At last, tongues are loosening. They are still in the minority, barely audible against the ranting of the nationalists, emboldened throughout Europe by the prospect of Brexit. The media are listening to them but do they hear them? The media who no doubt think it smarter, sexier, to report that an MP from the ruling party in Warsaw has asked the president of the parliament for the European flag to be removed from the chamber as “it symbolises foreign occupation in Poland”. There are media which, either to make life easier for themselves or by design, happily listen to demagogues of all sorts, thereby playing to the basest - and most stupid, too - instincts of those who use them, without drawing any lessons from the disaster that was Brexit for those who had championed it.
In the wake of the British pullback, these are the ones who claim to represent the common sense and reason seeking to take the lead on a path now strewn with uncertainty. These national “leaders” all in their own way are arguing for what we already have to be tweaked by hypocrites behind their masks. Thus they become those men and women whom Peter Drucker described in this way in 1996: “They settle for looking for solutions to sporadic problems, on the left, on the right; with as much impact as a plaster on a wooden leg”. Hence the invitation from this late professor of management “radically to change the way governments and public services are organised and funded”. Twenty years on and his call makes perfect sense in the context of a weakened Union. Most national “leaders”, however, are not ready to heed it. The media which live in the shadow of their national leaders and can see no further than the ambitions of their president or Prime Minister, just like the leader writer in the French daily Le Monde who dared write this unforgiving and dismissive sentence: “It is not by further weakening national sovereignty to shore up a federal Europe which practically no one wants that disconnected and discredited elites will assuage the anger of the people” that has been unleashed in the United Kingdom. Understand by this: lest it be so elsewhere, too, for example, in your own countries.
In football, the French team forgot that the best form of defence is attack. The political world in most EU member states seem to want to adopt a similar approach on the - mistaken - pretext that people do not want any deeper European integration. In this, they cheerfully play the game of the Eurosceptics and other Europhobes. But in these times of doubt about the continued existence of the EU, they are becoming freer with what they say, allowing the things that went unsaid which, for decades, hindered the Europe that was being constructed, finally to be expressed openly. There have been suggestions that Chancellor Merkel would like the Commission, and even more so its president, Jean-Claude Junker, to be sidelined, with both being seen by her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble , as being too politically zealous in implementing the economic and monetary union rules. For the moment, fortunately, there is nothing to substantiate this rumour. What there is, however, in black and white in Le Figaro, is the claim by French “leaders” (clearly they are only French, their European-ness stopping at France's borders) who argue in the name of reason that Europe should take “a great leap backward” no less ludicrous than the “great leap forward” decreed by Mao. And what do these august personages suggest? The return to a simple “European confederation on the basis of understanding and cooperation among nations”. To this end, they suggest that the European Council should have “departments to prepare and implement its decisions”, without any longer having to go through this Commission which Gaullists have never liked even though the states have well and truly relegated it to the role of a simple secretariat. Worse, they would like to see a repatriation of the European Parliament making it what it was before 1979 - representatives drawn from national parliaments. It would be laughable if it were not so distressing.
Fortunately, this revelation of national intentions too long kept hidden and too long working slyly to undermine and hinder the development of Europe, has freed a different dialectic, that of people who cannot put up with the exaggerated lies of those diehard supporters of intangible national sovereignty. The economist Bernard Barthalay is one of those to speak out, in the Huffington Post, to accuse the signatories of the above call for a different Europe of denying the affirmation of a “European people” so as to “keep in place the national oligarchies of which they are the beneficiaries or apologists”. The criticism is harsh, direct. Does it go too far? Perhaps. That, no doubt, is how those who are its targets will respond, they and all those beavering away in the corridors of national power. After all, who is Barthalay? Just a professor of economics who, can you believe, has federalist leanings. No head of state or government worthy of the name would pay any attention. However, Barthalay is not alone in raising high the standard of revolt.
Former member of the European Parliament Jean-Louis Boulanges, who currently lectures at the School of Political Science in Paris, is also critical in Telos of “the Eurosceptic princes who have been governing us for over twenty years”, all guilty of “striving to undermine the Community system” by bringing the Vienna Congress back to life in the form of the European Council. Hence this blunt condemnation: “This primitive system of meetings of national leaders which, in its most sophisticated form, takes its flawed decisions by unanimity, without any collective pre-meeting preparation, any parallel parliamentary involvement or any real judicial control afterwards is the complete repudiation of what the Union received from its founding fathers: a system which combines the power of initiative of a common institution, the Commission, decision-making by the member states under qualified majority, full participation of a parliamentary body elected by universal suffrage and the control of an impartial and respected court of law”.
At a time when a shine must be put on the European project so that it can regain the support of citizens, can we realistically rely on the European Council to deliver when it is this same Council that is the principle cause of its decline? Does this institution that the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas has accused of being responsible for “eviscerating the democratic process”, after, in the course of the Greeks crisis, it delivered budgetary “self-empowerment of governments to an extent hitherto unknown”, something which journalists will call a “coup d'Etat by governments”, really have the authority to speak on behalf of Europe? In the name of its twenty seven states and national parties in power, without any doubt! But do European citizens really speak as one through their president or prime minister? In other words, can they still have reasonable trust, at the European level, in national political-administrative structures which, according to Sylvie Goulard “have spent recent years bolting doors in the name of supposed national interests which, sometimes, are especially their own”?
No, the challenge to be faced today by all who really want to bring European citizens together through the glorious adventure of European construction is to find new ways for citizens deprived of their voice to be able to speak. As former MEP Philippe Herzog rightly said: “the jump start needed for a new beginning cannot be left to enlightened elites, as happened in the past” because “people have to be much more deeply motivated”. What a delightful initiative, therefore, by the Finnish municipality of Joensuu, which is situated near the border with Russia, to call on all European town councils to fly the European flag outside their town halls on Thursday 28 July to show, as the local mayor says, that “we Europeans are not perfect, but together we can work for a future that is better for us and for the generations to come”. In similar vein, let us put forward a more radical idea, forged in light of the disarray felt by the overwhelming majority of young people in the United Kingdom when the referendum result went the way it did. Since we now have to image the Europe of the younger generation, why not ask young people what kind of Europe they would like to live in? Why not convene a European Convention at which European states and peoples would be represented by young people of, say, under thirty years of age? These young people could have political, even one-sided, leanings but will not be the captives of national political parties as they have to have been selected and mandated by universities, perhaps even by final-year classes in secondary schools. They would be young people from all sections of our developing European society, from rural areas and our major cities, from associations, such as business circles and trade unions. Young people who could be joined, perfectly naturally by young Britons who, by talking about the dismay they felt, could encourage the members of the Convention not to stray too far along the muddy paths of narrow sovereignty.
What constitution or basic treaty could a Convention of this sort deliver? It is impossible to say with any degree of certainty. What is beyond doubt is that the surprise in reading it will be far less distressing than Brexit - except, perhaps, for national “leaders”, some of whom will read into it betrayal by a supposedly non-existent European people. All that would remain to be done would be to call on the member states, the United Kingdom and countries wishing to take part in this new political adventure to approve it through their own democratic processes. This time, the members of the Convention will have ensured that the constitution will not need a unanimous “green light” for it to come into force, the dictatorship of unanimity - and hence of the veto - no longer having any place in what has become the Europe of citizens!
Michel Theys
(next Beacons Friday 2 September)