World view:European Union leaders meet in less than two weeks for a summit at which they hope to complete negotiation of the reform treaty intended to make the EU more capable of handling the many problems it faces. This replaces the previous constitutional treaty following its rejection by French and Dutch voters two years ago, writes Paul Gillespie.
Symbolic, state-like constitutional language has been stripped from that document, but its institutional content remains mostly intact in the new text. It is hoped that national ratifications and the implementation of the document will be completed before the European Parliament elections in June 2009.
In moving from the one text to the other, there has been a radical change of political emphasis. The constitutional treaty was intended to address a crisis of legitimacy as well as of effectiveness in the EU's governing structures and values. Its point of departure was expressed inquisitorially in the 2001 Laeken Declaration as follows: "How to bring citizens, and primarily the young, closer to the European design and the European institutions, how to organise politics and the European political area in an enlarged Union, and how to develop the Union into a stabilising factor and a model in the new, multipolar world?"
The resulting Convention on the Future of Europe, which bargained the major draft of the constitutional treaty in 2002-2003, was drawn from a much wider circle of political actors than the usual diplomatic and governmental ones in the four successive treaties from 1987 onwards.
This, it was hoped, would enhance the EU's public legitimacy, in the sense that the exercise of power and collective decisions are accepted voluntarily, even by those who dislike or disagree with them. The accumulation of change since the 1980s was widely assumed to have transformed European integration from a mainly elite-driven endeavour to one requiring the consent and participation of mass publics.
If that is so, the interval following the Dutch and French results can validly be seen as a radical retreat from public engagement back to diplomatic intergovernmentalism. The governments are still convinced of the need for more effective institutions and decision-making as they use the EU to deal with a more interdependent world; but they have cast aside the effort to seek symbolic legitimation, fearing that populist nationalism would overtake their capacity to sell such an outcome to domestic publics in referendums.
Parliamentary ratification will be the norm in all the member states except the Republic (unless political pressures force Gordon Brown's hands in the UK). It is a politics of disguise, a retreat from clarity and transparency towards legal complexity and secret diplomacy. The reform treaty will be far less accessible to ordinary citizens than the constitutional treaty, but that is the price to pay for getting it through, so it is argued.
Political scientists usefully distinguish between input and output legitimacy in analysing EU affairs. Democratic selection of office holders, electoral approval of programmes and public consultation are common ways of securing input legitimacy; meeting public needs and values and ensuring that policies track public opinion are the main sources of output legitimacy. One is more bottom up, the other top down. One depends on politics, the other more on policies.
Many analysts were sceptical of the constitutional exercise. They argued that the EU does not need the kind of input legitimacy required by national governments, but draws most of its acceptability from effective policymaking, dealing with publicly accepted tasks of government agreed to be best handled at transnational rather than domestic level. They claim justification from this outcome, and certainly the political leaders involved seem to agree with them. Bertie Ahern is in a minority in preferring the constitutional text, which he saw to completion during the Republic's EU presidency in 2004, but he can live with the reform treaty on grounds of efficiency.
If ratified, the reform treaty will equip the EU with a president of the European Council, a foreign policy chief, more majority voting, greater integration of justice and home affairs (from which the Republic may ill-advisedly opt out with the UK) and more involvement of national parliaments in its decisions. The argument for more effectiveness is well taken, but it must be aligned with appropriate policies if the EU is to be capable of generating a convincing output legitimacy of results in coming years.
However, that also requires a fresh look at its fundamental tasks and a determined effort to formulate new big ideas to replace the search for peace and prosperity that animated the postwar integration exercise.
Managing globalisation, leading the international effort to combat global warming, reinventing social protection at the transnational level, stabilising and developing the EU's vast neighbourhood and representing its common interests and values in a multipolar world are good candidates for that. They are strongly supported by European opinion polls, which show mass public support for such action, as belief in US world leadership recedes.
But such an exercise cannot proceed by technocratic policies alone. It requires political initiative and leadership to convince mass publics that such goals are achievable and valorised without damaging their national democratic access. There has been a collapse of confidence and trust, and therefore of legitimacy, at national levels, as political capacity seems to diminish or be replaced by international policies. Mass publics are bewildered by the growing complexity and opacity of decision-making and often disillusioned by the reduced social protection flowing from neoliberal economic models.
Stripping the treaty of constitutional symbolism in the belief that the EU's legitimacy can be restored by better policies is a short-sighted game. Much of the constitutional discourse was also elitist, in the sense that symbolism was seen as an adequate substitute for a more robust politics at EU level. It is not so.
The case for transnational political parties offering greater policy choices, a more effective EU public sphere for debate and other means of reconnecting citizens to its politics is strong. This needs to harness national parliamentary and democratic politics, not bypass them. In that sense, it is a both/and politics combining the national and the European, rather than a zero-sum, either/or polarisation of them. The 2009 European elections could be a valuable laboratory for such change.