The future of Europe – simplify, simplify

The European Union has been a success beyond the wildest dreams of its founders. Yet at present, among the public at large, it is going through a period of ill-defined discontent, with symptoms as various as the Irish referendum’s ‘no’ to the Nice treaty, to growing euro-scepticism in Poland. Veteran Brussels watchers say that there is nothing new in this – European integration has always had its ups and downs and, in one way or another, the Union always succeeds in finding a new burst of forward momentum. The EU may never become a United States of Europe but nevertheless we should recognise what has been achieved. Perhaps, when people have euro notes and coins in their pockets next year, the historic nature of what has been achieved will become more tangible and the current symptoms of discontent will melt away. Perhaps – but perhaps not.

It is the ‘perhaps not’ scenario which should have Europe worried. It means that the expansion of the Union to Central and Eastern Europe could be in jeopardy; it means public support for the reforms needed to update Europe’s social market will be absent; it means trouble ahead when further changes to the Union’s political set-up come to be negotiated in 2004.

The events of 11 September have severely jolted the Union and its member states. It has underlined the importance of the Union acting together with the United States on matters of global concern such as international terrorism and it has focused the attention of Europe’s leaders on priorities which lie outside union borders rather than turning the spotlight inwards on Europe’s own malaise. Yet once the immediate international crisis is over, there is a danger that the Union will revert to navel-gazing in Brussels, in ways which are enormously off-putting for the average person. The longer term challenge remains for Europe to find ways in which public opinion can regain its confidence in the Union and for the Union to re-establish its internal dynamic.

Looking for remedies

One response is that the Union should get back to focusing on ‘real’ pocket book issues such as income and employment growth. According to this view, the Union has become distracted by institutional questions, which most people find incomprehensible anyway, and should go back to the days when it pursued projects which promised real benefits to people in their daily lives.

However, attempts to turn the clock back in this way are going to fail. The reason is that the economic agenda has changed. The days are over when there were relatively easy gains to be had from dismantling trade barriers between member states. Nowadays the economic agenda is about welfare reform or labour market flexibility – areas of policy making which upset long standing public assumptions about what citizens can count on in their lives and what they cannot. So when the agenda moves into these areas, people want to know who is taking the decision to change pension benefits or rattle their job security and why. In other words, it leads straight into the question of the political structure of the Union and who does what.

Pride in the system

When the United States of America adopted its system of government over two hundred years ago, visitors from Europe commented on the pride of the American people in their new form of democratic government. Europe today is building something new and equally ambitious – a continent-wide system of democratic government. But instead of pride there is doubt and suspicion. Possibly this reflects a ‘loss of innocence’ about democracy itself: the knowledge that democracies cannot easily control the abuse of political power and a cynicism about the deceit of Europe’s leaders such as Kohl or Mitterrand. But America too has had its share of crooks and charlatans in politics. And it is still possible to take pride in a system of government, while still deploring some of the individuals who emerge through the system.

Part of Europe’s problem is that so much of the thinking about its system of government is backward-looking. Both politicians and academics are far too prone to think that they can just transpose what people are familiar with from their own national contexts. America’s founding fathers had no such inhibitions. They knew they were creating something radically new and they thought in new ways about it. When Germany’s politicians advocate that Europe as a whole should adopt Germany’s own way of dividing up powers between levels of government, or, when British academics extol the virtues of Westminster-style parliamentary democracy for Brussels, both groups are displaying a total failure to come to grips with a new political setting. At this moment in its history Europe has to be open to radical new ideas and recognise what is different in the setting which confronts the design of Europe’s system of government.

Network Europe?

The great merit of Manuel Castells’ argument about ‘network Europe’ is that he is indeed trying to introduce new thinking into the debate about Europe’s political future. Yet I doubt whether the kind of alternative he offers will either serve his vision or convince. For one thing it rationalises a structure very close to what we already have in Europe – and that is a structure which people find incomprehensible. Politicians may sometimes be attracted to the currently fashionable idea of borrowing the ‘network model’ from business. We are told that ‘the network state’ is the characteristic response of political systems to the ‘information age’. But governments and the institutions in Brussels like such a model for the worst of reasons: they see it as a way to escape the constraints of democratic form, or as an excuse to think no further about the shape of a continent-wide union because it is already a ‘network’. At worst, it allows them to shift blame and conceal their own responsibilities.

For another thing the actions of the al-Qaida network bring home in a particularly horrific way the fact that we need to be able to distinguish between a good network and a bad network. This means linking the network approach both to democratic form and to what it is that the EU should be doing. Castells does neither. We therefore need a different vision.

Simplicity?

An alternative approach which I find attractive is to stress the advantages of thinking about a very simple democratic structure for Europe. Simplicity has long been seen as a virtue in the physical sciences but it is only recently, when people have started thinking about why some societies seem better at adapting to change than others, that issues of simplicity and complexity have begun to attract attention in the social and political sciences.

Simplicity encourages us to think about the basic qualities that we need for a successful continent-wide system of government. The danger the EU faces if it continues down its present track is that it will end up with a system of political choice which does not work and a system of market choice which does not work either. Instead of Europe’s government helping people to make the critical choices in their lives, it will make it more difficult for them.

Simplicity means that the EU and its structures would focus on the type of government activity where the EU can add value to people’s lives. This is generally in the rule-making or regulatory area. More specifically it arises in those cases where rules are needed which reach across the entire union, making it easier for people to do what they want to do in social and geographical settings which are distant and unfamiliar.

Communications in modern democratic political systems take place in two ways. One is through the electoral process. The other, nowadays the most important, is through using the language of rights. The electoral approach has basic weaknesses in Europe. It means putting together common platforms and disseminating common political programmes. Little of this has actually taken place. The existing European assembly provides a forum where national parties, not pan-European parties, come together.

By contrast, the advantage of a European Union for communication is that it can facilitate extensive exchanges of views across the Union. In particular, it is entirely appropriate for the communication of rules with ‘reach’, that is rules with sufficient content to be useful everywhere: for example, in the identification of minimum standards.

The reach of rules

Rules with reach suited to general and extensive communication across the continent can be viewed as a ‘McDonald’s’ product. Their content is not sophisticated. But rules that make it easier for people to get what they want across the union and to know and be assured about what exactly they are getting, are enormously helpful to them in their lives. People will continue to satisfy more particular preferences in their states and regions, but the Union will have added a valuable new dimension to their range of choice.

It is a function that only a union can carry out. Elites may sneer at McDonald’s, but part of the problem of the existing union is precisely that it is seen to represent the interests of an elite. That same elite should stop sneering and start thinking about how to respond to what people really want.

We should, however, think much more carefully than the current EU does about where exactly we need rules with ‘reach’ and accept that there are many areas of public policy where differences are instructive and desirable. The insistence that the new members from central and eastern Europe should accept the existing EU rule book in all its many volumes is a complete mistake. Krzysztof Bobinski’s story of the storks is a good illustration of this!

In fact, the model of ‘simplicity’ looks on the political system as a way to learn and sift good ideas from the bad. Because there are many different ideas in Europe about what is good and worth pursuing, and differences of opinion on how to interpret important values, this model does not try to put in place arrangements for organisation and authority that promote or impose a single view. Instead, it views a coherent system of government as one that is about setting procedural standards that may lead communities to greater knowledge about their most important values. The model allows for maximising the value of the language of rights as a way to bring together those who feel very differently about the interpretation of important values. The best setting for ideas to be sorted out is to allow for both good and bad to be fully expressed and for convergence to follow, if at all, from discussion and practice. ‘Simplicity’ is not just accommodation.

Would simplicity attract?

A continent-wide union which had democratic ‘simplicity’ as its talisman would find that its peoples would be less concerned about intrusive and remote government and less puzzled by who is responsible for what. ‘Brussels’ would no longer be an easy target for blame for all that goes wrong in European politics. As we look ahead to the 2004 Inter Governmental Conference, it would encourage people to think about the fundamentals of the Union rather than get lost in institutional detail. It would encourage them to think afresh about the tasks and circumstances of modern government, rather than remaining stuck with the forms of the past.