Memorandum submitted by Professor Vernon
Bogdanor CBE, Professor of Government, Oxford University )
I. There is clear evidence that the European
Union is losing democratic legitimacy. It faces the challenge
of harnessing popular sentiment to the construction of Europe.
That challenge can best be met by adapting British ideas of responsible
government to the working of the institutions of the Union; and
by introducing a measure of direct democracy, in the form of the
referendum, not to overcome the institutions of the Union, but
to supplement them.
II. It has become a commonplace that the
European Union is suffering from a democratic deficit, because
the European Parliament is unable to hold the executive of the
European Union to account. Much of the reform agenda which European
leaders are preparing for the next intergovernmental conference
in the year 2004 is devoted to the internal relationships between
the institutions of the European Union and the appropriate balance
between them.
The main problem facing the Union, however,
is less an imbalance between the institutions than popular alienation
from its objectives. Indeed, this alienation is coming to threaten
the very legitimacy of the Union itself. It is a striking fact
that turnout for the European Parliament elections has fallen
steadily and continuously since 1979, the year of the first European
Parliament elections.
TURNOUT IN EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT ELECTIONS,
1979-99
| Year | Number of member states
| % Turnout |
| 1979 | 9 |
63.0 |
| 1984 | 10 |
61.0 |
| 1989 | 12 |
58.5 |
| 1994 | 12 |
56.8 |
| 1999 | 15 |
49.4 |
In the last elections in 1999, fewer than half of the eligible
electorate voted; and this figure itself overstates the true level
of voluntary participation, since voting is compulsory in Belgium,
Greece, Italy and Luxembourg.
In the two countries which are seen as the motor of European
Union, France and Germany, turnout was 47.0 per cent and 45.2
per cent respectively. In the three new member states, Austria,
Finland and Sweden, which voted for the first time in European
elections, turnout was, respectively, 49.0 per cent, 30.1 per
cent and 38.3 per cent. Turnout was lowest in Britain at 24 per
cent. In parts of Liverpool, turnout was just 8 per cent. Turnout
in Britain, it has been pointed out, was lower than the percentage
who were prepared to "vote" in a popular television
programme called "Big Brother". It is hardly possible
for the European Parliament to claim a mandate to represent the
opinions of 370 million people of the European Union when fewer
than half of its eligible electorate is willing to vote for it.
This fall in turnout is paradoxical, since it has occurred
at a time when the power and influence of the European Parliament
have greatly increased, largely due to two major amendments of
the Treaty of Rome, the Single European Act of 1986 and the Maastricht
Treaty of 1992. In 1979, at the time of the first direct elections,
many commentators, dismayed by a turnout far lower than they had
hoped, claimed that apathy was inevitable at a time when the European
Parliament had so few powers. Voters could not, they suggested,
be persuaded to turn out to elect what would prove to be little
more than a talking shop. However, the increase in powers for
the European Parliament has coincided with a steady decrease,
not an increase, in the percentage of European electors willing
to turn out to vote for it. There is thus a striking contrast
between the progressive transfer of competences to the European
level and the lack of popular involvement on the part of the European
electorate. This failure to mobilise popular consent is now the
principal weakness of the European project.
There seems, then, little enthusiasm for the European electoral
process. Not only is the European Parliament unable to help create
a European consciousness, but, far from being seen as the protector
of the citizen against the machinery of European bureaucracy,
it has come to be regarded rather as part of that machinery itself.
Instead of being a counterweight to the technocratic elements
in European Union, it is perceived as an element in that technostructure,
part of an alienated superstructure.
This failing on the part of the European Parliament, so it
is suggested, is not contingent, but inherent in the way that
European institutions have developed since 1958 and on the tacit
understandings which underlie them.
The European Parliament stems from the Common Assembly of
the European Coal and Steel Community set up in 1952, which was
restricted to the exercise of largely "supervisory"
powers. It was not at the time seen as central to the European
project, but was tacked on to the other institutions of the Community
in a somewhat perfunctory way. In the Treaty of Rome, as ratified
in 1958, the powers of the Parliament were described in Article
137 as "advisory" as well as "supervisory".
The European Community, then, was to be based not on parliamentary
government, but on government by wise men and women situated in
the Commission, which was perhaps seen as a European analogue
to the French Commissariat du Plan.
The European Union has been very much influenced by the ethos
of consociational democracy. This is little understood in Britain
where the ethos of the Union is often, and in a rather facile
manner, compared to that of a federal state. In a consociational
state, however, as it existed in the Netherlands, for example,
politics operated by elite agreement, and the various groupings
forming the consociation—in the Netherlands, Catholics Protestants
and Liberals, in the European Union, the peoples of the member
states—remain separate. In such a consociational system,
the legislature foregoes much of its classical role of scrutinising
government and holding it to account. For neither the legislature
nor the people dare untie the packages agreed by elites, since
it is elite agreement which holds the system together.[1]
What both the French technocratic ethos and the Dutch consociational
ethos have in common is their denial of the basic principle of
parliamentary government, that government should be responsible
to parliament. For the French, parliamentary interference would
have ruined the European project, as it had ruined the 3rd and
4th Republics. For the Dutch, parliamentary government would have
divided Europeans in an unacceptable way, and so hindered the
prospect of reaching agreement. Such ideas were, of course more
plausible in a period when there was deference to political leaders,
when the leaders led and the followers followed. It has become
less plausible in an era when the leaders continue to lead but
the followers decline to follow.
The consequence, however, was bound to be a restricted role
for the European Parliament. Thus, elections to that Parliament
do not, as we have seen, fulfil the functions which elections
are normally expected to perform. In Britain, and in most other
democracies, elections confer legitimacy because they fulfil three
inter-related functions. They offer the voter first a choice of
government, second a choice of who should lead that government,
so providing it with a recognisable human face, and third the
choice of a set of policies.
Elections to the European Parliament, however, fulfil none
of these functions. They do not determine the political colour
of the European Union, nor do they determine how it is to be governed,
for the government of the Union is shared between the Council
of Ministers and the Commission, and the composition of neither
of these bodies is affected by European elections. Therefore European
elections do little to help determine the policies followed by
the Union; nor do they yield personalised or recognisable leadership
for the Union. This has important consequences particularly in
foreign policy. Henry Kissinger once complained that if he wanted
to telephone the spokesman for Europe, he did not know what number
to ring. "Who do I call? Who is Mr. Europe? If I wish to
consult Europe, and I have a phone in front of me, what number
do I dial?" At the time of the Reykjavik summit between Reagan
and Gorbachev in 1986, Europe, whose interests were clearly affected,
was conspicuous by its absence. "Our old continent is absent
from the major negotiations between super powers at which Europe's
fate is being sealed", the European Parliament complained.
"No single person is in a position to represent it".[2]
The situation is hardly different today. The creation in 1999
of the post of Secretary-General and High Representative for Commission
Foreign and Security Policy, hardly fills the gap. Indeed, it
is doubtful if most Europeans know the name of the current incumbent,
Javier Solana, who was not, of course, chosen by anything resembling
a democratic process, and is therefore in no sense a political
leader.
The Presidency of the European Commission is decided not
by the voters but by private dealings between the governments
of the member states. In 1994, for example, Jean Dehaene, the
Prime Minister of Belgium, who had been proposed as successor
to Jacques Delors, was thought to be unsuitable, not by the European
Parliament, but by Britain's Prime Minister, John Major, who believed
that Dehaene was too "federalist". Europe's leaders
then agreed upon Jacques Santer as his replacement. But this whole
process took place without any involvement or even consultation
on the part of the European Parliament, which, nevertheless, formally
approved Santer as President.
Yet, Santer, who was a Christian Democrat from Luxembourg,
was approved by a newly-elected Parliament containing a majority
from the Left. The European Parliament seemed perfectly prepared
to endorse a President who did not represent the majority of its
members.
In March 1999, three months before the next round of European
Parliament elections, the European Commission resigned en bloc,
following allegations of corruption. This led to the replacement
of Jacques Santer as President of the Commission by Romano Prodi.
It did not seem to have occurred to the leaders of Europe, meeting
in private conclave, to await the result of the European Parliament
elections before deciding upon Prodi as the next President.
Moreover, the nomination of individual commissioners by the
member states bears no necessary relationship to the electoral
success of the political parties. In the 1999 European elections
in Germany, for example, the CDU/CSU, the German component of
the Christian Democrat transnational European Peoples Party, secured
the largest number of votes, but the SPD/Green government nevertheless
appointed an SPD and a Green commissioner. It would be difficult
to find more striking illustrations of the irrelevance of the
European Parliament to the governance of Europe, indeed of the
irrelevance of the elections themselves.
In elections in the member states of the Union, electors
generally sees a connection between their vote and the actual
outcome in terms of policy and leadership. Elections to the European
Parliament, however, do not lead to the choice of an executive
nor of an electoral college which chooses an executive. It is
hardly possible, therefore, for electors to perceive any connection
between their vote and the policy of the Union.
Thus elections to the European Parliament, although in form
transnational, have become in practice a series of national test
elections, analysed for their implications upon the domestic policies
of the member states, rather than the European Union. They are
second-order elections in that their outcome is dependent not
on European matters, but on national party allegiances, modified
by the popularity or the unpopularity of the incumbent government
in each member state.[3]
They thus bear some resemblance to transnational opinion polls
charting the fortunes of the main domestic forces in the various
member states. But this means that they are unable to confer legitimacy
on the European project.
III. This weakness has become particularly striking since,
in Europe, from the late 1960s, as in democracies in other parts
of the world, the demand for political participation has grown
apace. One consequence of this has been that the mismatch between
popular expectations and the performance of government widened
during the 1980s and 1990s. For the effects of social change—rising
living standards, the gradual embourgeoisement of the working
class, the spreading ownership of property, shares and other assets—all
served to diffuse economic power more widely and to erode traditional
attitudes towards authority. The development of information technology
and the coming of an information society seemed to make possible
a radical dispersal of decision-making so that centralized, top-down
methods of government came to appear outdated. Many, perhaps most,
democracies elected governments which sought to move in the direction
of a market economy emphasising the importance of individual choice
in both the public and private sectors; one consequence was the
development of a consumerist culture so that, in social and economic
affairs at least, the individual gained sovereignty. The governments
of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, moreover, sought to make
public institutions themselves more accountable, both through
privatisation, and by encouraging devolution from local authorities
to individual institutions such as schools and housing estates.
The central theme was the attempt to give individuals more control
over institutions providing public services. Britain indeed was
a pioneer in the 1990s in a revolution in government and in attitudes
to government, a revolution which sought to resolve the paradox
that the triumph of liberal democracy, following the collapse
of Communism, seemed to be accompanied by growing alienation from
government. If one had to sum up this revolution, one could say
that its essence consisted in government becoming more consumer
and voter-friendly, more concerned with outputs than inputs, more
concerned to satisfy the needs of voters and citizens. The "Citizen's
Charter", introduced by John Major in 1991 was much mocked
at its inception, but its basic principle has been copied in a
number of other democratic countries. The reforms, sometimes rather
superficially attributed to "Thatcherism" were in fact
widely adopted, even in countries ruled by governments of the
Left—France, for example, Australia, New Zealand and Sweden.
Nevertheless, the growth of consumer sovereignty was not
in general matched by corresponding changes in the political sphere.
There was indeed something of a contrast between the return of
individualism in economic life and the relatively passive role
which individuals were expected to adopt towards their political
institutions. Voters, however, have begun to show a disconcerting
insistence on untying the consociational packages that their leaders
have agreed. That process was apparent in the referendums on the
Maastricht and Nice treaties in Denmark, France and Ireland. It
might have been apparent in other member states also had they
been required to ratify these treaties by referendum. The packages
agreed with much effort by political leaders, therefore, are in
danger of being untied as the demand for popular involvement in
decisions-making asserts itself. Perhaps indeed the concept of
"consociational democracy" is actually a contradiction
in terms. Perhaps consociational systems only work by denying
democratic participation in what are seen as the wider interests
of the stability of the system. What is clear is that it is no
longer, as perhaps it may once have been, a satisfactory method
of governing a community whose members see themselves as active
citizens.
Because the institutions of the European Union are seen as
being so remote from the voter, reforms involving rejigging these
institutions or inventing new institutions are unlikely to prove
of value. The European Union is already cluttered with institutions.
It needs a streamlining of institutions, and the reconnecting
of its institutions with the people, not more institutions.
The European Union has, in particular, no need for a second
chamber of the European Parliament, composed of national parliamentarians
from the member states. Such a second chamber which would be analogous
perhaps to the Bundesrat in the German Federal Republic, or the
American Senate before direct election was introduced in 1913,
would serve to impose the pre-1979 European Parliament on top
of the post-1979 Parliament. It would tend not to the clarifying
of accountability, but to the blurring of accountability, since
national electorates are already linked to the Council of Ministers
through their national political parties. The need now is to link
national electorates to the Commission through the transnational
political parties.
IV. If, then, the constitutional structure of the European
Union does not yield accountability to the voters of Europe, how
might such accountability be secured? Some of Europe's more far-sighted
leaders have come to favor the introduction of an element of direct
election in European institutions. Ex-President Giscard of France,
for example, has advocated that the President of the European
Council be directly elected by universal suffrage, while Jacques
Delors has called for the direct election of the President of
the Commission, and, as a first step towards that aim, the election
of the Commission President by an electoral college comprising
members of national parliaments and the European Parliament. Jacques
Chirac, also, has shown considerable sympathy with the idea of
direct election.
It is, perhaps, not at all surprising that support for direct
election comes from France whose 5th Republic finds so important
a place both for direct election of the President and for the
referendum. Indeed, it may be argued that if the European Community
reflects in part the ethos of the French 4th Republic, it should
now be replaced by a system based on the ethos of the French 5th
Republic, and this is the aim of the French reformers.
Direct election would explicitly recognise the principle
of the sovereignty of the people as the foundation-stone of a
united Europe. It seeks to meet the central challenge facing Europe
which is that of discovering some means of bridging the gap between
the elite and the people so as to construct a European consciousness
without which the whole European idea will remain an empty construct.
Direct election would enable European voters to influence
the policy of the European Union and to choose its government.
It would provide that democratic base of legitimacy which at present
the European Union lacks. There would then be a strong incentive
for Europeans to vote in elections genuinely designed to determine
the political orientation of the Union. Moreover, direct election
would focus popular interest on European issues, giving them glamour
and excitement, qualities sadly lacking at present, and it might
therefore prove a remedy for falling turnout and electoral apathy.
But there are two obvious objections to the idea of direct
election. The first is that European solidarity is probably not
yet sufficiently advanced for the nationals of one member state
to be willing to support the national of another as in effect
leader of Europe. Indeed, it may be argued that the proposal for
direct election presupposes the very solidarity which it is intended
to help create.
Secondly, any alteration in the method of electing the President
of the European Council or the Commission would require an amendment
to the Treaty. Such an amendment would need to be carried unanimously
by every member state. In two member states, Denmark and Ireland,
Treaty amendment requires approval by the people in a referendum.
In both countries, referendums have led to rejection—of
the Maastricht Treaty in Denmark in 1992, and of the Nice Treaty
in Ireland in 2001. In another member state, France, where a referendum
was not constitutionally required, the government nevertheless
called one on the Maastricht treaty in 1993, and this led to but
a narrow majority for the treaty. The two rejections and the one
near-rejection led to major crises in the European Union.
It is highly unlikely that, in the current state of Euro-scepticism,
unanimous agreement could be secured for an amendment proposing
direct election of the President of the Commission or of the European
Council. At least one member state and possibly more, would probably
reject such a proposal, not only ensuring its defeat, but causing
a further crisis in the Union. This would reawaken the same atavistic
sentiments which Maastricht aroused. The proposal for direct election
is again seen to presuppose that very European solidarity which
it seeks to create.
But, if the French method of democratising the European Union
seems too Utopian to work in current circumstances, the same may
not be true for the British notion of parliamentary responsibility.
Article 158 of the Treaty requires the President of the Commission
to secure a vote of confidence before assuming office. This vote
is generally a formality, and it would be refused only if someone
manifestly unsuitable or corrupt were to be proposed. There is
no reason, however, why this should continue to be so. There is
no reason why the vote of confidence should remain a mere formality.
Instead, it could be used, as of course it is in Britain, to enforce
responsibility.
In Britain, as in other parliamentary systems, a government's
existence depends upon its ability to secure a majority in the
legislature. If it fails to do so, it must resign. Why should
not the same principle apply in the European Union? The European
Parliament could, if it so wished, and without the need for any
treaty amendment, simply insist that the political outlook of
the President of the Commission, and indeed of the Commission
as a whole, conform to that of the majority in the Parliament.
Thus, a Left majority could insist that the President of the Commission
and the Commission were taken from the Left, a Right majority,
conversely, could insist that the President and the Commission
came from the Right.
If the Commission were to be dependent upon the majority
in the European Parliament, this would entirely transform the
role of the Parliament, for it would become an executive-generating
body. There would then be an incentive for electors to turn out
to vote in European Parliament elections since they would be helping
to determine whether Europe was to be governed in a Leftward or
a Rightward direction, something which has become of much greater
importance with the development of economic and monetary union;
electors would also be helping to determine the political leadership
of Europe and the broad direction of public policy in Europe.
The elections would become a real analogue of domestic elections
rather than, as they are at present, a series of domestic elections
conducted simultaneously. Elections to the European Parliament
would fulfil the same three functions as domestic elections. They
would be helping to determine the broad direction of public policy,
choosing a government, to the extent that the Commission is in
fact a "government", and helping to determine the political
leadership of Europe.
This transformation in the role of the European Parliament
would almost certainly lead to further consequential changes.
For voters would seek to know who the different transnational
parties would nominate as Commission President. The larger political
groups would probably nominate candidates for the Presidency before
the European elections, thus making the process of choice of President
more transparent. This would make the European elections in effect
direct elections of the European Commission. The analogy with
domestic elections, which, in Britain and many other democracies,
have the function of directly electing the leader of the government,
would be even more complete. Direct elections would then link
voters to the Commission of the European Union through the transnational
parties.
The British contribution, then, could be to show how the
fundamental principle of parliamentary government, of a government
responsible to parliament, can be applied to the European Union
so as both to yield accountability and to clarify the purpose
of European elections.
V. The idea of responsibility, however, implies not only
the responsibility of government to the legislature, collective
responsibility, but also the responsibility of individual ministers
to the legislature, individual responsibility. This too is an
idea which could readily be adapted to the European Union.
The essence of the notion of individual responsibility was
well stated by Gladstone who declared that "In every free
state, for every public act, some one must be responsible; and
the question is, who shall it be? The British Constitution answers:
`the minister and the minister exclusively'."[4]
Ministerial responsibility in this sense is a fundamental principle
of the British Constitution, defining and prescribing as it does
the relationships both between ministers and officials and between
ministers and Parliament. Indeed, it has the same importance in
the British system of government as the concept of the separation
of powers does in the American.
Under the British system of government, executive powers
are, with a few notable exceptions, conferred by Parliament upon
ministers and not on officials. It is the concept of ministerial
responsibility which buttresses the politically neutral role of
civil servants. For it ensures that officials, with very few exceptions,
speak and act in the name of ministers. They have no constitutional
personality of their own. Everything that they do is, constitutionally,
done under the authority of a minister, either express or implied.
Thus, civil servants are accountable only to the ministers whom
they serve. They have, in general, no direct accountability to
Parliament. Ministerial responsibility allows the minister to
be both the conduit through which accountability flows,
and also the wall protecting officials from Parliament.
Thus, the concept of ministerial responsibility sustains a structure
of government within which ministers are served by permanent officials
who are required to serve governments of any political colour,
and who, at senior levels, are debarred from party affiliation.
It is in this way that ministerial responsibility helps to sustain
a politically neutral civil service.
The sharp separation of ministerial and official roles which
characterises Britain and the "old" Commonwealth countries—Canada,
Australia and New Zealand—is not, by and large, met with
in Europe. On the Continent, by contrast, there are instead the
phenomena of the elected official and the unelected politician.
Indeed, one of the reasons why we in Britain find it so difficult
to understand the European Union is that in it important decisions
can be taken by unelected persons, by European Commissioners.
Jacques Delors, for example, a European leader of great authority
and significance, was never elected to any position in the European
Union, except the European Parliament between 1979 and 1981, when
he left on being appointed Economics and Finance Minister in the
new government of Francois Mitterrand. Nor was he ever elected
to any domestic position, except in local government. It is little
wonder that to British eyes the operation of the European Union
often seems to blur responsibility and to confuse lines of accountability.
The concept of responsibility both identifies who is under
a duty to respond to questions by Parliament, but it can also
be used to attribute blame. Thus, the principle of ministerial
responsibility to Parliament prescribes, first, that a minister
must answer to Parliament for every power conferred upon
him or her; and second, that a minister is answerable to
Parliament for the way in which he or she uses his powers. Parliament
can, in the last resort, if it is unhappy about the way a in which
a minister has exercised his or her powers, compel the resignation
of the minister.
There is a great contrast between the principle of ministerial
responsibility as it operates in British government, and the absence
of such responsibility in the European context. When, in 1999,
various commissioners were accused of mismanagement and corruption,
the European Parliament seemed to have no form of redress against
the errant Commissioners. The only form of redress was to secure
the resignation of the whole Commission en bloc, and that
required a two-thirds majority in the European Parliament. At
one time, it looked as if an overall, but not a two-thirds majority
would be secured. This would have meant that the Commission, despite
having lost the confidence of the Parliament, could continue,
broken-backed, until the end of its term. But in any case the
resignation of the whole Commission would have punished the innocent
along with the guilty. It was as if in Britain, the only way to
punish a minister who had made a mistake was to require the resignation
of the government as a whole.[5]
To introduce the principle of ministerial responsibility
into the government of the European Union would not, it seems,
require any constitutional amendment to the Treaty. It could be
achieved if members of the European Parliament were prepared to
use their existing powers to the full. In addition to a vote of
no confidence in the Commission as a whole, it would be perfectly
possible for the European Parliament to put down a motion of no
confidence in a particular commissioner on the grounds of mismanagement,
incompetence or corruption, and to insist on securing access to
all the documents relevant to the decisions which were being questioned,
in order to debate the motion. This would force the commissioner
to defend his or her record, and it would act as a powerful incentive
to better administration in the European Union. For, where there
has been mismanagement, the Commissioner might well be required
to demonstrate to the European Parliament that action had been
taken to correct the mistake and to prevent any recurrence, and
that, of course, could involve calling officials in the Commission
to account for their mistakes, perhaps even subjecting them to
disciplinary procedures. Certainly, the European Parliament would
need to be assured that appropriate remedial measures had been
taken. Thus, the principle of individual ministerial responsibility
could be a powerful tool of accountability in the affairs of the
European Union.
VI. The European Union is, as we have seen, based on
conceptions of government that are outdated in the modern world
of assertive democracy. It was much influenced by the ethos of
4th Republic France, which legitimised technocratic leadership,
and sought to insulate this leadership from effective parliamentary
scrutiny; and also by the ethos of consociational democracy which
legitimised decision-making by elites, with the role of the electorate
being confined to that of ratifying these decisions. It is time
for these outdated conceptions to be replaced by the British ethos
of parliamentary government, which entails the collective responsibility
of the Commission to the European Parliament, and the individual
responsibility of individual Commissioners for mismanagement,
incompetence or corruption.
But, even if such reforms were to be implemented, the electors
of the European Union might still feel that their institutions
were remote from them. For the key decisions on European matters
would still be made by political elites, albeit accountable political
elites.
Liberal constitutional theory, however, suggests that power
is entrusted to political elites, to legislators, by the people
only for certain specific purposes. "The Legislative",
Locke claims, "cannot transfer the power of making laws to
any other hands. For it being but a delegated power from the People,
they who have it cannot pass it to others".[6]
That principle has been broadly accepted as a constitutional convention
in Britain, where major changes involving the transfer of the
powers of Parliament, either upward to the European Union, or
downwards, to devolved bodies in, for example, Scotland, Wales
or Northern Ireland, are thought to require endorsement through
referendum.
Constitutional theory, then, seems to require that the endorsement
of the people is needed in a democratic polity when sovereignty
is transferred. That constitutional principle was well understood
by one of the founding fathers of the European Community, Altiero
Spinelli, who hoped that his proposed European Union could be
worked out by a European Parliament which had been granted a constituent
mandate for that purpose through a referendum.
The implication of this idea is that constitutional changes
in the European Union need to be endorsed not only the parliaments
of the member states, but also by the people. For the electors
of the member states, so it might be said, entrust their leaders
with the powers given to them by the Treaties; but they give them
no authority to alter the Treaties themselves. That authority
can only be given through the expression of popular wishes in
a referendum. It would certainly concentrate the minds of European
leaders if they knew that constitutional amendments to the Union
would have to be put, not just to the legislatures of the member
states, but also to the people in referendums.
Use of the referendum for major constitutional changes in
the European Union could perhaps be supplemented by also using
it for certain major policy issues. Why should not the Social
Chapter, for example, have been put to the European electorate
for endorsement in a referendum? Electors in the European Union
would have more reason to concern themselves with European issues
if their vote was needed to validate them. European Union-wide
referendums might then do a great deal to overcome the sense of
alienation and remoteness felt by many Europeans; and it could
lead to greater identification on the part of the European electorate
with the European Union. But, above all, introduction of European-wide
referendums into the politics of the European Union would be an
explicit recognition of the principle of the sovereignty of the
people, a principle without which a united and democratic Europe
cannot be built.
The challenge for the European Union, then, is to find a
means to bridge the gap between the machinery of policy-making,
which concentrates power in the hands of elites, and the ethos
of democratic self-government which entails popular control of
institutions. That challenge can only be met by introducing British
ideas of responsible government into the European Union, and by
a measure of direct democracy, intended not to replace the representative
institutions of the Union, but to supplement them and help remedy
their deficiencies. A genuine European Union can only be built
with popular support. It cannot be built by holding the people
at bay.
VII. These ideas for making the government of the European
Union more accountable are based in part, of course, upon British
constitutional experience and the lessons to be drawn from it.
But the European Union is not likely to accept British ideas unless
Britain can be persuaded to play a more constructive part in European
affairs. It is perhaps worth pondering on the words spoken by
Winston Churchill at the Albert Hall in 1947, when he insisted
that, "If Europe united is to be a living force, Britain
will have to play her full part as a member of the European family".
These words remain as true today as they were fifty five years
ago.
Vernon Bogdanor
September 2001
1
The idea of consociational democracy was developed by the Dutch
political scientist, Arend Lijphart. See, for example, Democracy
in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration, 2nd edition,
Yale University Press, 1977. Back
2
European Parliament: Committee on Institutional Affairs: Draft
Report on The Presidency of the European Community. Part B: Explanatory
Statement. PE 119.031/B. Para 6. Back
3
The German political scientist, Karlheinz Reif, was the first
to characterise European elections as "second-order elections"
in his book, Ten European Elections, Gower, 1985. Back
4
W E Gladstone, Gleanings from Past Years, John Murray,
1879, vol 1, p 233. Back
5
A lurid account of alleged fraud in the Commission, involving
misappropriation of funds, corrupt dealings with contractors and
"jobs for the boys", is to be found in a book by Paul
Van Buitenen, formerly assistant auditor in the Financial Control
Directorate in Brussels, Blowing the Whistle; One Man's Fight
Against Fraud in the European Commission, Politico's, 2000. Back
6
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, para 141. Back
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