The New Old World (24 page)

The ideas themselves are uneven. Weiler thinks his internet scheme—Lexcalibur, as he would call it—the most important and far-reaching, whereas to a sceptical eye it looks the flakiest: as if future teenagers will be eagerly scanning the 97,000 pages of Community directives or the hydra-headed minutes of Coreper for their political caffeine. The suggestion that a Constitutional Council be modelled on the tame French version is not much of a recommendation. But the Legislative Ballot is at once a highly imaginative and perfectly feasible proposition, one that would sow panic in European establishments. The idea of a direct fiscal tie between the Union and its citizens is not quite so original, but no less relevant and radical for that. The essential point is that with proposals like these, the discursive terrain has shifted. We have left the establishment consensus that the European constitutional order inhabits the best of all possible worlds, namely that of the second-best, for any other is impossible.

On this alternative terrain, one distinguished mind has envisaged a far more sweeping reconstruction of the Union. Philippe Schmitter, originally a pupil of Haas at Berkeley, later teacher at Chicago and Stanford, first made his name as a Latin Americanist, before becoming one of the world's most inventive and wide-ranging comparatists, writing extensively on corporatism, regional integration and—perhaps in particular—the problems of transition from authoritarian to democratic regimes, in South America and
Southern Europe. Stationed at the European University Institute in Florence at the turn of the century, he published in 2000 what remains in many ways the most remarkable single reflection on the EU to date,
How to Democratize the European Union
. . .
and Why Bother?
Typically, although a shorter early draft exists in Italian, this arresting work has never been translated into any other language of the Union, testimony enough to the provincial indifference with which it has abandoned thought of itself. As a systematic set of proposals for political change of visionary scope and detail, the text recalls another age, as if written by a latter-day Condorcet. An exercise of this kind normally belongs to a utopian style of thought, indifferent to constraints of reality. But a more worldly temperament, in every sense, than Schmitter's would be hard to find. The second part of his title expresses the spirit of the other side of his intelligence, an ironic detachment worthier of a descendant of Talleyrand. The crossing of two such antithetical strains makes for a work unique in the literature on the Union.

Schmitter begins by noting that the EU is neither a state nor a nation. Although it has irrevocably crossed the threshold of any mere inter-governmental arrangement, it displays neither the coincidence of territorial and functional authority that defines a state, nor the collective identity that marks a nation. Few of those subject to its jurisdiction understand it, and with good reason. ‘The EU is already the most complex polity that human agency . . . has ever devised'.
⁸⁵
It is plainly far from anything that could be described as an accountable structure under popular control. What would it take to democratize it? Little less than a reinvention of three key institutions of modern democracy: citizenship, representation and decision-making. Schmitter coolly specifies an agenda for the transformation of each. Of the resulting sixteen, sardonically designated ‘modest proposals', it is sufficient to indicate the following.

Citizenship? To promote a more active liberty in the Union: direct referenda to coincide with elections to the European Parliament, themselves to be held electronically over an entire week, with voters having the right to determine the terms of office of their favoured candidates. To make for the first time a reality of universal suffrage: multiple votes for adults with children. To
foster social solidarity: denizen rights for immigrants; conversion of the total monies now spent on the CAP and Structural Funds into a ‘Euro-stipendium' to be paid to all citizens of the Union with an income less than a third of the European average.

Representation? To create a more effective legislature—capping the size of the European Parliament, seating MEPs proportionate to the logarithm of the population of each member state, and assigning all other than symbolic work of the assembly to commissions, as in Italy. To encourage more Union-wide political organization: half of the EU electoral funds now allocated to national parties in member-states to be switched to party formations in the EP, vested with the right of nominating half the candidates on their respective national lists.

Decision-making? To manage equitably the complexities of a Europe with so many member-states, of vastly differing sizes—division of the Union into three ‘colleges' of states by ascending number of citizens, votes weighted within each by logged value. Three simultaneous presidencies of the European Council, one from each college, nominating a president of the Commission to be approved by a majority in each college and of the EP; decisions in the Council of Ministers likewise to require a concurrent majority of the weighted votes in all three colleges.

Schmitter, like Weiler, is not necessarily the best judge of which of his own proposals are the most significant. He argues that it is the alterations in the Union's decision-making rules he outlines that have the greatest potential for democratizing it—changes in Euro-citizenship and Euro-representation having less immediate payoffs. This seems implausible, as his ‘collegiate' orders appear least close to the tangible experience of ordinary voters, as a structure not only of considerable technical alembication, but operational at the remotest peak of European power. Ground-level changes in citizenship look much more explosive and swiftly transformative.

Schmitter rightly underlines the importance of the ‘symbolic novelty' of his suggestions for these, designed to have a benign shock effect to bring home the value-added of being a European as well as a national citizen. To engage people, indeed, politics must become more fun. As the American Founders, thinking it impossible to stop the causes of factions—regarded at the time as the worst of evils afflicting a republic—devised instead institutions to control their effects, so if there is no hope of doing away with today's equivalent—the trivialization of politics by the media—the antidote can only lie,
inter alia
, in making politics more
entertaining.
⁸⁶
The contrast with Moravscik's prescriptions for a popular sedative—the more boring, the better—could hardly be more pointed. Later suggestions include voter lotteries for funding of good causes, electronic balloting, and participatory budgets. But these are trimmings. The boldest and most substantial single idea in Schmitter's arsenal is certainly the proposal for a Euro-stipendium financed out of the abolition of the common agricultural and regional funds. As
bien-pensant
critics have not failed to point out, this would be bound to unleash redistributive struggles in the Union—the appalling prospect, in other words, of social conflicts that might engage the passions and interests of its citizens. In short, the worst of all possible dangers, the intrusion of politics into the antiseptic affairs of the Union.

How does Schmitter himself view the social context in which he offers his reforms? Not through the lens of the
philosophe
, but the lorgnette of the Congress of Vienna. There is, and for the foreseeable future will be, no popular demand or spontaneous pressure from below to democratize the Union. So why bother with schemes to render it more accountable? The reasons can only lie in underlying structural trends, which could eventually erode the legitimacy of the whole European enterprise. Among these are ‘symptoms of morbidity'—Gramsci's phrase—in national political systems themselves: distrust of politicians, shrinkage of parties, drop in voter turnout, spread of belief in corruption, growing tax evasion. Another is decline in the permissive consensus that the process of integration once enjoyed, as Europeans have become increasingly bemused and restive at secretive decisions reached in Brussels that affect more and more aspects of their existence. National leaderships lose credibility when major policies issue from bureaucratic transactions in Brussels, without Union institutions themselves gaining transparency or authority. Such degenerative trends now risk being exacerbated by monetary union, removing macro-economic instruments from member-states, and by enlargement, giving veto powers to as little as a quarter of the population of the EU. Democratization can still be deferred. But not indefinitely.

Nor, however, can it be realized suddenly or completely. Well before the ill-fated European Convention, Schmitter had dismissed the possibility that such proceedings could succeed. Constitutions
are born of revolutions, putsches, wars, economic collapses, not of routine peacetime conditions. The only way the European polity could—democratically—be constitutionalized would be through a Constituent Assembly with a mandate approved by a prior referendum of all European citizens. In the interim, the way forward must be a return to Monnet's method, now relying not on economic spillovers to advance integration, but on political increments of democracy to transform it in similar, gradually cascading fashion—
petits pas
once again yielding, in the end,
grands effets
.

It is appropriate that the most cogent programme for the democratization of the EU should come from an heir of neo-functionalism: the charge that Monnet's method precluded one could not be more directly refuted. But Schmitter's intellectual background includes more than Haas. His reflections end with a final, disabused twist. Where is the force that might take up his programme? One historical agent has been unequivocally strengthened by the EU, he writes. ‘That is the European bourgeoisie'. Could it rise to the challenge? Alas, it is too comfortably ensconced in power as it is, with little reason to alter the status quo. ‘Ideologically, its “liberal” positions have never been more dominant; practically, its “natural” opponent, the organized working class, has been weakened'. Were integration to come under threat from below, the bourgeoisie would be much more likely ‘to seek retrenchment behind a phalanx of technocrats than to take the risk of opening up the process to the uncertainties of transparency, popular participation, mass party competition, citizen accountability and redistributive demands'.
⁸⁷
Indeed. There is an echo here of Weber's disappointment with the German bourgeoisie of his time. But in the EU, no quest for a charismatic leader to resolve the impasse—Weber's solution—could be of avail. Perhaps after all, democratization of the European polity, like liberalization of the economy before it, will have to come like a thief in the night, overtaking all agents—elites and masses alike, if in uneven measure—before any are fully aware of what is happening.

Schmitter's construction thus at once refutes and confirms Majone's critique of the ‘Monnet method'. A radical iconoclasm of democratic ends is joined, for lack of anything credible that is better, with a sceptical reversion to traditional stealth in means. Yet in these reflections, a frontier common to all the theorizations
so far considered starts to be crossed. The language of class does not belong to the discourse of Europe. Schmitter's freedom with it reflects a working background in Latin America, where the vocabulary of rule has always been more robust, and a personal culture extending well beyond the triter Anglo-Saxon verities, as far as the exotic shores of pre-war corporatism or post-war socialism. He once authored a paper describing the EC as ‘a novel form of political domination'.
⁸⁸
What such intimations indicate is a gap. The reigning literature on Europe spreads across disciplines: politics, economics, sociology, history, philosophy, law are all represented. Missing, however, in the recent literature is any real political economy of integration, of the kind that Milward offered of the founding years of the Community. For that, one has to move outside the bounds of liberal discourse on Europe.

Unsurprisingly, the best work on this—all too uncomfortably concrete—terrain, of class forces and social antagonisms, metamorphoses of capital and fissures of labour, alterations in contract and innovations in rent, has been done by Marxist scholars. Here what has been called the Amsterdam School, a group of mainly Dutch scholars inspired by the example of Kees van der Pijl, who pioneered the study of transnational class formations, has led the way. The result has been not only a great deal of detailed empirical research into the business metabolisms of integration, but a consideration of the wider array of forces sustaining the turn the EU has taken since the eighties. Putting Gramsci's conceptual legacy to ingenious use, this is a line of interpretation that distinguishes between ‘disciplinary' and ‘compensatory' forms of neo-liberal hegemony (as it were: Thatcher's and New Labour's) within the Union, and—developing a hypothesis first suggested by Milward—seeks the social base of these pendular forms in a new rentier bloc with an over-riding interest in hard money, whose complex ramifications now extend into the better-off layers of the private-sector working class itself. Parallel with this work, a
spirited revisionist history of both the ideological origins and the economic outcomes of integration, each contravening received opinions, is under way—it too proceeding from Marx rather than Ricardo or Polanyi. Even in this heterodox left field, it should be said, the US presence is visible. The leading collection of the Amsterdam School,
A Ruined Fortress?
(2003), is orchestrated by a chair-holder from upstate New York, Alan Cafruny; the editor and principal contributor to the revisions of
Monetary Union in Crisis
, Bernard Moss, is an American based in London.
⁸⁹

What explains the strange pattern of expatriation—it would plainly be wrong to speak of expropriation—of European studies, understood as enquiry into the past and future of the Union? American dominance of the field in part, no doubt, reflects the famously greater resources, material and intellectual, of the US university system, which assures its lead in so many other areas. There is also the longer tradition and greater prominence in the US of political science, the discipline for which European integration is the most obvious hunting-ground. More generally, an imperial culture has to monitor major developments around the world: it could be argued that contemporary China or Latin America do not differ substantially from Europe, so far as the balance of scholarship is concerned. Still, the much greater density, not to speak of ancestry, of university research in today's Union would not lead one to expect particularly similar outcomes.