Colm Tóibín: EU must open up after Brexit

Lack of democracy and transparency at the heart of the EU must be addressed

The European Union, it seems, can withstand anything except a crisis. As the former Yugoslavia began to break up in the early 1990s, and in the economic turmoil of recent years, most countries within the union reverted to their 19th-century type. The stuff about us "all being Europeans now" ceased. We all went back to our own countries with their gnarled histories and their individual desires. There were no more inspirational speeches from our European masters. The national interest seemed more pressing than community-building.

When the European leaders met, we had a sense not of the shared European good being advanced, but of clashing concerns, of nation states forged in the past making arguments based on narrow, local priorities, sometimes focusing on nothing more than immediate political gain.

So, too, with the crisis over refugees. Despite agreements made between countries within the European Union, most notably the Dublin Regulation and the Schengen Agreement, each European country seemed intent on operating alone, in the national interest, once the crisis began. Even countries that seemed ready to open their doors to refugees soon prepared to close them again, almost on a whim. Despite efforts to create a pan-European policy, the governments of the countries of the EU have dealt with the refugee crisis as though there were no union, or no union that mattered.

EU structures

Now that England and Wales have voted to leave the EU, it would be easy for the union to blame this on some kind of post-empire stress disorder, or on the Tory party, or on the very citizens who voted. Indeed, there must be some in Brussels who wish that they could, as Bertolt Brecht put it, dissolve the people and elect a new one. But it might be more useful if the EU examined its own structures, its own uneasy relationship with democracy and transparency.

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Many of the institutions created by the community of nation-states in Europe appear now like alibis for something. The European Parliament, for example, seems like an alibi for democracy. An integrated European foreign policy seems like an alibi for a foreign policy that is, in fact, fearful and fragmented and almost non-existent.

The European Commission appears like an organisation whose main enemy is the European people.

Those of us who live in capital cities often have occasion to watch the commission and the people who work for the commission being driven at speed through our streets in cars with tinted windows. They are accompanied by the sound of sirens and by police outriders as they travel from some government building to the airport. They are mildly afraid of us, but their mild fear is nothing compared to the mild contempt they feel.

This can be compared to how diplomats from a large country feel about a posting in a small country. The small country is mildly tedious but, nonetheless, must be handled with some sensitivity. But more than anything, secrecy at all times must be maintained.

The European Commission bases itself on a foreign office rather than a government; the policy is mild, calm suspicion and the keeping of distance. Tight lips, weak smiles and holding cards close to the chest are more important than courting popularity or indeed any system at all of transparency.

There is no feeling that the commission and its bureaucrats are employed by the people of Europe and are public servants. Some of them have a sense that they operate in our interest, but not enough for them to be swayed by what we might actually want or not want.

In their dreams, we are children. They do not have nightmares; everything is under too much control for that. They are not, after all, dictators waiting to be toppled. They will not be toppled; their power is too svelte, cunning and underhand for that.

Weakening debates

Some of the European institutions have a way of undermining national parliaments that have ceded aspects of their sovereignty to them. More important perhaps, they have a way too of weakening national or even local debates about ethics and policy.

We all know that the states we inhabit have handed over power to what once was presented as an organisation filled with idealism and pure democratic purpose.

We all know too that the only movement to reform the EU or tear it asunder that has any energy or impetus is a right-wing movement with faint roots in fascism and deeper ones in an old xenophobic conservatism.

The urge to make European institutions better and more accountable, to return to an idea of a union in which each member state is equal, and each citizen equal too, has nothing in common with this anti-European movement, and nothing to learn from it, except its doggedness.

What is essential now in the Europe that remains – the Europe that has survived intact the weakening of the idealism of the European Union and will survive the UK referendum – is an urgent impetus for reform of the structures of the EU, beginning with the opening of the meetings of the Council of Ministers to the public and the media, and the making of individual members of the commission more accountable and their decisions more open to argument.

The EU that now depends on the closed door and the whispered deal should belong to the public square. Do the officials and the individual ministers know that? If so, how many lost referendums and how much public apathy and the growth of how many anti-EU parties will it take for them to do something about it?

In the meantime, the world outside the European Commission lies threatened not by war, which broke our world apart twice in the 20th century, but by lassitude.

History happens the first time as tragedy and then the world grows tired. And that tiredness is filled with the soundless sound of money moving swiftly across borders because of treaties signed by the countries of Europe. When times are good, we hear empty rhetoric about the bright, shining future of Europe, and when times are not good, there are instead many crisis meetings and late-night phone calls.

Simultaneous translators are woken from uneasy dreams to help our leaders try to understand what each other are saying, as though many voices need to be heard, as though anyone is listening.

Some things remain intact, however. For example, a notion still exists at the heart of the European dream that everyone should be given a chance and that equality of opportunity or equal access to services should exist, especially in education and health, and that women should be equal to men.

This may not work in practice, and it varies from country to country, but only a minority of European leaders would say that such equality of opportunity should not exist at all, or should be drastically watered down. It still remains part of what we mean by European identity.

Compared to the United States, India, or Central and South America, there is a seriousness still in Europe about ideas of social welfare. Also, we don’t use capital punishment and we never will again it seems. That surely is progress and surely underlines that some idea of human dignity and a sense of human rights has been consolidated here.

There is also in Europe some idea that the state has a responsibility to oversee, copper-fasten or perhaps even fund an independent radio and television service, and to guarantee some diversity in the ownership of newspapers and magazines and online news systems.

There is a sense too that the state, via the taxpayer, should be involved in funding or subsidising small publishers, film making, theatre, music, art galleries and individual artists without compromising anyone’s independence. All of this is threatened now, but it has not disappeared.

Meeting in secret

But the problem of democracy remains. If, as a citizen of the United States, I wish to vote for or against a president, I can do so easily, usually without impediment. I can also vote for other offices in America with a clear understanding of the extent and limit of their power, as I can do in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

How can I do this in Europe? I can vote in national elections whose results will dictate who sits at the table when the finance ministers of Europe meet or the prime ministers of Europe meet. But the ministers meet in secret.

In Europe now, as a result of the Greek crisis, we have a right to feel that when they meet, they rubber-stamp what has been decided by one or two among them, the largest and the most powerful, often in their own interests, and also by several European institutions who are not accountable in any way to the people of Europe.

I can also vote in elections for the European Parliament, but in doing so I am aware that if the Parliament did not sit for a year, or was abolished completely in the morning, it would make no material difference to my life or to the world around me.

This eroding sense of connection between the European elite and the European population looks, on the face of it, like a crisis, but, until Brexit, it has not been viewed in this way by the main European newspapers or commentators, or by most politicians or political scientists.

It has come to be seen as normality, this slow, poisonous alienation of the people of Europe from European institutions, this slow feeling that we the people are flawed and are not to be trusted.

No matter how many matters we as citizens disagree about, there is perhaps one thing on which all of us who live in Europe now must assent to. Starting afresh, no one with a serious democratic conscience would design the system of governance and the quality of citizenship we have in Europe now.

Like us all, the European Union is flawed. In the next two years as it begins to set the terms for UK withdrawal, it might also take time to look at itself, see what has happened as a necessary wake-up call and begin to respond accordingly. It might even consider doing this in public.