• National politicians and national media still have a major communication problem concerning the EU. European politicians too, of course, but they cannot solve the problem. Only those who already have the voters’ ear can do that.
• The irony of constitutional safeguards: Current legal constraints on the powers of governments prohibit the creation of legal structures that would offer better legal constraints on the informal powers that governments already have created for themselves.
• The democratic paradox: The smallest of Member States can veto a Treaty change supported by all other Member States. Isn’t this the dictatorship of the minority?
• If the issue was costs to tax payers or delivering concrete results, Irish voters would have voted ‘Yes’, massively.
• Nor can it be that the EU undermines symbols of national identity, like (in Ireland’s case) non-alignment, prohibited abortion, and low corporate taxes, as Ireland has opt-outs on the first two and tax decisions require unanimity in the Council.
• Perception, then, is everything.
• Today is Friday the 13th.

Update: First reactions by AFOE, Jon Worth, Nosemonkey.

Although it was a good thing that he did this in the end (and initially no one, except for the Arab regimes that instigated the rows, could have foreseen that it would become such a big thing), I was rather critical at the time because Fogh Rasmussen did not take the opportunity to explain what free speech was really about:

What Fogh should have done instead of saying that free speech is important, was explain why it is important. Instead of appearing as a weak leader not worthy of much respect, by saying that as a Danish PM he is used to being criticised and that he accepts that, he would have come across as a good leader by explaining that the constant criticism actually helps him to do a better job. He could have said that because people in Denmark have been allowed to say what they think about their leaders for a long time, and can even get rid of them if the leaders don’t listen, Denmark is such a wealthy country with so little inequality and suffering. The hint would not have been missed on a region still predominantly ruled by dictators.

Today, the Netherlands is holding its breath for a similar row to erupt, this time about a Quran-critical film that has been made by a Dutch MP and which should come out before the end of this month. Over at A Fistful of Euros, Guy described how the issue is being hyped in Dutch media before the film is even published. Hype or not however, the Danish case shows how easy it is to turn the positive reputation of a country into one of evil anti-muslim crusaders (that is, if you are an Arab regime with a motive and complete control over what appears in your own media). So it is only right that, in an attempt to avoid the Danish mistakes, the Dutch government has been working for months through its embassies in the muslim world to at least try to get its own message across to government and media in the predominant muslim parts of the world.

As part of the pre-emptive strike, Radio Netherlands Worldwide, the world service of the Dutch public radio, has now produced its own documentary (and a website ‘about Fitna, the movie’) in which it tries to explain the Dutch position on the MP’s film and its relation to free speech:

Has it succeeded better than Anders Fogh Rasmussen in the Al Arabiya interview? Well, yes, a little. What is good in the RNW film, is that it underlines that even the Dutch government is bound to obey the law, just like any ordinary citizen. It is not government, but the majority of the population through its representatives which makes the law. This is an important point to make. What the film also seems to be doing better than the Danish PM, is to make clear the importance of free speech for an open public debate. Even though a large majority of the population does not agree with the MP’s film, they still accept it is published because they realise that if they would ban opinions like these, next time it is one of their own opinions that is banned from being published. The giving and taking of free speech becomes a little clearer, and even more so because of most of the people explaining this in the documentary are Dutch muslims.

If the RNW film turns out to be convincing enough for a critical audience remains to be seen. What I am still missing, for instance, is a clear(-er) explanation of the connection between free speech, the state of law and democracy on the one hand, and having a government that is not corrupt, does not torture its citizens and governs effectively on the other. But it is an attempt, and anyway, if people turn to the streets over this film in Saudi Arabia, Syria or Egypt, we know that this is because their governments wanted them to, not because they have watched some film on the internet.

** update 27 March 2008: ** The film was published today. What an anticlimax! I mean, it is still the modern equivalent of Der ewige Jude, but not a lot of Dutch flags are going to be burnt over this. And it is badly made at that…

** update 28 March 2008: ** More on A Fistful of Euros.

The PQ had a majority of the seats in the Québec parliament a number of times in the 80s and 90s of last century. Referendums on independence have been organised in 1980 and 1995 but failed to get majorities in favour (60% and 51% voted non, respectively). The vote is a victory for new party leader Pauline Marois who favours a more centrist course. ]]> http://www.european-democracy.org/archives/2008/03/17/link-of-the-day-parti-quebecois-abandons-separatism/feed/ 0 http://www.european-democracy.org/archives/2008/03/16/norway-gets-gay-marriage-ja-vi-elsker-dette-landet/ http://www.european-democracy.org/archives/2008/03/16/norway-gets-gay-marriage-ja-vi-elsker-dette-landet/#comments Sat, 15 Mar 2008 23:31:40 +0000 eulogist http://www.european-democracy.org/archives/2008/03/16/norway-gets-gay-marriage-ja-vi-elsker-dette-landet/ Great news from Norway that seems to have escaped the major news media, including those from Norway itself: yesterday its government introduced a proposal to abolish discrimination against gays in the country’s marriage law. According to the press release, the new paragraph 1 of the law would read: “Two people of the same or opposite sex can get married”. After the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Spain, and South-Africa, this will take the number of countries in the world that allow homosexuals to get married to six.

People who want to get married in Norway will not be required to live in Norway or to have Norwegian citizenship. Such a requirement does not exist in the current law either.

The church law (Norway has a state church) is changed as well so the Norwegian Church gets the right to perform gay marriages without being obliged to do so.

The existing partnership law for gay couples is withdrawn, although existing partnerships will remain valid for those who want to.

Gay couples will also get the right to adoption under the same conditions as straight couples. Lesbian couples will get parenthood automatically over children born from one of them through IVF from a donor, just like this is the case for straight couples. The non-biological mother will then be called “medmor” (co-mother) under the law. If the father is not a donor, the other partner cannot become medmor but only adopt the child as a stepparent. The law does not foresee in parenthood for male couples.

**update** The family and culture committee of Stortinget, the Norwegian parliament, organises a hearing about the new proposal on 21 April 2008. See here for more information on the state of play in Stortinget. The text of the proposal itself can be found here (all in Norwegian).

The only positive note directly after the elections was that defeated candidate Tusk’s party Civic Platform (PO) would become the voice of relative reason in the government coalition. By now we know that PO has dropped out of the talks, as a result of which the new government will depend on several smaller even-further-right parties for its support. Among these maverick Andrzej Lepper, who has become deputy Speaker of the Sejm. This is not going well…

So how bad is it? First the bigotry. In his former job as Mayor of Warsaw, Kaczy?ski banned Polish gay and lesbian organisations from holding an Equality March, claiming that it would “promote the homosexual lifestyle” . Shortly after his appointment as the new Prime Minister of Poland, Marcinkiewicz told Newsweek homosexuality was contagious and had to be kept at bay by state intervention: “If a person tries to contaminate others with his homosexuality, the state should intervene against such an attack on liberty”. Note the orwellian ‘oppression is liberty’ claim, and how uncannily it resembles Mr Buttiglione’s (remember him?).

Accordingly, the moral corruption of impressionable young minds has to be prevented by subjecting them to sufficient social discipline teaching early enough in life. A document called Law and Justice – Our Way on the PiS party website therefore rejects the liberal education programmes for which Polish schools are of course well known:

In addition a uniform instructional concept should be adopted, rejecting the compromised liberal pedagogic and instead teaching the students the basis of social discipline and responsibility and civic education.

There was more homosexual contamination during the presidential campaign, as the excellent beatroot blogger tells us:

The Kaczynsiki camp has also tried to play (somewhat ludicrously) to the far-right and reactionary gallery by raising the spectre of a ‘homosexual lobby’ in the EU, which is ‘infecting’ Polish society. With his appeals for a Poland ‘cleansed’ of these elements, and with a new civil service free of corrupt ex-communists, Kaczynski has occupied the moral high ground.

As with many paranoids, there is a grain of truth in this EU lobby allegation, in the sense that the election outcome has already prompted the European Commission’s spokesman to warn Poland to abide by article 6 of the Treaty of Nice. This Treaty article says that all member states must protect minority rights and not impose the death penalty, of which Mr Kaczy?ski is a proponent.

Which brings us to provincialism. Poland’s new president, one of whose main roles is to represent the country abroad, is not very good at foreign languages and has few foreign contacts. This is a problem that can be overcome. Worse however, from a European point of view, is that his European and economic policy views combine a tendency to populist protectionism with the attitude that Poland is in the EU in order to get as much out of it as it can.

In a 2002 interview on the PiS website, Kaczy?ski argues that Poland should levy import duties in order to pay for “the handicapped, science and culture” and “maternity” while reducing its budget deficit. Warsaw Station reports that during the election campaign, the Kaczy?ski camp promised new initiatives worth up to 12 000 – 14 000 million z?oty (3060 – 3570 million euro) to voters – all of it to be paid from unspecified administration cuts. The irony is, of course, that the only realistic hope for more government spending is not the Polish government, but the EU’s farming and regional development funds.

The reason why his “fear and greed” tactics helped Kaczy?ski to win the elections becomes clear when you look at the map with the election results. What we see is an electoral divide just like the ones we saw in the last American elections and in the French referendum. Poland’s poor and rural East voted predominantly for the conservative and protectionist PiS candidate Kaczy?ski (blue) that promised financial support, whereas Warsaw and the more prosperous and optimistic West voted for the economically very (but not otherwise) liberal PO candidate Donald Tusk (orange). Note also the graph near the bottom of the page showing the relationship between voting behaviour and agglomeration size, and which is further proof of a very clear difference between rural and urban areas. Interesting too is that Poles living in North America and Italy (papal influence?) voted overwhelmingly for Kaczy?ski, whereas Poles in nearly all other countries of the world voted for Tusk.

What this shows is that the very real needs of an impoverished and insecure part of the population have been played upon by stirring up existing prejudices, scapegoating minorities and the evil abroad, and making false and unsustainable promises that, even if kept, neither make voters richer nor make them feel more secure. Yes, I know this is politics, but the degree in which it happened here is really sickening. It also matters, because the use of bigotry as a political means fits into a pattern we find elsewhere in the region as well.

In an article he wrote for Radio Poland, the Beatroot describes what happened during the Equality March in Warsaw, which took place nonetheless in a somewhat modified form despite the Mayor’s fatwa. Judging by his description, there are many similarities with the Gay Pride in Tallinn this year, and with the Gay Pride that took place in Riga for the first time this year. In Tallinn, the skinheads had turned up only in small groups thanks to the pouring rain, and they had no chance to assemble thanks to the dispersed pattern of Tallinn’s mediaeval streets and the adequate way in which the Estonian police escorted the event. As a result, and despite a bomb alert that turned out to be false, everything went well in Tallinn. In Riga a few weeks earlier however, it had rained stones and eggs just like in Warsaw.

In Latvia as well as in Estonia, the counter-demonstrations had been provoked, or at least prompted, by church and political leaders, including Prime Minister Kalvitis of Latvia and an unholy alliance of conservative nationalists and Soviet-nostalgic communists (no doubt bien étonnés de se trouver ensemble). Even the ambassador of Russia meddled in, underlining – I think correctly – that “anti-human” marches like these would be impossible in Putinist Russia. The climate of hysteria these people created during the weeks preceding the Prides led to severe criticism from Amnesty International and other human rights groups.

The involvement of Russia in the Baltics is another sign of power-political motives underlying the homophobic smear campaigns. The Baltic states have large Russian minorities (from 8% in Lithuania up to 26% in Estonia and 40% in Latvia) that immigrated there during the soviet era. Since independence, successive governments in Latvia and Estonia have tried to underline the breach with the soviet past by emphasising their respective states’ national identity. This happened amongst others by first refusing citizenship to resident Russians at all, then (after EU pressure) only to those who did not pass an (Estonian/Latvian) language exam. Today, large shares of the Russian minorities in the Baltics still have no citizenship, and although many of them are doing well in socio-economic terms, quite a lot of others are not. Russia, which still has not come to terms with the loss of its empire in the west and has several border disputes running with its Baltic neighbours, uses every opportunity it gets to poke social unrest, just as conservative nationalists use it to play their own supporters’ discomfort with a fast changing society.

Bad as it is in itself, all this scapegoating by superior order gives a particularly bad taste in the mouth in view of the past and the way it is (not) dealt with. In some countries in Eastern Europe, gay groups are still not allowed to participate in commemorations of the holocaust, of which they are themselves victims. Tellingly, Lech Kaczy?ski defended his ban of the Equality March in Warsaw also by saying that is was “a joke” to hold the march on the same day as the unveiling of a monument to General Stefan Rowecki, a leader of Poland’s anti-Nazi underground army during World War II.

Another example is the (otherwise quite impressive) Genocide Museum in Vilnius, which is dedicated to the periods of Nazi and Soviet occupation and even has a temporary exhibition on what happened to the Armenians in the 1915-1917 era. When I visited it last summer I could not help noticing that its text-rich displays mentioned even the Jewish (let alone other) Lithuanian victims of the Nazis in only one little sentence. It seems tempting to attribute this silence to shame over the enthusiasm with which locals had helped to exterminate 90% of their Jewish countrymen, surprising even the Nazis. The museum also suggests that, in 46 years of Soviet occupation, the only Lithuanians occupying leading positions in the Communist Party had been a few deluded souls from deprived backgrounds, so it seems that my interpretation is not too far-fetched. Even today, anti-semitic and bigoted rants have become the trademark of major Lithuanian newspaper Respublika’s editoral comments, although the good thing is that it was fined by a court for doing so.

I found the Occupation Museum in Riga to be more nuanced than the Genocide Museum in Vilnius, because it not only recognised that ordinary Latvians had worked with the Nazis and the Soviets, but also tried to explain why they did so – at least as far as WWII was concerned. Most nuanced of all three Baltic museums dedicated to the 1918-1991 period – in the sense that it also clearly mentioned the fate of the Jewish population during WWII – was the Museum of Occupations of Estonia in Tallinn, whereas pre-WWII Estonia had the smallest pre-war Jewish population of all countries in the region and anti-semitism there was very low. None of the museums provided some perspective for the independent republics of the interbellum, for instance by comparing their (and Poland’s Second Republic’s) increasingly authoritarian character with contemporary trends going on elsewhere in Europe (most of all of course Germany).

If this is in any way indicative of the way national history is being written in the Baltics (and, by extension, Poland) – which seems to be the case given the (justifiably) prominent place of these museums on the list of national attractions – then providing a complete and balanced picture of the past seems to have been sacrificed to the higher goal of nation-building, by creating a myth of collective heroism and resistance to evil. I do understand why and how this happens – after all, it has been only 15 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and how long has it taken Western Europeans to come to terms with only 5 years of Nazi occupation? But the problem is that a large part of the population does not fit the idealised image of the patriotic hero. In those fifty or more years, almost no one will have escaped the need to compromise. Many, perhaps even most, people will have someone in the family who made a carreer, or collaborated enthusiastically with either Nazis or Communists, or even participated in criminal acts of varying degrees of immorality up to the worst imaginable.

What I am saying is that the rants of people like Kaczy?ski, Marcinkiewicz, Lepper, and others against communists and gays are nothing new. They form a direct line with the authoritarian independent pre-war republics and with the communist regimes. The Soviets hated “deviance” of any kind, be it Jewish, gay, handicapped or dissident, because their mere existence spoiled the official myth of (socialist) perfection. Pre-war nationalists and their present ideological heirs hate it for the very same reason.

In a famous essay called The power of the powerless, Václav Havel described well how totalitarian values persist once they have established themselves in society:

Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people’s own failure as individuals.

Havel was refering here to the communist regimes, which he calls “post-totalitarian” because they force people to stay in line not by using force like classic dictatorships, but by habit and social coercion. It works because its ideology and rituals provide certainty in times of uncertainty:

In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish.

Reading this today, it is as if he is describing the voters in Poland’s East and explaining why the conservative appeal to reactionary values seemed so attractive to them. An insecure society is very good at suppressing and persecuting what is different from the ordinary (René Girard might say: a society that is in a mimetic crisis will try to find a scapegoat in order to survive). But it is sad that it had to go like this, as given the influence Havel’s essay has had on the Solidarno?? movement, you would expect Poland’s current political and religious leaders had internalised its message a little more than they give evidence of.

Now, all of this is not to say that appearances cannot be deceptive. In fact, sources point out that a lot is changing for the good both in the Baltics and in Poland, and that the rhetoric of political and religious leaders has to be contrasted with the pragmatism (albeit often on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” basis) of many ordinary people, especially in the larger cities. What matters is, however, that the pragmatists have not been elected in government. And although the definition of deviance may have been narrowed significantly since the fall of communism, bureaucrats, lawmakers, employers and anyone else in a position of (however little) power still have the means to suppress, punish and discourage what is defined as deviance today.

If the choice is between finding a scapegoat and adapting to change, the moral choice is of course for the latter. Luckily, that is in fact what Poland and the Baltics, and most other states in Eastern Europe are in fact doing – even more effectively, admirably and profoundly so than the countries in Western, “old” Europe. Donald Rumsfeld was right pointing that out. The “creative economy” and the novel ideas that symbolise new Europe and its hope for the future are growing explosively. But they do so not in Poland’s rural and reactionary East where people voted for Kaczy?ski, but in its cities and West where they voted Tusk.

It may be so that a society does not strictly need to treat its minorities well in order to have economic growth. But treating your minorities badly is a sign of a state of mind that is not willing to embrace change and new ideas. As such, the way a society treats its minorities is a litmus test for how fit it is for the future.

Many people in the old EU, myself not excepted until recently, tend to look at the Baltic republics as one big Finland in the making: hi-tech and efficient in their economy, transparent and democratic in their politics. This picture is largely correct. Yet, on closer inspection, traces of the past still remain. There are of course the obvious ones which have to do with incomes and the economic situation: According to Eurostat figures, all three of the Baltic countries’ inhabitants saw their purchasing power rank bottom of the EU25 list in 2002, with predictions for 2006 showing not much of a change in this respect.

But figures also show solid GDP growth rates in the order of 5% or more over the entire region – and even if Latvia remains bottom of the GDP list over that entire period, it will have seen its GDP per head (in purchasing power standard, PPS) rise from 39% to 47.8% of the EU average. This is quite something. And I have to say that the buzz was palpable in all the cities we visited, perhaps most of all in Riga. There was constantly this exciting feeling you get almost nowhere in the old EU: the feeling of an abundancy of opportunities everywhere around you, and plenty of evidence of people grabbing them, setting up businesses and realising new ideas. So yes, the Baltic economies are burdened with the heritage of their communist past, but they are dealing with it pretty well and developments are going fast in the right direction.

The economic heritage, however, is a relatively superficial thing. Value patterns are much more difficult to change. This is, to an extent, a good thing, as it means that the totalitarian regimes of Nazis and Soviets that occupied the Baltic region for most of the past century (the latter did so twice) have not been able to impose their value systems (or lack thereof) as effectively as they wanted. On the other hand, this also means less palatable value patterns (whether they developed before the occupation, during the occupation, or as a reaction to occupation) may also survive longer than one might wish for.

I came across a few examples where values patterns, at the very least, evoke questions, which I intend to deal with in three future posts:

• Dealing with the past – a case study on occupation museums
• Gay prides – soviet values and post-soviet diversity
• The nationality question – dealing with the Russian minority

I should add immediately that they are by no means typical for the Baltic region alone: similar issues are at stake in other countries of the former Eastern Bloc, and it is not difficult to link most of them, one way or another, to issues currently discussed in countries of the old EU which also have to do with questions of identity, fear and responsibility.

So in a way, you could always consider this short series on the Baltics as a case study in the broader perspective of Central and Eastern European values in particular, or European values in general.

Is this another example of “activist law-making”, as argued by opponents of the change? Well, perhaps, and that certainly increases the risk of losing popular support: Already, the conservative opposition has announced it will seek a revote of the law if it wins the next elections. But even if the law is activist and politically risky, that does not make it morally wrong to pursue its adoption. In fact, the Canadian government has done admirably what governments in a democracy are supposed to do: to show leadership and vision, also in the face of public opposition.

What keeps surprising me in debates like these, is not so much the opposition itself, but the lack of philosophical coherence behind that opposition. If same-sex marriage was opposed solely on the grounds of religion or tradition, I could easily accept (though not agree with) that argument. But more often than not, opposition comes from people calling themselves Liberals or Conservatives: People who, supposedly at least, put individual liberty first and who have a healthy distrust of state intervention in people’s personal lives.

How do they combine such principles with homophobic state intrusion?

** update ** The Spanish parliament has delivered, increasing the number of Truly Civilised Countries (TM) to four in the world. Next in line: Cambodia?

As motivating ideas behind European integration, “uniting again what had been separated” and “all men will be brothers” should be equally appealing in 2005 as they were in 1945 and in 1989. What the EU does seem to lack these days, as opposed to its early years, is leaders whose “magic” is able to unite the masses behind those ideas.

After the resounding Dutch ‘no’ to the EU Constitution and last weekend’s EU summit, I still believe this is the case. Here is why:

Polls conducted shortly after the referendum reveal that both French and Dutch voters support the general idea of EU integration. Whatever the right-wing (nation-state oriented) EU-sceptics say, no less than 72% of French voters are in favour of continued integration. Similarly, 84% of Dutch voters support the EU in some form or another, whereas only 16% could be considered EU-sceptics. Other, more extensive polls published only recently (France, Netherlands) confirm these figures. In short, the French and Dutch votes were directed against this EU, not against the EU. This is an important conclusion to begin with.

With that in mind, finding strong arguments against the contents of the Constitution becomes rather difficult. On balance, it brings progress rather than anything else relating to the objections brought up in the campaign, while most other arguments for a ‘no’ (on Turkey, the budget, net contributions) had nothing to do with it or were grossly exaggerated. If the EU is undemocratic and not transparent, the Constitution makes it more democratic and more transparent. If the EU is too complicated, the Constitution makes it a lot simpler. If the EU’s policies are too liberal or not liberal enough, the Constitution leaves plenty of room for EU politicians to take a, democratically sanctioned, different course. And if the Constitution is long, this is because detailed prescriptions are necessary in order to curtail Brussels’ power sufficiently and effectively.

Of course, one could still argue that the Constitution’s improvements do not go far enough. But the picture for most voters after the campaigns is the complete opposite: that, by adopting the Constitution, the EU would become less democratic, more (or less) liberal, more complicated and more centrist or distant. This probably explains the frustration on the yes side, which often had the impression no one was even listening to its arguments. And they were right, as in this dialogue des sourds the other side was not talking about the Constitution at all, but about a more fundamental problem.

The 2002 Fortuyn crisis in the Netherlands clearly indicated that something was wrong there with the relationship between the electorate and the political classes. And despite the fact that many Dutch politicians of the pre-Fortuyn era have been replaced by others, the crisis is still there. Public confidence in the country’s leadership is even lower than it was at the time of the Fortuyn murder. More disturbingly, confidence in the mainstream opposition parties is hardly any better. They would probably win the elections if there were any right now, but only by lack of an alternative, which, fortunately, the populist right is not providing either. Pim Fortuyn’s own party of cronies and loonies is back from 22 seats just after his death to between 0 and 1 in the current polls, and the life time cycles of various alternatives that spring up every now and again (including maverick Wilders) seem to get shorter and shorter.

But it is no different in France, where a common complaint is that the country has been ruled by the same old men and their cronies for ages. Nor is it different in the UK, where Tony Blair was re-elected thanks to the electoral system and the weak opposition, not to his popularity among voters. Or Belgium, where the rise of the extreme-right Vlaams Belang seems unstoppable. Austria (FPÖ), Italy (Alleanze Nazionale, Lega di Nord), Denmark (Dansk Folkeparti) and the anti-globalist movement are other cases in mind. In my view, the votes in France and the Netherlands against the EU Constitution as well as the now rising ‘no’ support in Luxembourg, Denmark, Poland and the Czech Republic fit into the same pattern.

Research shows that, even during the Fortuyn crisis, Dutch public confidence in political parties was still one of the highest in Europe. In most other countries, notably Germany, the UK, Italy and France, it is considerably lower. Therefore I see no reason to assume that public unease is limited to only a few countries. Still, it is remarkable how difficult it is for ruling parties to admit that something is the matter, even in the middle of a crisis, with polls racing down and defeat staring them in the face: “Look at this country, it is doing fine! People are more prosperous than they have ever been, they have no reason to complain! The populists are lying, fearmongering and scapegoating, they have nothing to offer!” Every time this happened, whether the issue was domestic policy or the EU, the ruling parties were absolutely right. But still they lost the voting.

The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard seems to be closer to the truth than either the ruling parties or their populist opponents, in an article entitled “L’Europe divine” published on 17 May in Libération. He writes:

Le jeu est fermé d’avance, et tout ce qu’on sollicite, c’est le consensus. Oui au oui : derrière cette formule devenue banale se cache une terrible mystification. Le oui lui-même n’est plus exactement un oui à l’Europe, ni même à Chirac ou à l’ordre libéral. Il est devenu un oui au oui, à l’ordre consensuel, un oui qui n’est plus une réponse, mais le contenu même de la question.

and:

Car ce non en profondeur n’est pas du tout l’effet d’un «travail du négatif» ou d’une pensée critique. C’est une réponse en forme de défi pur et simple à un principe hégémonique venu d’en haut, et pour lequel la volonté des peuples n’est qu’un paramètre indifférent, voire un obstacle à franchir.

As I understand him, the problem for voters is not so much with the issue at stake or with anything else that is factually or reasonably connected to it, but, on a meta-level with not being in control of events. There is a link here with Baudrillard’s own work on hyperreality and other critiques of the influence of mass media on public opinion. The idea here is that the picture people have of the society they live in is shaped by the mass media which, as a result of market pressures, have to come up with news that sells: sensational crimes, corruption scandals, political crises. Tabloids have no incentive to add nuance to this picture, for instance by pointing out that crime statistics stay the same or improve, or how favourably living standards in Western Europe compare to those in countries to the east or the south. According to Belgian sociologist Mark Elchardus this also influences the way our democratic systems function: Even when the media themselves are diverse, with newspapers ranging from the Sun to the Financial Times, media consumption for most people is not. The result a social divide which is not, as in the past, between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ but between ‘knows’ and ‘know nots’: between a small group that is well-educated, well-informed and confident about the future on the one hand, and a large, scared and cynical, group whose idea of political reality is shaped by a constant flow of horrifying crimes and political scandals on the other. This, combined with the individualisation and de-ideologisation of society, leads to a democracy that is more person and less idea oriented, and in which politicians only survive by running from one incident to the next media hype, instead of developing long-term visions for the future (which, in turn, only reinforces the idea that the tabloids are right). We live, as Elchardus puts it, in a “drama democracy”.

It is probable that the same social divide pictured here for public views on crime, politics in general and immigration, to a large extent applies to public views of the EU as well. In this case, we not only have an extremely low basic level of information among the public and the press, but also an incentive for national politicians to use “Brussels” as a scapegoat for their own and nobody’s failures. These two factors combined for many years to create the ideal starting point for an anti-Constitution campaign with all the characteristics of Elchardus’ “drama democracy”. The result is easier to see in France than in the Netherlands, but visible in both: In France, the groups voting ‘yes’ were the higher executives, the higher educated and the higher incomes. In the Netherlands, these groups voted against the Constitution, but with smaller margins than average.

But however much I think this analysis is correct, I do not agree with solutions (proposed by Elchardus, for instance) that try to turn the clock back, by moving decision-making away from the whimsical electorate and back to the organisations that “really” represent them. Because doing so would imply that, somehow, the message sent by voters was “wrong” and had better be ignored. Although I certainly believe that voters in France and the Netherlands were wrong as far as the Constitution text is concerned, in the sense that voting ‘no’ moved them further away from the constitutional arrangement they probably want, the idea to push through a project without winning the confidence and support of citizens first, not only seems disrespectful and arrogant but rather counter-productive as well.

People do indeed resent choosing between ‘yes’ and ‘yes’. However, this resentment does not stem from “keeping to be told” that there is no other option, as the populists phrase it, but from feeling out of control, realising that there is in fact no other option yet not feeling very comfortable about its implications. And in our modern societies with their emphasis on the value of individual autonomy, there is little that makes people feel less human than the idea of not being in control of their own destiny. We saw this in the massive anti-globalisation protests a few years ago, in the general anti-political cynicism found in many countries and its culmination in anti-establishment populism, and in the wave of anti-EU-ism that now seems to be going through Europe. In each of these cases, protests were directed against the opaque, seemingly limitless powers (of the corporations, the political elite, and “Brussels”, respectively) that supposedly rule our lives. In short, people feel they have lost control, and they want it back, badly.

But what does control mean? First of all, individual choice conceived as the result of rational considerations by a detached individual, in the confinement of his own mind, is of course an illusion. Individual choices occur in a social context. They tend to be much less unique and individual than modern dogma makes us want to believe, and are more likely to be the result of complicated historical, sociological and psychological processes. This should affect the way we think about democracy as well. Rather than seeing it as the arithmetic summation of as many individual choices as there are voters, democratic decision-making too is a largely collective process in which we all influence each other. The key question here, which determines if we feel in control on an individual level, is to what degree we are prepared to accept the outcomes of that process, especially when we are on the “losing end” of a vote.

My favourite philosopher, the Canadian Charles Taylor, seeks the answer in collective identity (emphasis mine):

To see why, consider such a regime from an individual’s standpoint. Say that I am outvoted on some important issue. I must abide by an outcome I oppose. My will is thwarted, so why should I consider myself free? Why does it matter that it is the majority of my fellow citizens, rather than the decisions of a monarch, that is overriding my will?

[...] This question is not merely theoretical. It is rarely put on behalf of individuals, but it regularly arises for sub-groups, such as national minorities, who see themselves as oppressed by majorities. Perhaps no answer can satisfy them. Whatever one says or does, they may be unable to see themselves as part of a larger sovereign people. They therefore see its rule over them as illegitimate, which is precisely the point: the logic of popular sovereignty requires an idea of collective agency based on a sense of individual belonging that is much stronger than in our lecture audience.

[...] The crucial point is that regardless of who is right philosophically, it is only insofar as people accept some such appeal that the legitimacy principle underlying popular sovereignty can work to secure their consent. If identification with the community is rejected, the government will be illegitimate in the eyes of the rejecters. In short, there can be no democracy without a shared identity as participants in a common agency.

In the same article on Sovereignty in Europe and Iraq, he concludes:

In some ways, [compared to Iraq] much less is at stake in building a new democratic community out of the already free and prosperous European countries. But whether the “democratic deficit” on the European level be remedied also depends on whether a shared European identity can be forged out of the 25 nations that will soon make up the European Union.

I agree with this in principle, although the next question to solve then is what constitutes a shared identity. Does it have to be explicit? Europeans travelling to other continents often have the experience that they feel more “European” there than at home. Not only because they suddenly realise how much, in terms of culture and values, they have in common with fellow Europeans compared to the local people they meet, but also because local people in their contacts affirm them in that European identity. At home in Europe, though, where it matters for our discussion of European democracy, that European identity feeling is very weak and seldomly made explicit.

The question is if it has to be: do you feel European because you keep being told you are – like American schoolkids have to salute the flag and sing the national anthem every day? Or is it a more implicit process, is “European identity” the right word for the feeling of “belonging” that emerges as you gradually become aware that you are part of a European, rather than a purely national context? It may not come as a surprise that my preference is for the latter interpretation.

The problem with this process in Europe right now, is that the European context of our lives is already there (and I think it would be even if the EU had not existed), but our awareness of it has only just set in. And because it is all so new, we do not trust the process yet: we do not know how it works, which arguments are taken into account before decisions are taken, or what to expect next. This becomes markedly clear in a poll conducted after the ‘no’ vote in the Netherlands, which showed that with 32% the most common reason for people to vote ‘no’ was not loss of sovereignty, the economy or the accession of Turkey, but simply that they felt uninformed. As far as the Netherlands were concerned, this discovery during the referendum campaign must have come as a shock to many people: according to Eurobarometer 58 of 2003, Dutch people had one of the highest opinions of their own knowledge of the EU, yet they scored lowest among the old EU-15 in a simple knowledge test.

Add to this a general feeling of distrust towards anything political that our societies seem to be going through, and you find that people feel they neither know what is going on, nor trust those who do know and who are taking the decisions for them. Those are, in fact, good reasons for a ‘no’ vote.

Overseeing all this, in order to restore confidence in European cooperation (whatever future form that takes), it looks like we have to make sure that people:

• feel they know what is going on,
• trust those involved in the actual decision-making, and
• have confidence in the general direction things are taking

To begin with the latter: it is striking that a confidence crisis never arose when the economy was doing well, during most of the nineteen nineties. So for a large part of the population, fear of the future must be part of the story. These days, with terrorism, the lagging economy, aging populations and its effects on health costs and pensions every day in the newspaper, there is much to be fearful about. Recent EU developments blend in perfectly in order to confirm that impression:

• the introduction of Euro coins coincided with record inflation, especially in the Netherlands as a result of a pro-cyclical tax policy (note that the Euro had been around for several years already; it was the introduction of tangible coins that mattered)
• Enlargement with ten relatively poor countries in Central and Eastern Europe is easily perceived as a threat to the labour markets and economies of the old Member States (the famous Polish plumber), even though most serious economic analyses point to the opposite
• talk of Turkish EU accession may have fed into popular fears of Enlargement in general and of muslims in particular (although, to be fair, this element was far less pervasive than expected in both France and the Netherlands)

Much of this is, perhaps, a matter of perception, but most of all of how you put it into words. But words are dangerous things, especially in politics: Once someone has captured something (a problem, a feeling) into words, and those words fail to do justice to the complexity or full extent of the feeling or problem, the danger is that the words and what they represent, rather than the phenomenon they are trying to describe, become the focus of public debate. This is what populists do, whether advertedly or (more often, I suspect) inadvertedly: capturing justified feelings into the wrong words, thereby diverting the debate from the real problem, and ending up with the wrong solution – sometimes with destructive results.

Clearly, societies with low knowledge levels of the issue at hand are more likely to fall victim to (opinion) leaders believing in the narrowness of their analyses. This is why it is so important in the first place that the media finally start to provide informed coverage of EU decision-making. Not more pro-EU coverage, no, just informed criticism written by journalists whose work ethics are about wanting to inform people, to challenge rather than to confirm them in their beliefs. That would be a nice change of the present situation.

But the worst problem of all, in my opinion, is that Europe’s leaders are no better than their populist challengers and, for years, just went along with parroting the tabloid press. They followed, instead of led. They could have presented vision, truth, and hope for the future. They could have presented Enlargement as an oppurtunity, rather than a threat. They could have conceded that inflation was so high because of tax breaks pumped into an overheated economy, instead of blaming the Euro. They could have presented Turkey as a successful muslim democracy, the regional example Iraq failed to become. They could have taken the blame for failing to reform France’s and Germany’s sluggish economies, rather than putting it on globalisation. They could have used Europe’s weak performance during the wars in former Yugoslavia and in the run-up to the Iraq war as arguments for more, rather than less, integration of foreign policy. And they could have admitted that their own backroom deals are the cause of lopsided distributions of subsidies and of Czechs paying for Irish incomes, and use that as an argument against national vetoes and for transparency, instead of the reverse.

If voters in Europe are to regain trust in its decision-making, they need new and better leaders. Leaders with the intellectual capacity to understand their own decisions and to develop visions that look further than the next elections. Leaders who also have the communication skills to convince people of their views and to inspire confidence in their decisions. Leaders who are not afraid of democracy, but who know that voters can be reasonable and are prepared to bring sacrifices if necessary, and that if they are not, it is because they, the leaders, have failed to convince.

When the French and Dutch people voted ‘no’ to the European Constitution, this was most of all a vote of no-confidence in, not only their own national leaders, but the entire European leadership including that of other countries. Voters did not believe that Schröder, Chirac, Blair, Balkenende and the others, as a collective, would be able to put their squabbles aside and get Europe and its economy on track again. The last European summit only proved them right. Again.

First of all, I think lobbying is in essence a good thing and in fact essential for the quality of public decision-making. We expect our representatives in various parliaments and in our governments (including the European Commission) to consult widely with civil society before they take any decisions. How else could they do that than by talking to its representatives?

For Members of Parliament, especially if they belong to small political groups who do not have the (wo-)manpower to read (let alone follow in detail) every proposal going through Parliament, lobbyists are an invaluable source of information. Intense lobbying activity on a specific proposal is always a good warning signal that something is the matter with it. Information provided by lobbyists from industry and NGOs is also of great help identifying the contentious elements in a proposal and learning the positions of various sections of civil society.

As June O’Keefe of SEAP points out: reputation is everything in the Brussels village. If you spread false or misleading information once, you are no longer listened to next time. Good M(E)Ps know who is relevant to listen to – this is what the “building good relationships” part is mostly about. Good lobbyists know that too, so they make sure their information is useful and their arguments reasonable. Good lobbyists also know they must combine their efforts if they want their arguments to carry more weight, by speaking per sector or European umbrella organisation instead of bombarding policy-makers with different or even contradicting arguments for each company, interest group or national NGO.

Of course it is then up to the M(E)Ps to decide which and how many different lobbyists they listen to, what they do with that information and how they justify this to the outside world. Parliaments are transparent institutions: Journalists monitor every move politicians make, so, at least in principle, the opportunities to question the decisions made are plenty. In other words: the correction mechanism is there, and if an M(E)P gets away with pork-barreling or even corruption, it is because the correction mechanism (the press, the voters) failed to do its job.

Why then the common perception that there are so many lobbyists in the European Parliament? My answer would be: because there are so few journalists in the European Parliament. When I compare the European Parliament to national parliaments, my impression is not that there is more lobbying going on in the EP. What is striking in Brussels, is the lack of media frenzy there compared to national parliaments.

The explanation I think is that individual actors acting rationally here leads to a sub-optimal overall result: Lobbyists optimise results by concentrating on the politics that has actual effects in the real world (if they don’t, they simply don’t get paid). Newspapers and other media, if they want to keep selling, optimise by concentrating on the politics people think has actual results, even if that means reporting non-events happening at the national level while neglecting important things happening at the EU level. The adage “what happens does not matter, what matters is what people think that happens” applies. And the vicious circle remains closed by the facts that most people get their idea of what matters from what they read in the press, and that politicians who want to be re-elected – like newspapers that want to be sold – are forced to concentrate on what people think that matters. Hence, given the importance of EU decision-making, the rather shocking imbalance between the number of political correspondents in national capitals vs. those in Brussels, whereas lobbyists are much more evenly distributed. Hence, also, the equally shocking lack of knowledge among journalists, and with the general public, of how the EU works and which decisions are taken there.

So if we cannot, and maybe should not, do very much against the influence of lobbyists in the EP, is this different for the contacts between lobbyists and civil servants? Well, yes and no. As I said, civil servants preparing a piece of legislation must be in touch with civil society if they want to have any idea of the effect it is going to have on society. Like M(E)Ps they will have to keep the “general interest” (whatever that is) in mind when assessing that information. But unlike M(E)Ps, it is much more difficult to monitor what civil servants do, as in most countries their preparatory work happens behind closed doors. So it is fair that there are rules to prevent people from misusing their position. Of course, bribing should be illegal, both for the civil servant and for the person or organisation doing it. And within the civil service and the Commission, strict codes of conduct with sanctions should apply.

But where bribery is relatively easy to define, it is much more difficult to draw a line between defending and explaining one’s interest or those of one’s organisation or client, and inappropiate use of influence. So I really think a civil service’s main line of defence against this should be in having an effective code of conduct for their own employees, and not in setting rules for the outside world. As for SEAP, it is in their own best PR interest (remember, reputation is everything) to have their own code of conduct and to kick out members who misbehave. But I really think the prime responsibility is with the Commission.

And lest we forget: Member States do a lot of lobbying too in Brussels, only then it is called “defending the national interest”. But as this very often goes against the general interest of all EU members together (take Spanish structural funds, the British rebate…), it really fits into the same category. Here again, we need a lot more press to monitor what is going on and to hold those responsible to account.

Oh, just for the record, I am not a lobbyist…

On a more positive pre-weekend note (as least in my opinion), there is today’s decision by the EU’s environment ministers to set even more ambitious post-Kyoto targets than the Commission proposed.