Ian Christie and Rebecca Willis's challenging essay starts from the proposition that the vision that guided Western Europe for the last fifty years has run its course and that the union is now in need of a revitalised sense of mission one driven less from above by a political elite than in the past.
They propose the task of governing globalisation and securing sustainable development worldwide as the new guiding vision for the 21st century.
Seven pillars of doubt
I am unconvinced for seven reasons:
- Despite beginning with Orwell's 1947 essay, with its emphasis on the USA and USSR, the Cold War and the possible division of the globe between three gigantic slave states (as in his Nineteen Eighty-Four), they make nothing of the outcome of that struggle and the collapse of communism at the end of the 20th century.
- They credit the Treaty of Rome with Europe's post-war economic growth and prosperity. It probably helped to provide peace and security but a substantial catch-up with the US after falling further behind during the war is what one would expect under such conditions. The surprise is that the process of convergence stopped in the '70s and the US pulled further ahead in the '80s and '90s.
- Thus there are two immediate challenges to the EU first to cope with its enlargement to the East, if it happens, doubling the number of member states in several waves of entrants. The authors mention enlargement only once to say it is stalled (or would be under their first business as usual scenario). I agree that it is not a done deal but failure will also call for careful and prolonged management both of disappointment and of renewed application. The other immediate challenge is to resume the normal processes of economic convergence; by following Scandinavian examples of investment in education and new technology and also further deregulation of factor markets, and further promotion of competitive access. This, rather than low productivity green collar jobs, is the way to tackle Europe's unemployment problem: its environmental problems deserve to be tackled directly in their own right.
- Christie and Willis are right that free-trade is not enough, either internationally or, particularly, domestically. Markets do need appropriate elements of regulation to ensure competition, transparency, standards of information etc., but Europe needs more free trade both internally (eg., in financial services) and externally (eg in agricultural products). It also needs less (and better directed) regulation, especially of labour markets, rather than more, if convergence is to resume.
- Sustainable development is a worthy if fuzzy objective. Christie and Willis, who throughout (and rightly) stress the threat of global climate change, add the word worldwide. How feasible is that for Europe? Only very slightly more so than for its several members. It is not wise to adopt as a guiding principle something that is so far beyond one's assured reach. Hard-nosed Utopianism is admirable but this is not hard-nosed enough for me.
- Like Orwell, Christie and Willis offer us three scenarios. In the third, towards sustainability, the majority of citizens have moved decisively towards a `post-consumer' outlook. They then go on to ask is the third scenario credible at all? answering that it is no more incredible than the vision of the founding fathers of European integration. I disagree; not only do they exaggerate their achievements (2 above) but they also criticise EU politicians for concentrating excessively on its own technical processes. At least these are within political control. It is not clear whether the emergence of a dominant post-consumer culture is a precondition for pursuing sustainable development or whether our political leaders or some other enlightened elite are to commit themselves to changing human nature: Utopian, certainly; hard-nosed, certainly not; democratic, scarcely. We may be able to preach and wait, but we are not being offered a proposition to buy into here and now.
- The authors do say, unambiguously descriptively of the here and now, that evidence shows that people support a strong role for the EU in the environmental field, and think that the Union has done a good job on the environment. This is probably true certainly in the UK much of the hard action on the environment has followed EU directives and commitments and it has contributed to environmental improvement. Nevertheless the arrangements are less than logical, are not consistent with subsidiarity, and if made so would harness little grass roots support for tackling world-wide problems.
Not sustainability, but subsidiarity?
I am less convinced that Europe must always be in pursuit of some `big idea'. Is that true of other successful democratic polities? And if not of them, why us? If big ideas are generated to order to keep the notorious European bicycle rolling is that not more likely to breed cynicism and scepticism about politics rather than to contain them? Before returning to the suggestion that sustainability should be the next big European idea I want to probe the role of such an idea a little further.
Europe's leaders often complain about the gulf between them and the people in the street who do not even know their names. In a joint statement some years ago, Mitterrand and Kohl expressed their desire to bridge this gap. One strand in this was to be by paying greater attention and respect to the principle of subsidiarity. I would agree that this principle has been neglected and much British hostility or scepticism might have been avoided had it been otherwise.
Societies are organised in ever widening circles from the individual, the family, pubs and clubs, parishes, towns, counties, länder, countries, associations of states such as the EU, NATO and the UN. Problems can also be ranked depending on the range of the relevant effects, who is inconvenienced by my dog's fouling the village footpaths or my factory's fouling the air, or contaminating the river? Who has a legitimate interest in the quality of water supplied by the local undertaking?, or the number of lorries on our roads? Who has a legitimate interest in peace in the Balkans or in emissions of carbon dioxide that will change everybody's climate (though in different ways with different effects)?
These policy issues can be matched up, more or less, with the different levels of governmental institutional structures. One of the problems of Eurocrats is that their institution is near the top of the structure (not a hierarchy), while most ordinary people focus their concerns largely, though not exclusively, at the bottom.
The consequence of this, and it is both a logical and a desirable consequence, is that if the EU respects the principle of subsidiarity that matters should be dealt with as far down the structure as is compatible with the public good then the EU's distinctive policies and politicians, presidents and commissioners, will not concern themselves with the things of primary concern to the people in the street. Does this make the ideal of a democratic EU unattainable? Not necessarily with appropriate indirect elements (members of the UN General Assembly are not directly elected) but it may be hard.
The visionary route to disillusion?
Does sustainability offer a distinctive solution or counter-example to the problem, if indeed it is a problem, of matching issues to the institutions at the right level in the structure while maintaining enough popular interest in what is done in the peoples' name(s) and maintaining the democratic legitimacy of the EU (and the UN)? I do not see that it does. Many environmental issues can be dealt with at a fairly low level. Sustainability might, or might not, be interpreted as requiring attention at a high level. Certainly this is true of global warming but that does not make a very good case for EU intervention.
EU policies to restrain CO2 emissions, like those of the individual national governments, are as likely to make things worse by diverting emitting processes to countries with dirtier technologies, lower standards and less effective enforcement as better. Global problems call for global solutions and neither the US nor the EU is, on its own, big enough. Moreover what happens elsewhere to those problems best treated on a continental scale with governmental institutions responsible to, and for, populations of 300 million or so?
The EU, US, China, India, Russia, Indonesia and Nigeria may, by chance, have such coverage (not in every case very effective) but what of the rest of the world? If they can join in, perhaps under a UN umbrella, do we really need the EU?
It has been said that there is a gap in Europe between the leaders and the led but who are those who should be led? May it not be that we are a citizenry whose politicians have neglected the brief given them by their electors and have gone off too far in pursuit of too many big ideas of their own?
