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Chapter Four: This is Not What Democracy looks like

Supporters of the Lisbon Treaty have argued that it is mainly about ‘internal housekeeping’ and involves some ‘tidying up’ of existing institutional arrangements. Any serious examination, however, shows that this is a gross exaggeration. The Treaty lays the foundation for a Euro super-state of the future.

In this chapter, we shall outline some of the important changes which the Treaty brings and then show how a transfer of power to the EU represents a diminution of democracy. This argument does not rely on a claim that ‘national sovereignty’ is intrinsically better.

Instead we will try to show how there is a bias in the EU to play down popular influence on decision making and that the Lisbon Treaty has done nothing positive to address this. In order to make this case, it is necessary to present the briefest guide to the EU maze.

At present the EU has a number of main governing institutions.

• The European Council is composed of the heads of state or governments of the member countries. This meets twice a year in the form of a European summit and sets the broad agenda for political decisions. These are followed through by the Council of Ministers which consists of the ministers from the member states who are subdivided into the Council of Agricultural Ministers or the Council of Foreign Ministers and so on. This operates through a weighted vote system where the bigger countries get more votes, according to their population size.
• The European Commission is the body charged with the day to day running of the EU. It is an unelected body composed of nominees from each country who are no longer supposed to represent national interests. It is also the guardian of the treaties agreed by the EU and a mediator between the different governments.
• The European Parliament is the only directly elected body and has currently 785 MEPs. It has limited legislative powers and has a veto over the appointment of the EU Commission.[i]

.The Building Blocks of a Super-State

The Lisbon Treaty builds on these foundations but introduces a number of important institutional changes. The clear aim is to gradually forge a super-state of Europe.

The Treaty creates a new EU Presidency who will dominate the EU Council and emerge as the main figurehead of the EU. Article 9b of the TEU states that ‘The European Council shall elect its President, by a qualified majority, for a term of two and a half years, renewable once’.

Up to now the chair of that Council has rotated and has been occupied by the leader of the particular country that plays a caretaker role for six months. Under the new arrangements, however, it is now stated that ‘The President of the EU Council will not hold a national office’.

The aim is to build up a figurehead who stands above national interests and represents the EU as a whole. He or she, however, will not be elected by the people of Europe.

The Lisbon Treaty also creates a new Foreign Minister for the EU who will have the ungainly title of ‘The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy’.

His or her main purpose will be to tie the member states ever tighter into a common foreign policy. Article  17: 2 of the TEU, for example,  removes the national veto and ushers in a system of qualified majority voting when dealing with a ‘proposal which the High Representative of the Union of Foreign Affairs and Security Policy has presented following a specific request to him or her from the European Council.’

Let us suppose for the moment that EU Ministers unanimously agree to ask the Foreign Minister to come up with proposals to deal with the crisis in Kosovo and any conflicts that arise with Russia. Once he or she comes back with specific proposals on the issue, the national veto of Ireland to decide its own policy on the issue is removed.

The new EU Foreign Minister will also run a special newly created EU diplomatic service. This will consist of about 5,000 to 7,000 diplomats who will probably be situated in EU consulates in different parts of the world.

Article 32 of the TEU is interesting because it simply states that ‘The (European) Union will have a legal personality’.

The purpose here is to give the EU its own legal existence which takes it beyond being a co-ordinator of nation states. It is another important step in moving to a federal model that is similar to USA, which is theoretically a legally separate entity from the individual states of Texas or North Carolina.

In practice, two developments will quickly follow from this. The EU will be able to sign up to international legal agreements on foreign policy, crime or judicial matters rather than simply on trade matters.

It also means that the EU will seek a seat on the UN Security Council as a legal personality in its own right and capable of speaking for the different countries that compose it.

Internally, the Lisbon Treaty reduces the influence of member states on the day to day running to the EU in a number of ways.

The voting system at the EU Council is changed so that it becomes harder for member states to block decisions.  Article 205 of the TFEU states that from the year 2014 a qualified majority is defined as 55 percent votes of members of the EU Council, as long at they represent 65 percent of the EU population. A blocking minority must get the votes of enough member states which represent 35 percent of the EU population.

This is a huge obstacle for smaller countries such as Ireland to overcome and so the EU leaders are confident that they will have effectively reduced national votes. By contrast it gives the big powers of Europe vastly more influence. An alliance of France and Germany with just two other countries can block any legislation –even if the other 23 are in favour..

The Treaty also gets rid of the right of each nation state to nominate someone for the EU Commission. Instead two thirds of EU states will have a nominee of the Commission on a rotating basis and so one third will have none for one of the respective five years sessions.

The Lisbon Treaty also transfers more areas of ‘competency’ to the EU and away from nation states.  The whole area of who exactly predominates – the EU or a national parliament- is quite confusing but essentially there are three different domains of decision making. In the first domain, the EU has ‘exclusive competence’; in the second, there are ‘shared competences’ between the EU and member states; in the third, the EU simply ‘co-ordinates, supplements or supports’ the action of member states.

However the Lisbon Treaty creates an important default position. Article 2:2 of the TFEU on shared competence states that ‘member states shall exercise their competence to the extent that the union has not exercised its competence’. This clearly gives pre-eminence to the EU over nation-states, even in supposed areas of shared competence.

The overall result is to insert EU decision-making ever deeper into most areas of day to day life. So in energy or transport, for example, EU decision-making will now predominate. In all, the Lisbon Treaty will remove national veto in over forty areas.

Writers like Susan George estimate that already about 80 percent of the laws adopted by national parliaments are nothing but adaptations of EU laws.[ii] With the further transfer of powers, EU influence will grow even further.

Taken together, the measures which are outlined above are clearly not just ‘tidying up’ arrangements. These are serious efforts to lay the basis for a United Sates of Europe.

In principle, there is nothing inherently wrong with such a project.

The nation state itself did not just spring from the sky as a natural institution but was forged through intense conflicts and broader economic developments. Though a long complicated historical process, peasants were, as one writer put it,[iii] turned into citizens and stamped with the identity of a particular national formation. We were not born to be Irish or French or British but our respective nation states developed subtle and not so subtle techniques to get us to see the world through national spectacles. There is, therefore, no reason why national identities in future might now give way to super-national or internationalist identities. The dream of John Lennon’s song Imagine of a world without borders is not entirely fanciful!

The real question, though, is on what basis is such an EU super-state being forged. If national identities are increasingly swapped for European identities, it is perfectly reasonable to ask will this mean more democracy or less. Will the change mean greater or lesser control of our lives by corporate executives or political elites? 

Unfortunately, the evidence from both the Lisbon Treaty and the record of how the EU actually functions shows that it entails less, rather than more, democracy.

The EU’s Democratic Regression

In recent years, there has been a growing academic literature which sees the EU as a ‘post-democratic structure’ which is governed, by a technocratic elite who want ‘efficiency’ rather than any popular influence on decision making. Much of this literature comes from writers who favour greater EU integration.

Peter Mair, for example, argues that the EU has largely become a ‘de-politicized’ sphere and ‘this is part of a more or less deliberate policy by mainstream political elites who are reluctant to have their hands tied by the constraints of popular democracy.’[iv]

Ralf Dahrendorf noted that ‘The (European) Union has now laid down very serious tests of democratic virtue for so called accession countries. If, however, it applied these tests to itself, the Union, the result would be dismal’.[v]

Giandomenico Majone has written a number of celebrated articles to attack those who lament the ‘democratic deficit’. But his defence of the present structures is interesting, to say the least. He compares the EU to an independent regulatory agency that deals with market failures and argues that its policy making should not be based on ‘majoritarian’ institutions. ‘Majoritarian’ has become a polite term to sneer at the concept of one person one vote.  Majone’s case is that the lack of democracy is in fact a good thing![vi]

There are a number of ways in which the shift in decision making to the EU means a regression in democracy.

First, the EU is an executive run institution where the most limited of control is exercised by directly elected representatives. The EU parliament does not elect its executive. It does not even receive the full minutes of the EU Council or the EU Commission to scrutinise who is voting which way.  It cannot sack individual EU Commissioners but must take the team as a job lot. When it was revealed that one EU Jacques Barrot had hidden the fact that he had been convicted of fraud and had received an amnesty from his ally Jacques Chirac who made it illegal to even mention his crime in France, there was nothing the EU Parliament could do.  It can veto the list of portfolio holders which are presented by the EU Commission President at the start but once in office it cannot single out one for resignation and so Barrot is still the EU Commission Vice President. Even it wishes to get rid of the whole Commission, it has, according to the Lisbon Treaty, to have the motion of censure carried by two thirds of the votes cast.

Second, the directly elected members do not even get to propose and decide on legislation by themselves. No group of MEPs can arrive at the parliament with a draft law on, for example, minimum standards on health care that are required throughout the EU and have it and turned into law.  Instead the unelected EU Commission submits a proposal to the parliament and then most complicated of procedures are put in place to effectively shunt decision-making off into a sphere of back-door horse trading. Some times this occurs because the EU Parliament is merely consulted but does not get to decide.  On other occasion, however, there is co-decision and the  Lisbon Treaty, in fact, expands this area for the parliament.

But what exactly is co-decision?  On a formal level, it involves an institutional maze in  which there is ‘first reading’ by the parliament, then the European Council takes a ‘common position’, and then there is second reading that is followed by ‘Conciliation Committee’ that mediates between the Parliament and the EU Council. All the time the horse trading and deal-making is in full swing so that any radical proposal is diluted down. In reality, however, the situation is even worse than this mind numbing absurdity. According to an important report conducted by the Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies, the system really works though informal, shadowy ‘ trilogues’ which often hammer out agreements between the different institutions in advance so that laws are fast-tracked though. The authors of the report conclude:

The relationship between Council and Parliament involves a plethora of informal and semi-formal meetings in which many of the real decisions about legislation are taken with little scope for public oversight. We dub this process the “invisible transformation” of the co-decision procedure (and it) has affected relations among governments within the Council as well as making it more difficult for national parliaments to supervise how EU business is contradicted.[vii]

The problem is further compounded by the fact that there are no real elections which focus on issues that are decided at EU level. Instead Euro-elections are fought out among local domestic parties who broadly ‘collude to keep the issue of Europe off the domestic agenda’[viii]. They are effectively contests on how the national governments are performing and so are characterised as ‘second-order national contests’[ix]. The result is that few representatives go to Brussels with a mandate to take a position on EU matters.

Instead a groups of failed or would-be national politicians are sent to Europe to receive, from 2009, a lavish salary of €7,000 a month plus generous expenses. Once there, they are likely to join one of the two largest groups in the parliament, the PPE (Conservative) or the PSE (Socialist). These are supposed to represent the left-right of the political divide but the unusual structure of the EU parliaments means that there is often a consensus between the two blocks. There are frequently trade offs and informal alliances, with most decisions being made far away from the prying eyes of the people that are supposed to be represented.. An recent example was a decision to introduce mandatory data retention in 2005. Here both political blocs agreed to a measure whereby an individual’s phone records, e mail logs and details of internet usage are kept by corporate providers for between six months and two years to be made available to the police and intelligence agencies should they request them. Clearly the people of Europe did not vote for such a repressive measure but it was imposed on them through a corrupted form of democracy

The other institution which is supposed to provide a ‘democratic input’ is the EU Council and the Council of Ministers. Neither can be said to really exercise democratic control, if by that we mean that representatives deliberate based on mandate from their electors. Although the EU Council and the Council of Ministers make laws, the different Ministers do not meet jointly in one legislative assembly. Up to recently, their deliberations were secret but the new Treaty opens this somewhat. However, it fails to bring transparency to the real locus of decision making – the COREPER. This is a permanent committee of ambassadors and top civil servants which meets once a week to haggle over the decisions. It is charged with dealing with a grey area between ‘technical’ and ‘political’ decision making. It works by coming up with a list of ‘A points’ and ‘B points’. A points are those which are agreed by COREPER and sent en bloc to the Ministers and then agreed by them without further discussion. They literally just sign off on the dotted line. According to one study between 70 percent and 90 percent of decisions are made this way.[x] The Ministers only vote on the B points and even then the chair of the meeting will manoeuvre until there are enough votes for a compromise to go through.

Despite the fact that the top bureaucrats in COREPER are supposed to be servants of the elected representatives, it does not function like that. The very fact that the structure is set up to mediate and achieve consensus between nation states, means the bureaucracy can change political positions into mere negotiating tactics. They get to say what are the constraints and opportunities for the home governments; they get to formally read out a position from their elected representatives and then negotiate it away. Far from being subject to any democratic control, informal contacts between the bureaucracy play a huge role in how decisions are made. According to one interviewee ‘the really frank discussions take place over lunch’.[xi]

The lack of democratic control means that unelected EU Commission plays a huge role. This unelected body has the sole right to propose laws to an elected body. Article 249 b gives more ‘delegated powers’ to the EU Commission to ‘supplement or amend certain non-essential elements of the legislative act’.          

The composition of the present composition EU Commission shows exactly how it is such a right wing force. Its President, Jose Barroso, is a former Maoist who supported the Chinese dictatorship and then switched to a fanatical pro-US position. Despite the fact that 84 percent of the Portuguese people opposed Bush’s war on Iraq, Barroso worked closely with Tony Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister Aznar to get backing for the war. He was so subservient, that one opposition figure in Portugal dubbed him, the ‘butler’ to the big powers. His accession to the post of EU Commission President represented a victory for the backroom manoeuvres of the more pro-US countries within the EU. 

Barroso told the Financial Times that ‘in one sentence; his would be a pro-business Commission’.[xii] He was ably assisted by the nominees sent to him by national governments. The Irish Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, is so right wing that the Fianna Fail leader Bertie Ahern thought it wiser to send him off to Brussels. The Dutch Commissioner Neelie Kroes-Smit sat on the boards of twelve major companies including Volvo and the French arms group Thales. She also worked as a lobbyist for Lockheed Martin, the US arms manufacturer. The British Commissioner, Peter Mandelson, is a failed politician who resigned, not just once but, twice from his country’s cabinet over dubious donations from business interests. If this is the key institution in the EU, is it any wonder that privatisation and attacks on the welfare state are the order of the day.

The Lisbon Treaty effectively does nothing to address the lack of democracy. Instead it makes it worse in three major ways.

It transfers more powers to an EU super-state whose decision making effectively lies outside the public scrutiny.

It strengthens the neo-liberal bias of the EU and so locks in a consensus around right of centre politics.  ‘Negative integration’ where barriers to the free market are being removed is the order to the day but any attempt to forge a ‘positive integration’ with greater public regulation over markets are questioned as spurious efforts to hinder real competition.

It introduces a passerelle clause that gives the EU Council the right to extend its powers without any further need for a new treaty. Passerelle is a French word for a footbridge but in reality it is a fast-track to greater EU powers.

Article 33 (3) says where  the treaty provides for the Council to act by unanimity in a  given area of case, the European Council may adopt a decision authorising the Council to act by qualifying majority in that area or in that case..

Defence and military matters are excluded but in all other areas this allows for the removal of a national veto. There is a provision to notify parliaments of the change but unless there is a vote against within six months, it can go through. In the Irish case, this will do away with the need for further referenda as the bandwagon of EU integration moves forward.

Through such mechanisms the undemocratic instincts that pervade the culture of the EU elite are revealed.

Efficient for Business

The lack of democracy in the EU is often justified by a need for ‘efficiency’. How, it is asked, could a continent of 490 million people be run on democratic lines?

By the same token, however, it might be suggested that the people of India or China should give up aspirations for democracy because their countries are too big! The efficiency argument is spurious because it avoids the simple question: efficient for whom?

In reality, the structure of the EU makes it highly efficient for big business to shape public policy behind closed doors. Brussels has become the lobby capital of the world – second only to Washington. The total number of its lobbyists is an estimated 15,000. There are so many that the Society of European Affairs Professionals sent a letter to the President of the EU Parliament complaining there were not enough seats and headphones for them. A staggering 5,000 lobbyists are accredited with full time access to the parliament building![xiii]

The vast majority of lobbyists – an estimated 70 percent come from business interests- because only they have the resources to fund them. One former employee of a major lobbying firm estimated that turnover on corporate lobbying amounted to between €750 million and €1 billion in 2005.[xiv]

Almost every industry has its own lobby groups varying from the tiny European Bottled Water Cooler Association to the chemical industry federation which employees over 140 people in its Brussels office. At the top of the pile are the big five ‘public affairs’ agencies who advise businesses on how to get their way – Burson- Marsteller, APCO, Fleischman-Hilliard, Hill and Knowlton and Weber Shandwick. These firms often recruit former member of the political elite to work for them and so create a revolving door that intensifies their influence. Pat Cox, the former Irish President of the European Parliament, now works for APCO as well as running his own smaller ‘consultancy’ firm. Similarly, Michiel van Hulten, a former MEP and chair of the Dutch Social Democratic Party now works for Burson Marsteller.[xv]   

The EU is an ideal hunting ground for the corporate lobbyists because it is like a maze tilted towards a pure, free market. In all, there are approximately 2,000 committees working in the EU. They draft laws, oversee their implementation, hold hearings and, even when there proceedings are held in public, the sheer complexity of the structure gives a shelter to big business to promote its interests. The EU also goes out of its way to facilitate them.

It sets up expert advisory committees which become official fronts for corporate interests even though they sometimes do not even record their proceedings. There are, for example, 1,350 drafting committees which ‘pre-cook’ proposals for EU law but some are entirely ‘informal’. One of the most prominent lobbyists, Daniel Guegin, admitted that lobbyists press to set up new expert groups so that they are in a good position to ‘control the agenda’.[xvi] The European Climate Change Programme on reducing CO 2 emissions from light duty vehicles, for example, has nine representatives from industry associations and only two genuine NGOs. The Tobaccos Control Stakeholder Consultation Expert Group has 24 industry representatives and only 2 from trade union and consumer organisations.

The corporate lobbyists target both the unelected EU Commission and EU Council where national politicians can operate with less public scrutiny. By turning their ideas into a highly technical discourse, they interact with the permanent civil servants to feed them ‘advice’. They wine and dine MEPs at expensive briefing lunches organised by think tanks which are little more than front groups for large corporations. Bigger firms like Burson Marseller even engage in a practice known as ‘astroturfing’ where they set up fake, grassroots campaign groups to help their lobbying efforts.

Business devotes vast resources to these practices because they know it works. The results, unfortunately, have dramatic effects on the lives of millions. Take the immense power of the bio-technology industry, for example.

In the late nineties, it lobbied extensively for their right to ‘own’ the living cells of animal and even human body parts. According to the SmithKline Beecham lobbyist, Simon Gentry, that company spent €20 million on the campaign.[xvii]  In 1998, they got their way with the Life Patent Directive which helped to take capitalism to a new and more intrusive level.

The population of Europe are opposed to the of GM food but the EU Commission have an extremely close working relationship with lobby groups, such as EuropaBio, the industry front group.[xviii] Their latest push is to use of biofuels as a way of supposedly dealing with the climate crisis. The EU has recently adopted a target that 10 percent of the fuel for road transport will come from biofuels by 2020. The idea came from the Biofuels Research Advisory Council, an expert group that was drawn predominantly from the oil, car and biotech industries..

This, then, is the type of super-state we are being asked to endorse in the Lisbon Treaty.  The Irish referendum gives us a rare opportunity to kick back at the corporate aristocrats who dominate our world. Accustomed are they are to getting their way, a resounding NO will come as a cruel blow. All the more reason, then, to administer it.