ROBIN SHEPHERD: EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY IS ON THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS ****
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/921/european_democracy_is_on_the_edge_of_the_abyss
It’s been moving this way for some time, but now Europe’s leaders are going to have to answer a simple question on democracy: For, or against?
It’s often the little details casually slipped into the coverage that give the game away. Try this from today’s BBC report on the EU’s latest destined-for-certain-failure bailout deal for Greece:
“Opinion polls suggest that the two parties in the coalition, which currently dominate parliament, are facing huge losses at the next election, scheduled for April. Parties on the far left and far right, which are set to make big gains, are opposed to the bailout deal.“
So, fascists and communists are set to make inroads as the centre-right and centre-left parties of Europe discredit themselves by their dogged commitment to a set of suicidal policies concocted in Brussels? Well I never.
“Predictable, and predicted“, as the eurosceptics are now fond of saying: the hollowing out of European democracy has been leading us in this direction for years.
But the more you look into it the worse it gets. George Tzogopoulos, of the Bodossakis Foundation think tank, was quoted in the Irish Independent last week as saying: “In my view the election (in April) will be postponed because of EU pressure.“ All quite casual and unremarkable. A leading Greek analyst just thinks the EU will ban a general election.
And it’s certainly plausible. Remember the words of the (obviously unelected) European Council president, Herman van Rompuy, in November? Speaking after calls in Italy for a general election, he said: “This country needs reforms, not elections.”
As The Commentator said at the time: “It’s jaw dropping stuff. It’s like thinking you’re having a nightmare only for it to dawn on you that this is actually happening.”
Few democracies have been more damaged in Europe than Ireland, which was twice in the last decade forced to vote again after rejecting EU treaties in referendums. On the planned new Fiscal Union, a recent Red C poll for the country’s Sunday Business Post suggested that 72 percent of Irish citizens want a referendum, 21 percent don‘t and seven percent registered no opinion.
But the government, if it can, will ignore them.
And there’s more. Here’s what the same paper said in an editorial: “…in our view, a referendum campaign would risk creating significant economic and financial instability and, were the electorate to vote No, this instability would increase rapidly, costing jobs and threatening investment. In our current economic predicament, this is the last thing we need.“
Mainstream newspapers as well as leading politicians are now starting to talk about the “dangers“ of what we used to consider the normal process of ensuring democratic legitimacy. Isn’t it up to the Irish and Italians to decide what is in their interests? Apparently not.
But then again that right was not accorded to the French or the Dutch when they voted against the European Constitution. This time they weren’t forced to vote again, they were simply ignored and got the same thing which was rather transparently repackaged as the Lisbon Treaty.
As I said at the time, to ignore a referendum is actually worse than to rig it. When you rig an election you still show respect for the principle that the “winning side“ must at least be seen to get the most votes.
But really, the most important issue is not the blatant opposition of many of the EU’s leading lights and their supporters to respecting the need for elections or the results when they don’t like them, it’s the increasingly obvious incompatibility between democracy itself and the neo-imperial model of European integration which the continent is rapidly adopting.
It only takes a little consideration of how much of the current European edifice could exist if it had been constructed on the consent of the governed. The euro? Not on your life. German voters consistently told pollsters they didn’t want it. So, that’s the euro gone.
The legal-political basis on which the entire project is currently constructed, the Lisbon Treaty? No, France, the Netherlands, and Ireland rejected it in referendums and several others would probably have done the same had they been given the chance: Britain certainly. So that’s the Lisbon Treaty gone too. I could go on.
The situation is more serious than it looks. For example, billed as “a first step towards more European coherence” it has just been announced that Germany and France are looking to “harmonise” their corporate tax rates next year. The European Commission is pushing to extend that to every single member state. Put that notion with what we’ve already got in the European project and what Brussels plans us to have and you really start wondering what will soon be the point of elections at all.
What, after all, will people actually be able to vote on? Fiscal policy? No, that will be a supranational decision in which your country’s electorate will not have the decisive say. Tax policy. No (see above) for the same reasonMonetary policy? It’s true that most countries operate independent central banks but if you’re outside the euro your elected government can at least appoint the governor and set the policy parameters. Not so if you’re in the euro, whose eventual membership for most countries is compulsory.
Foreign policy? No, again the ambition is for supranational consensus to rule the day. Border and immigration policy? No, especially not if you’re in the Schengen zone where you don’t even have a clue who is coming through your borders.
So, again, what are you going to vote on? Education? Cultural matters? Well, only as long as you don’t do something which contravenes laws for which ultimate authority resides in the European courts.
We’re not there yet. But that’s the way the leading forces in European politics want to take us.
And, in the absence of a European demos – a shared sense of destiny buttressed by common media, a common language to read and watch the media in, pan-European political parties, identical national interests etc – what that will spell is nothing less than the end of the democratic era in modern Europe.
This, by the way, is not a matter of opinion. You either understand what democracy is and what it entails or you do not.
But there is one very important issue that most certainly is a matter of opinion: Are you for democracy or against it? Depressingly, shockingly, almost unbelievably, that is the question that modern Europe now has to answer.
Robin Shepherd is the owner/publisher of @CommentatorIntl.
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