible progress in the European project. Our citizens are not ready to “continue to pursue integration and political enlargement of the Union”, is, in substance, what is being stated by figures such as Donald Tusk and Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister, and that is before turning to leaders further East who share the view of the Polish foreign minister that, for the European Union to emerge unscathed from Brexit, “it is time to re-think the old Franco-German model of closer European integration”. In truth, the propensity of those in power nationally to consider that they alone are able to speak on behalf of their citizens is now becoming intolerable! In whose name do they, in fact, speak? Everyone's? Of course not! They only speak for those closest to them, those who are active in their party. And then - and perhaps even especially - for those who, in their country, shout loudest in their condemnations of Europe - Farage, Le Pen, Wilders and others of that ilk in each of the member states of the Union. This is a time when too many national and European political leaders have become then only too willing mouthpieces of the supporters of the Europe of nationalities which not so long ago led us to two world wars.
There was even a minister who suggested after the meeting of the foreign ministers of the six founding states in Berlin on Saturday that only “concrete results”, such as being able to “telephone abroad without having to pay high roaming charges”, would assuage the disaffection facing the EU. Did the fall in telephone roaming charges (imposed by the Commission despite the reluctance of a number of the relevant ministers) have any influence whatsoever on the how the British voted last Thursday? Is there any need to answer this question? Such comments merely further insult citizens' intelligence, as if some leaders were determined that people should be treated like children when it comes to European affairs, which must, no matter what, remain the preserve of national elites.
In his way, that foreign minister vindicated Boris Johnson who, when asked what the “Remain” camp was offering, replied: “steady and miserable erosion of parliamentary democracy in this country”. That response is valid for every country, national executives having long conducted themselves, on the European level, without really needing to account to national parliamentary assemblies, the European Parliament being little more viewed for them than the annoyance of a stone in their shoe. The rise in the power of the European Council has served only to exacerbate this democratic malaise. In reality, European citizens have for a very long time been pushed out of the game by their national political leaders. As Bernard Dreano, a member of the now forgotten “European Citizens Assembly” put it in 1997, they have long been to live in an ersatz democracy, in a system where peoples might possibly be allowed to say “yes” or more probably “no”. And ordinary citizen Dreano added: “We would almost have to invent a new word to describe something that is not exactly a dictatorship but is no longer democracy. Could it be blackmail?”
Who is doing the blackmailing if not national political leaders who claim to be the only ones able to speak on behalf of their citizens but without going to the trouble of listening to them? Who claims the desire to retain national sovereignty as demands from the people? Can the democratic deficit in Europe not, then, be laid at the door of the steadfast will of the national political classes not to concede anything that might affect their grains of power, no matter that this may be harmful to peoples' best interests or risk aggravating resentments? As Philippe Herzog recently observed, “the nation-state wants to be fully sovereign” but it “is not the people”, given that “the culture of power it propagates alienates folks”. The citizens of Europe would do well to take this to heart and to make themselves heard so that, in the coming weeks and months, their will, their expectations are not hijacked and used to back a dream of national sovereignty that is not theirs.
Michel Theys