Brussels blog

In the Orwellian world of the European Union, no does not really mean no, a treaty pronounced dead by popular vote is still alive and the bloc’s parliament rejects the popular vote as undemocratic.

Ireland may have rejected the Lisbon treaty, which requires the approval of all 27 member states to become law, but the EU’s leaders have vowed to press ahead with ratification.

Perhaps most baffling of all is the European parliament’s reaction. The speaker of the people’s elected assembly, Hans-Gert Pottering, said: “It is of course a great disappointment for all those who wanted to achieve greater democracy, greater political effectiveness and greater clarity and transparency in decision-making in the European Union that the majority of the Irish could not be convinced of the need for these reforms of the European Union.”

I’ll let you read that again. Yes, these citizens were wrong. Through exercising their democratic right to vote they have delivered a blow to democracy. What Pottering really means, and he has a point, is they have delivered a blow to the expansion of the powers of the parliament. It was the biggest potential winner of this reform.

At the moment around two-thirds of legislation has to win the approval of parliament. Under the treaty it would get new powers over farm policy, trade, justice and other areas. This could be a good thing but the problem is that too often the 785 MEPs, unheralded in their own countries and dependent on party patronage for their seats, get captured by special interests.

Parliament’s agriculture committee features more farmers than a barn dance. Trade debates tend to be dominated by members briefed by NGOs. Things are improving slowly, with the parliament fighting stirring battles on civil liberties issues and holding member states to their promises on environment and energy. Yet they will not improve fast as long as the people do not care. The next elections in 2009 could see turnout across the bloc fall below 50 per cent.

The assembly, which has already adopted the trappings of the dead constitution such as playing the Ode to Joy to visiting heads of state, threw its usual fit of pique when meeting on Monday in Strasbourg. It was “inconceivable” that the EU could expand further without reform, it said. In other words, what was good enough for those who got in early is not good enough for the latecomers: blackmail.

Paul Van Buitenen, the whistleblowing auditor whose revelations of corruption and nepotism brought down the commission in 1999 and who is now an MEP, sums up the dilemma well.
 
The EU has become frozen in transition from national states to a supranational system. National parliaments now mostly implement rules decided in Brussels yet they are where most citizens believe power lies and where most media attention is focused. The Brussels institutions make most of the laws but nobody pays them much attention.

 “We cannot continue with this halfway house. Either we move forward to having a proper European parliament with real powers to hold the executive to account. Or we return power to national parliaments and continue as separate nation states,” he told me recently.

The Irish seem to have opted for the latter. Pottering has not: “We must now calmly reflect on how to proceed. The reform of the European Union is important for citizens, for democracy and transparency.  Therefore I hope that it will be possible to find a solution so that reforms can come into force by the time of the European elections in June 2009,” he said.

Let’s have a vote on it.

Talking of votes, the house will vote on Wednesday on whether to approve Jacques Barrot’s move from transport to justice commissioner and Antonio Tajani of Italy as his replacement.

It should go reasonably smoothly. Indeed, there could barely have been a dry eye in the civil liberties committee on Monday night at Barrot’s hearing. “As a child I was impressed by Robert Schuman, who was a friend of my father, while my adult years have been marked by all the struggles to advance the European project,” he intoned.