With a delicious freshness, a close associate of the Greens group in the European Parliament launched a heartfelt attack on the decision made by a majority of MEPs to turn their backs on the idea of creating transnational electoral lists, “And there we had it on 7 February around 12.20pm. I watched the result on the screen with both weariness and distaste. I had the impression that we were living in 1954 and that the European Defence Community (EDC) had failed and that this failure would trap us for decades and decades yet to come in this Europe of states” (Sauvons l’Europe15 February). Let's try and provide some reassurances to Mélanie Vogel because no matter how disagreeable and disappointing this vote is, it should not be seen as a tragedy (see EUROPE 11956) and only indicates that another battle has undoubtedly been lost but that it is increasingly less likely that the war will be lost in the long term.
This is because since 1954 and the disastrous decision made by the unholy marriage between the Gaullists and French Communists, the balance of forces has indeed very much changed in the Europe that was taking shape. Barely 10 years after the end of the Second World War, the guardians of the intangible nation state were barely able to hold up their heads and the horror of the conflict had obviously prevented them from pulling up the rug from under the feet of Monnet and Schuman. The failure of the EDC was their wake-up call. This occurred first of all in France which, for a long time, had been preaching to deaf ears. This hatchet job, however, was going to come with a price because the 2000s witnessed the victorious dawning of inter-governmental Europe and would, notwithstanding, be nothing other than a pyrrhic victory!
The European Union and its citizens are currently living in the aftermath of this victory which is for them, nothing other than a defeat. The rise in power of national governments has not been perceived as either worrying or damaging as long as Europe was preoccupied with the great borderless market and its butter mountains, steel quotas, dioxin chicken crisis or nebulous Uruguan negotiations. Nonetheless, the creation of the single currency radically changed things for citizens with the euro at the bottom of their pockets who, subsequently, began to think about how it was managed, just as an economy divided up into 19 different segments also served as a backdrop to this situation. Since the crisis broke out in 2008, this inter-governmental management has, at the very best, left the great majority of citizens dissatisfied or at worst, rather unhappy with the political choices available to them. The breakthrough for nationalist forces in the four corners of the Union is a consequence of this.
Today, even the most Europhile of European citizens are not prepared to defend Europe in the way it has been concocted for them by the European Council and the technocrats who serve it who have absolutely no democratic legitimacy. Today, even though they pretend they cannot see it, the heads of state and government and the member states have, pitted against them, almost 500 million European citizens - not even a majority of their fellow citizens are prepared to lift a finger on their behalf in the majority of cases! The balance of forces has therefore changed and it would take a very clever person to ensure that the 27 individuals meeting up at the European Council will, in the long term, manage to impose their law on the European people who, arising from their slumber, are getting impatient with the decisions taken in their name, as they remained stifled.
In this debilitating context, the idea of creating transnational lists made sense. Enormously so, even if it was not a guaranteed miracle cure. In the spirit of those promoting these lists (the Italians to begin with but very quickly taken up in Paris, where Emmanuel Macron embodies a real break with European thinking limited to being what should not overshadow sovereignty and which in certain minds, remains an Empire), it involved a small and modest step towards the construction of a European democracy worthy of the name. This involved a European democracy in good and due form, which will prove indispensable one day or another because it cannot be denied that it will indeed be necessary for Europe's citizens at a given moment through their votes to make the economic decisions in the Eurozone, legitimate - or ultimately accept that the Eurozone is condemned to remain a democracy hampered by competing national interests forever.
As a former extremely close associate of Jacques Delors when he was the President of the Commission, Christine Verger, has just described with implacable lucidity, the real fundamental problem posed: “… The fundamental question created by the idea of these lists affects the respective definition of the sovereignty of the people(s) in relation to that of nations and the way in which this should be expressed” (Notre Europe, ‘Transnational lists: a political opportunity for Europe to overcome the obstacles’, Policy Paper No. 216, 7 February).
This idea knows no bounds. We are now, without even noticing it, easily 500 million European citizens involved in a war not against ourselves, namely, against the different nations but against the states, which through the national governments, are hiding behind “their” nation in an effort to never lose hold of their power. Those at the European Parliament who spoke against the creation of transnational lists are the supporters of a deeply dis-satisfactory status quo, which aims to maintain democratic primacy at a national level. This is madness because the competition of national democracies, similarly to tax competition, is no gauge of success for the European Union and its citizens. This is because the balance of forces between the national governments and European citizens has changed since they have the euro in their wallets and the status quo will sooner or later become democratically untenable.
The only question that remains, therefore, is this: Will the respective nation states and European Council agree with the appeals to build a European democracy which is unhindered and which launches the beginnings of a European “people" in the making, before a nationalist and extremist wave submerges the continent and destroys the European project for a very long time, perhaps, even for ever?
Michel Theys