Technocrats blamed for indifference about Europe's future

The crowd that gathered on Sunday at Edwin Lutyens's imposing memorial in Thiepval for the 85th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme was, for the most part, just what you might expect.

Most were British, many were ex-servicemen and their families and a large number had clearly visited the battlefield sites many times before.

What was striking was the strong showing of young people, most of whom were indistinguishable in appearance from the fashionably dressed crowd I saw streaming towards Madonna's concert in Paris the previous evening. These were average young people who chose to spend their Sunday morning in a field remembering the dead of the first World War.

The numbers visiting the Somme have increased steadily in recent years, and record numbers are expected this summer. The success of such films as Saving Private Ryan and Pearl Harbour suggests that the second World War also continues to exercise a fascination over succeeding generations.

This curiosity about Europe's past stands in sharp contrast to the blank indifference shown by most Europeans towards the current debate about their continent's future. Indeed, the more energetically EU leaders profess their determination to "bring Europe closer to the people", the less inclined Europe's citizens appear to be listening.

In a lecture at Hamburg University last week, the German philosopher and sociologist, Jurgen Habermas, suggested that one reason the European project has become a turn-off for citizens is that it has been removed from the sphere of normal, political debate.

And he blamed European intellectuals for failing to capture the debate on Europe's future from technocrats, whose primary interest is in institutional efficiency as opposed to democratic accountability.

"The hostile or reluctant population can only be won over to Europe if the project is released from the abstraction of discussions among experts, in other words, politicised," he said.

Dr Habermas identifies two primary motivations behind the first moves towards European integration half a century ago: the prevention of war in Europe and the limitation of German power.

Most Europeans agree that both of these aims have been fulfilled, and Dr Habermas describes the success of the European method of managing longterm conflicts by ritualising them rather than attempting to resolve them to the advantage of one side or the other.

But the most successful aspect of European integration has been in the economic sphere, and Dr Habermas identifies as a deep, structural problem the discrepancy between Europe's close-knit, economic interconnection and the looseness of its political co-operation. He argues that political control must move to keep pace with market deregulation.

"From this perspective, the European project looks like a common attempt by national governments to regain in Brussels some of the capacity to intervene that each one has lost at home. That at least is how it looks to Lionel Jospin, who advocates an economic government for the euro-zone and in the long term the harmonisation of all corporate taxation," he said.

Dr Habermas agrees with Mr Jospin's assertion in May that institutional reform of the EU can only succeed once the political purpose of the European project takes on clearer contours. For Dr Habermas and Mr Jospin, Europe is more than a common market, and the project of integration must be about protecting the European model of society from external threats.

Dr Habermas maintains that one step towards making European decision-making more transparent and comprehensible to citizens would be to draw up a constitution for the EU. One of the most powerful arguments against such a move is that there is no such thing as "the European people", only a collection of peoples that each owe their primary loyalty to the nationstate.

Dr Habermas argues that the creation of national identities in the 19th and 20th centuries was an artificial process and that national consciousness and democratic citizenship are mutually reinforcing. A European constitution would encourage interest groups, political movements and religious denominations to take a closer interest in the political process outside their nation-states.

He suggests that EU institutions can only become truly democratically legitimate through an interplay between the institutionalised decision-making process and the informal process of opinion-forming that takes place through the mass media.

He urges national newspapers to report more comprehensively on political debates in other European countries, creating an exchange of information and ideas between peoples rather than from Brussels downwards.