Injecting real democracy into the EU

"Europe can learn from the Westminster model" according to Oxford professor of government Vernon Bogdanor in an article in this morning's Financial times (sub required).  As the EU celebrates its fiftieth birthday its institutional future is uncertain as the failure to ratify the European Constitution demonstrates.  Bogdanor observes that it is a question of legitimacy:

Both José Manuel Barroso, European Commission president, and Tony Blair, UK prime minister, have sought to circumvent Europe’s constitutional problems by saying that it must concentrate on “delivery”. But lower call charges for mobile phones, however welcome, will not yield legitimacy to the EU, any more than the alleged fact that the trains ran on time reconciled Italians to Benito Mussolini. Moreover, a constitution suitable for six member states in 1957 is hardly likely to be equally suitable for 27 in 2007.

There has been a great deal of discussion about Europe's "democratic deficit" where powers have been transferred away from governments of the member states, accountable to their domestic parliaments, to European institutions that are not so accountable. 

In theory, the European executive ought to be accountable to the European parliament. But elections to the parliament fulfil none of the purposes of elections to domestic parliaments. They do not determine the government or the policies of the EU, nor who is to lead it. Perhaps that is why turnout has been steadily falling since 1979, until, in the last elections in 2004, fewer than 50 per cent of eligible Europeans could be bothered to vote.

The Parliament now has to ratify the European Council's nomination of the President of the European commission and the European Constitution and the European Constitution was to provide that, in future,"while the Council should choose the president, parliament should ratify the choice". 

Bogdanor points out that this is "the reverse of what should happen in a parliamentary system". 

It is the parliament that should choose and the Council that should ratify. Were the European parliament to choose not only the president of the Commission, but also the other members of it, elections to the parliament would be transformed. For they would help determine the broad direction of policy and the leadership of Europe. There would be a real incentive for electors to turn out to vote.

Such a reform could be achieved without amending the treaty. All that would be required is for the trans­national parties to nominate their ­candidates for membership of the Commission before European parliament elections. Of course, the elections would be unlikely to lead to a majority for any single party, and so a coalition would be necessary. The Commission would be composed of members of the winning bloc.

Introducing the essentially British principle of making the Commission collectively responsible to the European Parliament.  This basic element of the Westminster model can be complemented by individual responsibility.  Currently, the parliament has no institutional mechanism to dismiss an individual commissioner who has transgressed, short of dismissing the whole Commission.  Bogdanor concludes that the introduction of British constitutional ideas could do much to make European government more effective and accountable, which certainly makes a change from the usual British Euroscepticism. 

Professor Bogdanor was chairman of the Federal Trust’s working group whose report, Legitimacy, Accountability and Democracy in the European Union, has just been published and can be downloaded here.

Comments

[Fergus O'Rourke]

"... a constitution suitable for six member states in 1957 is hardly likely to be equally suitable for 27 in 2007" quoth Bogdanor, you say.

Wot ?!

Next thing, people will be saying that a constitution suitable for c.14 states in c.1776 is not appropriate to a 50 state continental super-power in 2006. That couldn't be true, could it ?

Or, that a constitution suitable for an inward backward homogeneous rural society with a declining population in 1937 will not do for (pick your own hyperbolic adjectives) Ireland in 2007. Equally ridiculous.