grant/europe layout 18/10/02 6:42 PM Page 52
52
Can Britain lead in Europe?
The roots of this popular antipathy to the Union lie in the mid-1980s, when the combination of the single market programme and the Single European Act (which introduced qualified majority voting for single market laws) boosted its powers. The dismantling of non-tariff barriers to trade and the regulation of state aid and mergers meant that some companies relocated and some people lost jobs. And then in 1991 the Maastricht treaty, with its plan for a single currency, promised to touch an essential element of sovereignty. So it was perhaps natural that many people would resent what seemed to be an arrogant and increasingly powerful bureaucracy in Brussels. The Union’s institutions have little legitimacy in the eyes of many Europeans. The poor image of the European Commission, the embodiment of “Brussels”, derives partly from its tendency, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to regulate in too much detail and to grab more power for itself. A more fundamental problem is that commissioners are appointed by governments rather than elected. Yet even the European Parliament, directly elected since 1979, has failed to win much credibility: at each successive European election, a smaller proportion of the electorate has bothered to vote. The EU’s problem is partly geographical: Brussels is inevitably more distant than the national governments with which people can readily identify (for similar reasons the US government in Washington DC is mistrusted more than state governments). But the EU creates its own special problems of legitimacy. As Raymond Aron wrote: “The 9 European idea is empty…it was created by intellectuals, and Raymond that fact accounts for its genuine appeal to the mind and its Aron, “The century of total feeble appeal to the heart.” 9 war”, Doubleday, 1954
The EU is a political system that does not correspond to the kind of social and cultural reality with which many EU citizens can readily identify. The “community of interest” that ties together, say, Germans and Greeks is already stretched pretty thin; enlargement of the Union into Eastern Europe will make it thinner still. How many Germans will want to pay taxes that are recycled as regional aid to Romania?