After the ‘crisis’: increasing public support for the EU

After the institutional wrangling, the EU must address its citizens’ knowledge about the way it works at the same time as promoting inspiring and unifying grand ideas.

István Hegedűs

Since the agreement reached at the Lisbon summit about the Reform Treaty, new hopes have emerged that the long-lasting constitutional-institutional debates about the future shape of the European Union might be completed after a successful ratification process before the next European elections in 2009. If this positive scenario is realised, we would breathe easier after an unpleasant period of a worldwide debate about the state of the European Union since the negative outcome of the French and Dutch referendums on the draft constitution in May/June 2005. The confronting arguments turned round two dissenting views: is the European Union in a crisis or, perhaps, in a deep crisis?

Well, the failure of the approval of the European constitution in two founding member states expressed the inability of Euro-enthusiastic politicians, intellectuals and civil organisations to convince the majority of their societies to join them in their beliefs. Although the victory of the ‘no’ campaigns in France and the Netherlands did not occur simply because of a lack in popularity for an elite-driven project, it is still necessary to contemplate the tasks of pro-European public actors in order to change the embarrassingly sceptical/pessimistic public mood in many old and new member states. To avoid referendums on the new treaty almost everywhere inside the EU-27 seems to be a good solution from the perspective of political reasoning, but this method cannot solve the problem of a growing gap in attitudes and opinions concerning the European project between elites and masses.

The idea that the ongoing battle for the souls and votes of the European citizens in all member states could be easily won by pro-European political forces simply using better communication tricks is an illusion. Public sentiments rooted in popular culture and past historic experiences cannot be overcome by professional PR messages. One of the most important obstacles that should be tackled by mainstream Europeans is the very limited general knowledge of the people about European decision-making processes and the role of the common institutions. How can we imagine an even partially rational debate about the future of Europe if many Europeans have never heard anything about the present sharing of policy competences between European and national levels? Moreover, it is still not common knowledge amongst a significant part of the European electorate that Members of the European Parliament do not sit and vote together in national blocks, but that they have joined competing political groups in the all-European trans-national party system.

We might accept the argument that many citizens do not necessarily invest much energy in learning facts and opinions about political issues. But those who are interested in public affairs can usually make the difference between parliament, government, opposition, and the constitutional court at the domestic level. The sad consequence of missing basic information about the European institutions and the rules of the game is that Eurosceptics can easily misinterpret the decision-making processes, the objectives and motivations of all-European ideas.

The wide spread opinion that ordinary people cannot understand the unique European institutional framework and that therefore we should focus on simple, everyday European topics and policy issues, which are closer to people’s concern, is both short-sighted and misleading in this simplified form. Although the democratic procedures and the system of checks and balances in the European public life are different to the conventional constitutional methods people are more familiar with in the domestic political arena, all stakeholders could learn the fundamental logic of the European institutional set-up. At least, citizens should know who is (more) responsible for the development of a special policy area: their national government or, let’s say, the European Commission? Education could raise the general level of public discourse. Not all citizens can attend courses of European Studies at universities, but without any clue to the political world of the EU there is no real chance for anybody to develop reasonable positions on European matters.

In recent years, anti-European and Eurosceptic political groups often in alliance with populist and nationalistic parties have emerged and gained public attention in many countries. Pro-Europeans should keep on explaining that there is nothing resembling a giga-state in Brussels going over the heads of the citizens. Members of advocacy coalitions beyond partisan borders supporting the idea of a united Europe should not fall into a rhetorical trap by accepting that the EU faces more and more serious democracy deficits. Instead, the offensive appearance of pro-European groups might convince people that one of the main objectives of the institutional reform process during the last two decades of European integration has been to upgrade the degree of citizens’ representation, to increase the democratic nature of the decision-making procedures as well as to strengthen control mechanisms and transparency.

Constitutional and institutional issues, however, are just part of the bigger package. There are mutual fears both in the old and new member states concerning the performance of the enlarged and enlarging European Union. Pro-European politicians should realise that bad feelings about there having allegedly been too much spending to support the economic catch-up of Central and Eastern European countries is just one side of the coin: people living in the former communist regions had the impression that the West hesitated too long before new democracies could join the European club of excellence. Hungarians still often complain that we are second-class members inside the EU since we do not receive the amount of financial transfers from the EU budget “rightly deserved”. Since dominant narratives of European politics are not the same in the whole of Europe, the double-speak of politicians in order to calm down dissatisfaction at home forecloses the crucial argument, namely that common efforts should be made for the sake of all Europeans.

When I saw the exhibition at the renewed Berlaymont building visited by crowds one year after the biggest enlargement in the history of European integration, it was an unpleasant surprise to me that once again the old version of the story was presented. The concept of the show did not include the complicated development of the “other” Europe before and after the Second World War. Jean Monnet was naturally the symbolic figure of pragmatic federalism. But beside all the prominent West European constructors of an ever-closer union, there have been thinkers and politicians believing in a new Europe born in other parts of the continent. Guests of the Brussels fair might have learnt the name and fortune of Oszkár Jászi, the Hungarian social scientist, who had to leave for the United States in the nineteen-twenties after being a minister in Mihály Károlyi’s revolutionary government at the end of the First World War. In exile, as an antifascist and anticommunist intellectual, he wrote a study entitled “The United States of Europe”, and whilst evaluating the disappointing and dangerous European political situation of the 1920s as well as listing the problems of the crumbled East-Central-European region facing national antagonisms and violations of minority rights, he proposed the integration of the European nations.

Today, successful pragmatic policy steps and the introduction of new grand ideas should go hand in hand. These efforts might improve the overall political climate and help tolerant patriotism fit into European identity. Hopefully, mainstream European political elites have regained their self-confidence in their roles. The growing role of the European Parliament and an increasingly partisan debate on European issues might mobilise more and more citizens to realise that European and national issues are interlinked with one another.

No doubt: the challenges facing the EU at the beginning of the twenty-first century will be seen retrospectively as the childhood diseases of a long and prosperous development of an united Europe!

István Hegedűs is

Chairman of the Hungarian Europe Society

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