Year YYYY, 2024, Single Issue
Democracy in Crisis and a Federal Europe as the Only Solution
In the four weeks between 6 June and 7 July, 2024, we had the European elections followed by the legislative elections in France, the latter taking place either side of the UK general election. Following the worrying picture that emerged from the European elections, the democratic response in France, halting the wave of Marine Le Pen and Bardella’s Rassemblement National, had the effect of injecting new life and a dose of confidence into the pro-democratic forces, which are also celebrating the victory of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in the UK. In short, a great danger was averted in France, creating some space and time for efforts to structurally reverse the trend by acting on the root causes of the ever-deeper polarisation of our societies, which is favouring populists and leading to a return of nationalism.
By keeping out the far right in the recent legislative elections, French society gave an important demonstration of its capacity for democracy; but this result should not be allowed to distract us from the outcome of the European elections, which exposed the growing gap separating a large proportion of European citizens from the EU’s democratic institutions. Most of the member states recorded growing support for anti-European and anti-system right wing forces, more or less openly hostile to the rule of law and opposed to supporting Ukraine. In other words, this phenomenon was not confined to France, where the far right, despite having been (for now) stopped in its tracks, remains the country’s leading force in terms of consensus; it also extended to many other countries, including Germany where Alternative für Deutschland, despite its scandals and clear neo-Nazi sympathies, obtained 16 per cent of the vote, overtaking Chancellor Scholz’s SPD and becoming the party most voted for in the Eastern Länder. These results provide a clear indication of how difficult the various national governments are finding it to respond to the citizens’ needs, and to win their support.
To tackle the root causes of this trend in public opinion, it is clearly not enough to improve current politics, but necessary, rather, to radically change the capacity to act, so that democratic politics can once again offer citizens a credible and positive vision of their future. Citizens need to be able to feel, once again, that their destiny is in their own hands. They need to feel part of a community that deserves their personal commitment, and part of a project that is striving to improve the world and society.
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Federalists have always denounced the inadequacy of the European political-institutional system that chose to pursue integration through the construction of the Common Market, and over the past 25 years in particular they have underlined the error of the model adopted by the European Union at the turn of the century, when the objective of prioritising deepening over enlargement was abandoned. Deepening meant building political unity among a more cohesive core group of states within the European Union, while at the same time opening up the Union and its Single Market to new members, with whom it would thus have become possible to share not only the acquis Communautaire, but also a gradual movement towards greater political integration. We are referring here to the federation-within-a-confederation concept that was being discussed in the mid-1990s, and was last taken up by Fischer in his speech at the Humboldt University in 2000; a model that would have allowed Europe to have a foreign policy, an economic policy and an internal policy capable of meeting, respectively, the new security challenges that were emerging following the collapse of the USSR and the end of bipolarism, the new economic, commercial, financial and industrial challenges brought by globalisation and the launch of the single currency, and finally the new challenges accompanying the advent of the internet and digital technology. This failure to understand that it was time to complete the construction of the European political union (in line with what the fathers of the single currency themselves, starting with Jacques Delors, had envisaged at the time of the Maastricht Treaty) left Europe exposed to the repercussions of multiple crises, without the tools needed to address, and still less prevent them. NextGenerationEU has been a breath of fresh air, and fundamentally important, but the fact that it is regarded as an extraordinary response to an exceptional period has weakened its positive impact on public opinion. It is true that it has temporarily stopped the advance of Europe’s enemies and forced them to ‘change their spots’ so as to appear more presentable; indeed, after seeing the damaging effects of Brexit, they have abandoned thoughts of other ‘exits’, and instead embraced the ‘Europe of nations’ idea. However, it has not stopped them definitively, and in fact their rhetoric has continued to resonate with a bewildered public opinion that lacks strong points of reference.
The lesson to be drawn from all this could not be clearer. The crux of the matter is that the present European Union cannot be allowed to continue muddling along as it has been attempting to do for too long. There is now an urgent need to enable the Union to implement effective policies, both internally and externally, in the numerous economic and political areas in which national policies are entirely inadequate. To do so would constitute an essential step for the much-needed strengthening of pro-democratic politics alluded to earlier, a step that demands the creation of an autonomous European level of government (i.e., one endowed with its own competences, resources and capability to act). Failure to take it, condemning us to inaction, will leave us at the mercy of the increasingly evident inadequacy of the national level of power. And since the national power framework is still the heart of democratic life and political exchange, the coordination, on all the most crucial matters, that is being sought between the member states at European level is made to seem like an odious constraint, rather than being recognised as the wrong answer to our unavoidable need to act united as Europeans on the world stage. The current system creates the impression that democracy itself is being hollowed out, and it is an impression that will grow stronger and stronger until such time as a democratic European sovereignty is constructed. This is also the significance of and reasoning behind the outgoing European Parliament’s proposal for Treaty reform that, together with a request to launch a Convention (as envisaged by the Treaties), was submitted through the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the EU to the European Council in December 2023, and is now in the hands of the European Council, i.e., the governments. The Convention route indicated by the European Parliament is, as we have already highlighted in previous issues of our review, the only way to relaunch the European Union.
In this context, we have to be aware that our enemies, the enemies of Europe, fall into two categories: nationalists and ‘realists’. The latter are those who, in view of the European election results, argue that the idea of reforming the Treaties needs to be abandoned so as to allow Europe to advance — after 15 years of the Lisbon Treaty — by exploiting the opportunities for reform contained in the existing Treaties; in other words, they imagine that the obstacle of unanimity can be overcome through a unanimous intergovernmental agreement (sic!). All this while the nationalists’ weight in the Council is increasing compared to what it was in the past — a past in which no agreement was ever found. Essentially, the realists feel that the governments are more likely to agree unanimously to relinquish control over fundamental matters and the power of veto than they are to agree by a simple majority to start a Convention in which everything would in any case still be to play for. Basically, they seem to be arguing that it is better to surrender in order to avoid the possibility of being defeated.
For their part, the nationalists, with their ideology of dismantling the EU, constitute a huge danger because of the support they enjoy in public opinion and the way they are able to upset people’s perceptions. However, their recipe for the EU is inherently unworkable; for this reason, their true strength derives from the fact that they provide a cover for ‘realists’, allowing them to argue that now is not the time to address the change that the EU needs, and that it would be better to further postpone the issue. In this way, these so-called realists fuel the discontent and confusion in public opinion that the antidemocratic nationalist forces feed on, making it impossible to act on the causes of social malaise.
In conclusion, in this new legislature the path to reform of the European Union has certainly become narrower, but it is equally true that it has become even more important and necessary to pursue it, also and above all because there are no (positive) alternatives. Pro-European forces must therefore step up their efforts and be more determined than ever. Their majority in the European Parliament is still solid; starting from this, they must seek to build an alliance with the European Commission and force the European Council to take a stand. Time is not on the side of the stability of our democracies, threatened as they are by war and impoverishment. Only a more united Europe, a federal Europe, can restore hope for the future and give fresh impetus to democracy.
