The European Union (EU) has embarked upon a decisive phase of reappraisal and significant reform. Under the chairmanship of Giscard DEstaing, a Constitutional Convention is under way. Its aims are greater democratisation, transparency, accountability and a new contract between the governed and governors to be encoded in a new Treaty.
Hurrah! You might exclaim with delight. Well, hold the party invites.
One of the key questions that the Convention poses is: how can the Unions democratic legitimacy be strengthened? How indeed?
It is now clear that the Convention itself simply cannot come up with the whole answer. Certainly, a new constitution is needed. But meanwhile, there is an existing EU government and its behaviour now is profoundly important in deciding whether the fine words of any such document are ever to be believed.
Last month there was an important clash over how the EU accounts for the huge amounts it spends. It was a wake-up call to the Convention and the EU as a whole.
On the surface, it was played out as a personal confrontation between Neil Kinnock, the European Commission vice-president who is in charge of reform, and Marta Andreasen, who had been employed as the EUs Chief Accountant. She had concluded that the EU was massively open to fraud and had been forced to resign, in a welter of comments about her personal character and how she had been difficult to work with and should not have been appointed in the first place (see a report on this story).
The Commission regarded it as a matter of its employment policies, focusing on Andreasens personal conduct and alleged character flaws. Meanwhile, the European public is far more concerned about the state of the EUs accounts. If there is something wrong with the way the team plays, we do not want to be told that those who complain only do so because they are not team players. Four and a half billion euros should not just be classified as irregularities by the European Court of Auditors. It is a scandal that the accounts can be altered with no trace of who has made the changes. If it takes someone who is a difficult person to work with to raise the alarm, then any true democrat will want to see more of them.
Accounting irregularities have become a way of life over many years of EU spending projects. What makes this latest scandal and the inept handling of the issue alarming is that we were reassured that, after the Jacques Santer debacle, integrity and accountability were to be at the heart of the new EU. If the only response to a clear issue of accountability is for the administrative apparatus to blackball the individual who raises it, then that institution does not have the ability or capacity to reform itself.
In which case, some other body must do it. The Convention has now to address the core issue of the EU and bring the Commission itself under control.
The weakness of power
The European Commission is an organisation of highly committed and very talented individuals working in a highly stimulating environment with a unique, umbrella view of Europes strengths and weaknesses. Many years of working in the political arena in Brussels have convinced me that the problem is not that the Commission is corrupt or consciously deceptive. Rather, the issue is one of its internal culture and of its over-politicisation.
The culture is a strange, insecure combination of arrogance, idealism, total commitment and paranoia. The Commission believes that it is the High Priestess and ultimate custodian of the European project. As a result, it frequently takes on a proselytising, politicised character. This is compounded by its unique position of unbridled power and consequent lack of explicit, external masters.
These factors have produced a culture that swings between European evangelising and bureaucratic self-preservation. Some in the Commission have become accustomed to this lack of democratic accountability even relishing it. But, as a whole, power based on a weak democratic foundation exposes the Commission to external condemnation, which, because the unjust denunciation, as always, mixes with the just criticism, generates internal paranoia.
It lacks the political buffer that most national civil services benefit from. Legally, the Commission and its officers are merely the servants of the Council of Ministers; but, in practice, the responsibility of the politicians is to deliver national policy within the European framework, not to develop European policy. As a result, the Commission has no serious, democratically accountable advocates who can protect it from political and unfair attacks, as opposed to operational and accurate criticisms that can improve it.
The Commission has missed many opportunities over the last fifteen years of phoney reform. It has mistaken maintaining its power with growing in strength. Its obsession with keeping all the powers it has and can accumulate has reinforced its greatest weaknesses. Had it aligned itself more closely with the European Parliament it could have mitigated its current political exposure and provided itself with much clearer European legitimacy. Instead, it has retained its unenviable role as a broker between the nation-states.
Giscards Convention must now address this, or it will fail. It needs to provide the Commission with greater legitimacy on one hand, while providing the bureaucrats with explicit political protection so that the Commission can focus on operational excellence rather than having constantly to justify its own existence. It is in good part the need for self-justification that results in the entrenched response made by Neil Kinnock and many before him, not sure whether they have to protect their political legitimacy or to address the real underlying issues.
Europe has asked the Commission to fulfil too many roles. It is not that the Commission needs to become more democratic in many ways it should be totally divorced from politics. It is that we need to develop an explicitly political and democratic European master under which the Commission can operate.
If the Convention fails to provide a new basis that holds the Commission to account and thus, at the same time, permits it to play a defined and effective role, then the EUs government will remain crippled, wasteful and unpopular. This will undermine any attempt to secure the democratic legitimacy of the EU as a whole. For what will be the use or appeal of a constitution that fails to address the central power structure and turns a blind eye to bureaucrats who cook the books?