Democracy Crisis within the European Convention
Esko Seppänen GUE/NGL Group, 1.4.2003
The European Convention is in a great hurry to draft a constitution
for the European Union. Haste, however, is not democracy.
The Convention aims to be finished by June.
If the constitution is not completed by June, differences
of opinion being so great will mean it will not be ready by
July either. If it is not ready by July, it cannot be approved
in September either, because that is when the Swedish referendum
on European Monetary Union is being held. If it is made known
that the EU is to become a federation, that country is certainly
going to vote NO to EMU. After September there will not be
time to convene an intergovernmental conference (IGC), which
is needed if the constitution is to be approved at the Rome
European Summit in December. If the constitution has not been
drawn up in time for Rome, it will not be ready in the spring
either. Ten new Member States join the Union on May 1 and
they will want to participate as full members in the decision-making
process. Then in June there are the European Parliament elections,
and none of the parties will want to go to the polls bearing
the emblem of federalism.
The EU constitution, whose Article 1 includes the wording
‘(The Union) administer(s) certain common competences
on a federal basis’, is being prepared from the top down.
At the final stage, just 66 Convention members will decide
whether to adopt it. They will be deciding on a draft constitution
for the other half billion or more citizens of Europe.
The Convention is not representative. The federalists are
over-represented. The smaller a group that represents 500
million people is, the more unrepresentative is that group’s
composition. The larger a state or a federation is, the less
diverse in nature its representative bodies. There is a danger
that the EU will be representing its peoples in the same restricted
sense as France will under that country’s new law on
elections. Just one in seven of the French members of the
Convention represents parties not on the Right.
The federalists are over-represented in the Convention and
so are the right-wing European People’s Party (EPP) and
the Social Democrats. Of the Convention’s 207 members
and alternates, only a dozen or so are involved in the work
of the Democracy Forum network, which is against a federation.
That reflects the hegemonic position of the federalists in
the Convention.
As the federalists in the Convention have the upper hand,
they try to use it to their advantage. Their aim is for the
constitution, as drafted by them, not to have to undergo any
changes at the IGC.
According to the original mandate given to the Convention
at the Laeken summit, there was supposed to be a time gap
between the Convention and the IGC long enough to allow a
national debate in the different countries to take place on
the draft constitution. It is in the interests of the federalists
that the IGC should be merely a formality and that the Convention’s
draft will not be dissected there. The same logic applies
to the proposed amendments the Convention members have made
to the text of the articles as submitted by the Praesidium:
there is so little time to contribute proposed amendments
that there is no chance for them to be discussed by democratic
national bodies.
The federalists believe the sovereignty of the Member States
is a barrier that stops them from promoting their own interests.
If the power of the nation states is transferred to a supranational
decision-making forum whose composition is based on countries’
populations, that says little for democracy, if, at least,
democracy means a country’s right to self-determination.
The Left do not acknowledge the concept of supranational democracy.
There is no global democracy because that would lead to difference
and diversity being unrepresented. The UN and its member organisations
do not constitute valid models of democracy in that their
members do not enjoy equal status.
Treaty of Nice
The main legislative decisions in the European Union are taken
in camera.
It has been estimated that 70% of new legislation is drafted
by working groups made up of civil servants, that 15% of the
new laws are given their final shape at meetings held by the
Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper), and 15%
are decided by the Councils of Ministers. All of these meetings
are held in camera.
The most meagre form of democracy – in fact it is not
democracy at all – is the EU summits, where the leaders
of nations agree things without any mandate from their people.
They always convene behind closed doors.
The Nice Summit has been described as a coup d’état
on the part of the big EU states. EU power was redistributed
there using enlargement of the Union as its justification.
If the old distribution of power had been taken into account
a situation would have arisen where a numerical majority of
small countries would have voted down the minority view held
by the big states. That was prevented by the Treaty of Nice.
The big countries would not take the risk that democracy would
foil their plans.
But it is the new right of veto, based on country populations,
that is of particular significance. Representatives of the
three big Member States may together block any qualified majority
decision.
The EU constitution will be Nice-compatible. If it is not,
there will not be one. The big countries will never give up
what they acquired at Nice. Their power is to be written into
the constitution, giving a legal format to the centralised
power wielded by the big countries. They will become an inner
circle, each one battling with the other two for power and
trying to speak for the entire EU.
The big countries are nevertheless unable to reach agreement
on whether the EU should also operate as a federation in foreign,
security and defence policy. The Union has responsibility
for armaments, but policy in operations by armed forces will
probably be enhanced cooperation, strengthened solidarity,
and flexibility based on constructive abstention on the part
of some countries: those that engage in operations will be
allowed to do so in the name of the Union.
The Union is becoming militarised. When it comes to military
issues, however, it divides into an inner circle and an outer
ring.
The Union is not the same for everyone.
The Laeken summit
At Laeken it was decided to convene a Convention to simplify
the EU Treaties and discover whether ‘this … reorganisation
might not lead in the long run to the adoption of a constitutional
text in the Union’.
Simplification of the Treaties is not enough for the Convention’s
federalists: they want a constitution as well. The mandate
from the heads of governments meant nothing to them.
The Convention is in fact a very devious idea. It could have
only been dreamt up by people who are out to evade democracy,
not increase it. The Convention is not parliamentarianism.
Its members are not formally accountable to any national political
body, even though the Union will only have full competence
if the Member States relinquish theirs. The federalists do
not want to be accountable to their nations or their citizens.
The Convention is an unparliamentary way to draft a constitution
for the EU. Its poor spread of representation also makes it
an undemocratic way.
For the federalists the Convention is a clearly better alternative
to it being drafted by an intergovernmental conference. That
way they will have had a hand in the process. That way too
they have been able to involve the supranational European
parties, the bastions of federalism in Europe, in the preparatory
work. The European Parliament has likewise been involved,
an institution where the federalist view reigns supreme and
whose delegation in the Convention includes just three who
wish to preserve the notion of a confederation of states and
who are opposed to a federation.
The Convention meets at the premises of the European Parliament.
That has given its federalist delegation the overwhelming
advantage of being on home ground. MEPs have been able to
steer the Convention in a federalist direction through a united
effort. Members of national parliaments have never had such
resources at their disposal.
The Praesidium or ‘Politburo’
The Convention is led – and manipulated – by the
Praesidium, which holds all the power in the preparation of
the draft constitution. Not all the Member States are represented
in it or in the Convention’s Secretariat for that matter.
All the members of the Praesidium are federalists (who leak
draft documents to their own groups working behind the scenes
but to them only).
The Presidency is able to manipulate the flow of the meetings.
Requests to speak are not granted in the order they are received:
the speaker lists are planned on the basis of expediency.
The prescribed length of speeches is ignored when certain
members of the Convention are speaking. The Presidency draws
conclusions from the speeches by the members which they say
reflect the position of the Convention members as a whole.
Many members complain, however, that Valéry Giscard
d’Estaing, in particular, draws conclusions from the
debates that reflect more his own ideas than the way the meeting
has gone.
The Praesidium has decided the Convention’s Rules of
Procedure and decides the agendas for the meetings.
The Praesidium also decided to set up Working Groups, to be
chaired by members of the Praesidium. The business of the
Working Groups is translated by interpreters into just two
or three languages. The chairmen selected the ‘experts’,
who were heard.
No one has ever voted in the Working Groups. It was therefore
possible for the chairmen to record the conclusions of the
Working Groups as they pleased. If the conclusions serve the
cause of the Praesidium they are referred to when the articles
are being formulated, but if they do not they are ignored.
Languages do not enjoy equal status in the Convention. There
is no interpretation service for the languages of the candidate
countries, and their representatives have to say what they
want to say in a foreign language (unless they pay for an
interpreter themselves). When the Praesidium drafts articles,
the amendments proposed by the members of the Convention are
not translated into other languages. There were 1187 proposed
amendments to the first 16 articles. Of them, the Praesidium
drew the conclusions that served its purpose. If a member
of the Praesidium did not speak the language the proposed
amendment was submitted in, it was ignored.
Candidate countries
The EU is to enlarge and, in addition to the representatives
of the Member States, representatives of the governments and
national parliaments of the 13 candidate countries were invited
to participate in the proceedings of the Convention, including
representatives from Turkey.
The members of the Convention from the new Member States do
not enjoy full membership because the Laeken conclusions stated
that representatives of the candidate countries would not
be able to prevent ‘any consensus which may emerge among
the Member States’.
In addition to the candidate countries having no right to
an interpreting service, originally there was an unwillingness
to let them have representation in the all-powerful Praesidium.
To avoid conflict, it invited a representative from Slovenia
to attend sessions as an external member.
As it is the purpose of some (big) old Member States to prevent
the new members from having an influence on the final outcome
of the Convention, they are in a hurry to have the draft constitution
by June. The intention then is to convene an intergovernmental
conference (IGC) for September in order that the constitution
can be finally adopted in Rome in December 2003.
The aim is to have the constitution ready before the new members
join the Union on 1 May 2004. Several representatives of the
candidate countries have nevertheless suggested that the IGC
should not be convened until after accession. If, however,
the IGC is to be convened before then they want their representatives
to participate with full powers. The constitution is to be
theirs too after all. According to Article 9 in the draft,
it will have primacy over the law of these Member States in
just the same way as it has primacy over the constitution
of the old Member States.
Adopting a federal constitution for the new Member States
without allowing them to make their own contribution to its
content is not democracy.
NGOs
To obtain general approval of its work – and to try and
conceal its poor levels of representation – the Convention
held two ‘hearings’. Citizens and young people were
heard and cross-examined.
For civil society to be heard, eight ‘contact’ groups
were set up, all chaired by representatives of the Praesidium.
Each of them met once.
If an organisation happened to know that a hearing was available
it could send its representative along. The business of the
contact groups was translated only into English and French
using interpreters. The following spoke: people representing
1) regional and local communities, 2) culture, 3) ‘society’,
4) science, 5) human rights movements, 6) environmental movements,
7) the field of development and, finally, 8) (‘European’)
organisations whose area of interest is the relationship between
citizens and institutions.
It was the ‘European’ organisations that were heard.
If an NGO did not have a supranational mouthpiece in Brussels
it was not heard.
Representatives from the contact groups were selected to speak
at the citizens’ forum at the plenary meeting of the
Convention on 24-25 June 2002. The choice of speakers served
the interests of the federalist hegemony of the Convention.
The EU-funded University of Florence was heard. It was here
that the first prototype of the EU constitution was drafted.
The Robert Schuman Foundation was heard. This organisation
is a well-known provider of funds for EU propaganda targeted
at Poland. The Polish NGO office in Brussels, which it sponsors,
was also heard. So, too, was the Federalist Voice, which brings
together federalist organisations from the EU countries at
meetings paid for by the EU. The Young European Federalists,
sponsored by the European Commission, were heard. The European
Women Lawyers’ Association, co-founded by the British
Prime Minister’s wife, Cherie Blair, was heard. Also
heard were the European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages,
which is financed by the European Commission, the European
Anti-Racist Network, and the World Organisation Against Torture.
The European Social Platform, many of whose member organisations
are dependent on EU funding, was heard.
Many speakers had personal financial ties to the Union or,
for example, the Jean Monnet Foundation. Some speakers had
received EU stipends. Speakers also included former European
Commission officials, who had gone on to make even more money
by managing EU-sponsored organisations. European capitalists
also spoke – as representatives of the people. The speaker
for the European Industry Round Table held staunch views in
favour of the Community method and against the power of national
governments (and parliaments). The interests the capitalists
have in common are better served by small rather than large
groups of civil servants and politicians.
When the forum was over the Convention’s Praesidium believed
they knew what the opinion of many hundreds of millions of
people in the EU was regarding the EU constitution. In the
wake of the hearings, how best to interpret public opinion
is in the hands of the Convention.
The Youth Convention
At more or less the same time there was a ‘Youth Convention’,
which was held on 9-11 July 2002. The aim was to gain support
for the constitution process from young federalists.
In total, 210 young people between 18 and 25 years old from
both the Member States and the candidate countries were invited
to this meeting. The members of the European Convention representing
national institutions/organisations could choose one young
person per member/alternate to attend the Youth Convention
– 168 national representatives in all. In practice, all
these members named their own participants, and as federalist
hegemony was a feature of the senior Convention, so it became
one of the Youth Convention also.
Of the quota allowed for the European Parliament and the Commission,
42 representatives of ‘European’ youth organisations
were selected.
It had originally been agreed by the European Parliament’s
Convention group that there would be a call for applications
on the Internet and that representatives would be selected
on the basis of these applications. Out of hundreds of thousands
of young people, there were only a couple of hundred applications
for the European Parliament’s quota of 32 places. Just
a handpicked number of young people had come to find out that
they could apply, and the time in which to do so was only
a few days. Seven of them were deemed suitable. The remaining
free places were shared among the European parties.
When the Youth Convention was held at the beginning of July,
it first of all elected a Praesidium and rapporteurs for three
Working Groups. Of the 11 elected, nine were people that had
been selected either by the European Parliament or the senior
Convention’s Praesidium. Just two were chosen from the
group selected by the members of the Convention representing
national institutions/organisations, and both of them were
from the UK, the country of the European Convention’s
Secretary-General, Sir John Kerr.
The Praesidium’s choices were predictable as the Youth
Convention was built on a tripartite partnership between Young
Conservatives, Young Social Democrats and the Young European
Federalists (EU-sponsored). There was also an agreement that
in the election of the chairmen of the three Working Groups,
the Conservatives, the Social Democrats and the Federalists
should each get their own group.
In its procedures the meeting was unrepresentative and undemocratic.
There was no proper control with regard to the speeches or
their length. No minutes were taken. The chairmen of the Working
Groups passed their Group’s conclusions straight on to
the Youth Convention’s Praesidium, and the members of
the Working Groups were not informed about them.
The representatives of the Youth Convention eventually laid
eyes on the conclusions of the meeting on the last morning
of the conference. They had to agree to them. Any proposed
amendments to this exceedingly complex document had to be
submitted – and only in English – by 2 p.m. that
same day. There had to be nine signatures for each proposed
amendment. When the document was voted on, only 130 out of
the 210 participants participated in the final vote. Of them,
25 voted against and 20 abstained. Hence fewer than half the
participants supported the opinion of the Youth Convention,
and more than 50 signed a protest about the way the meeting
was conducted. It was not published with the conference documents.
And that is how the Convention’s Praesidium managed to
base its proposals on the opinion of the young people of Europe!
Approval of the constitution
At Laeken it was decided that the Convention would ‘draw
up a final document which may comprise either different options,
indicating the degree of support which they received, or recommendations
if consensus is achieved’.
The Convention federalists are firmly united in their goal
to bring about just one hegemonic alternative. Those against
can propose other options. The aim, however, is to make sure
beforehand – without any vote on the matter – that
there is a majority among the 66 members deciding on the final
draft that will make the proposed amendments meaningless.
They want to avoid what Romano Prodi, head of the European
Commission, fears most: that full consensus will lead to the
Convention’s ruin.
The plan then is that the Convention should not vote on the
final outcome. Nor should the final draft be dissected at
an intergovernmental conference. Instead, it should be pushed
through as the Charter of Fundamental Rights was.
No public debate on the constitution is to be entered into
before the alternatives are just YES or NO. Then they will
be prepared to discuss the issue.
The Convention’s toughest problems will be discussed
by its members in April/May, allowing as little time as possible
for any thorough debate. Then they will have to decide how
the constitution is to be adopted by the Member States.
They are trying to avoid a situation where a negative view
on the part of a (small) Member State would prevent the constitution
from becoming law. None of the big countries will block it
because the constitution will represent a compromise for them
– or there will no constitution at all.
A new Union, wielding its power in the manner of a federation,
will thus be established. Those countries that adopt the constitution
will join this new Union. It remains undecided as to what
will happen to those countries that do not accept the constitution.
The same goes for the old European Union (EU).
Undoubtedly the countries that do not adopt a constitution
that has been drafted in an unparliamentary and unparliamentarian
way as law which has primacy over national constitutions and
legislation face dismissal and isolation.
In several countries an advisory referendum is being held
on the constitution. It should be organised to take place
in all EU countries on the same day. Without a mandate from
the people the constitution will not represent the people’s
will to have their country join a Union that exercises power
in the manner of a ‘federation’.
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