country’s pre-war colonels before the German blitz. Brave talk forgotten, it was all over in a phone-call. For the region where Poland accounts for nearly half the population and GDP, the episode is a lesson in the tacit hierarchy of states it has entered. The East is welcome, but should not get above itself. For these purposes at least, Deutschland is once again über alles.
Not that crumbs are unavailable. As the British, Dutch, and French rulers, so the Polish too received, with the postponement of their demotion, the fig-leaf needed to dispense them from submitting the reanimated Constitution to the opinion of their voters. It was left to Ireland’s premier Ahern—along with Blair, another of the conference’s recent escapees from a cloud of corruption—to exclaim, in a moment of unguarded delight: ‘90 per cent of it is still there!’ Even loyal commentators have found it difficult to suppress all disgust at the cynicism of this latest exercise in the ‘Community method’. The contrast between such realities and the placards of the touts for the new Europe could scarcely be starker. The truth is that the light of the world, role-model for humanity at large, cannot even count on the consent of its populations at home.
2
What kind of political order, then, is taking shape in Europe, fifteen years after Maastricht? The pioneers of European integration—Monnet and his fellow-spirits—envisaged the eventual creation of a federal union that would one day be the supranational equivalent of the nation-states out of which it emerged, anchored in an expanded popular sovereignty, based on universal suffrage, its executive answerable to an elected legislature, and its economy subject to requirements of social responsibility. In short, a democracy magnified to semi-continental scale (they had only Western Europe in mind). But there was always another way of looking at European unification, which saw it more as a limited pooling of powers by member-governments for certain—principally economic—ends, that did not imply any fundamental derogation of national sovereignty as traditionally understood, but rather the creation of a novel institutional framework for a specified range of transactions between them. De Gaulle famously represented one version of this outlook; Thatcher another. Between these federalist and inter-governmentalist visions of Europe, there has been a tension down to the present.
What has come into being, however, corresponds to neither. Constitutionally, the EU is a caricature of a democratic federation, since its Parliament lacks powers of initiative, contains no parties with any existence at European level, and wants even a modicum of popular credibility. Modest increments in its rights have not only failed to increase public interest in this body, but have been accompanied by a further decline in it. Participation in European elections has sunk steadily, to below 50 per cent, and the newest voters are the most indifferent of all. In the East, the regional figure in 2004 was scarcely more than 30 per cent; in Slovakia less than 17 per cent of voters cast a ballot for their delegates to Strasbourg. Such ennui is not irrational. The European Parliament is a Merovingian legislature. The mayor in the palace is the Council of Ministers, where real law-making decisions are taken, topped by the European Council of the heads of state, meeting every three months. Yet this complex in turn fails the opposite logic of an inter-governmental authority, since it is the Commission alone—the EU’s unelected executive—that can propose the laws on which the Council and (more notionally) the Parliament deliberate. The violation of a constitutional separation of powers in this dual authority—a bureaucracy vested with a monopoly of legislative initiative—is flagrant. Alongside this hybrid executive, moreover, is an independent judiciary, the European Court, capable of rulings discomfiting any national government.
At the centre of this maze lies the obscure zone in which the rival law-making instances of the Council and the Commission interlock, more impenetrable than any other feature of the Union. The nexus of ‘Coreper’ committees in Brussels, where emissaries of the former confer behind closed doors with functionaries of the latter, generates the avalanche of legally binding directives that form the main output of the EU: close on 100,000 pages to date. Here is the effective point of concentration of everything summed up in the phrase—smacking, characteristically, of the counting-house rather than the forum—‘democratic deficit’, one ritually deplored by EU officials themselves. In fact, what the trinity of Council, Coreper and Commission figures is not just an absence of democracy—though it is certainly also that—but an attenuation of politics of any kind, as ordinarily understood. The effect of this axis is to short-circuit—above all at the critical Coreper level—national legislatures, which are continually confronted with a mass of decisions over which they lack any oversight, without affording any supranational accountability in compensation, given the shadow-play of the Parliament in Strasbourg. The farce of popular consultations that are regularly ignored is only the most dramatic expression of this oligarchic structure, which sums up the rest.
Alongside their negation of democratic principles, two further, and less familiar, features of these arrangements stand out. The vast majority of the decisions of the Council, Commission and Coreper concern domestic issues that were traditionally debated in national legislatures. But in the conclaves at Brussels, these become the object of diplomatic negotiations—that is, of the kind of treatment classically reserved for foreign or military affairs, where parliamentary controls are usually weak to nonexistent, and executive discretion more or less untrammelled. Since the Renaissance, secrecy has always been the other name of diplomacy. What the core structures of the EU effectively do is to convert the open agenda of parliaments into the closed world of chancelleries. But even this is not all of it. Traditional diplomacy typically required stealth and surprise for success. But it did not preclude discord or rupture. Classically, it involved a war of manoeuvre between parties capable of breaking as well as making alliances; sudden shifts in the terrain of negotiations; alterations of means and objectives—in short, politics conducted between states, as distinct from within them, but politics nonetheless. In the disinfected universe of the EU, this all but disappears, as unanimity becomes virtually de rigueur on all significant occasions—any public disagreement, let alone refusal to accept a prefabricated consensus, increasingly being treated as if it were an unthinkable breach of etiquette. The deadly conformism of EU summits, smugly celebrated by theorists of ‘consociational democracy’ as if it were anything other than a cartel of self-protective elites, closes the coffin of even real diplomacy, covering it with wreaths of bureaucratic piety. Nothing is left to move the popular will, as democratic participation and political imagination are each snuffed out.
These structures have been some time in the making. Unreformed, they could not but be reinforced by enlargement. The distance between rulers and ruled, wide enough in a Community of nine or twelve countries, can only widen much further in a Union of twenty-seven or more, where economic and social circumstances differ so vastly that the Gini coefficient in the EU is now higher than in the US, the fabled land of inequality itself. It was always the calculation of adversaries of European federalism, successive British governments at their head, that the more extended the Community became, the less chance there was of any deepening of its institutions in a democratic direction, for the more impractical any conception of popular sovereignty in a supranational union would become. Their intentions have come to pass. Stretched to nearly 500 million citizens, the EU of today is in no position to recall the dreams of Monnet.
So what? There is no shortage of apologists prepared to explain that it is not just wrong to complain of a lack of democracy in the Union, conventionally understood, but that this is actually its greatest virtue. The standard argument, to be found in journals like Prospect, goes like this. The EU deals essentially with the technical and administrative issues—market competition, product specification, consumer protection and the like—posed by the aim of the Treaty of Rome to assure the free movement of goods, persons and capital within its borders. These are matters in which voters have little interest, rightly taking the view that they are best handled by appropriate experts, rather than incompetent parliamentarians. Just as the police, fire brigade or officer corps are not elected, but enjoy the widest public trust, so it is—at any rate tacitly—with the functionaries in Brussels. The democratic deficit is a myth, because matters which voters do care strongly about—preeminently taxes and social services, the real stuff of politics—continue to be decided not at Union but at national level, by traditional electoral mechanisms. So long as the separation between the two arenas and their respective types