Europe: it is about democracy, stupid (and the British lesson)
By Francesco Grillo
“There is no taxation without representation”: it was paradoxically a British prime minister, William Pitt the Elder (named like that to distinguish him from his younger son who also led UK), who provided in 1765 the most compelling argument in favor of the American colonies declaring independence. That argument was meant to be both on a legal and ethical basis. It is to this very classical and yet very modern principle that Europe should go back, if it wants to survive its most serious crisis.
The Monetary Union is not sustainable any longer – as even the British opinion makers acknowledge - without the union of fiscal policies. However according to the oldest and most powerful law of democracy, a Fiscal Union would never be accepted by the European citizens if they continued to perceive that it results in their taxation being set by an international organization or even worse by foreign politicians that they never elected. This is exactly the feature that made the recent European crisis so devastating: not only the Greeks, the Italians, the Spanish suffered the costs of a recession; they were even allowed - rather dishonestly by their very governments - to have the feeling that the crisis was to be blamed upon whom does not represent them.
This situation cannot simply go on any longer. Europe cannot survive in this limbo. Either we make it completing the European project with a fiscal and democratic integration. Or we break it and we go back to what Europe was twenty years ago: a common market more or less similar to the ones existing in other parts of the world with some rhetorical aspiration to a federalist dream which has proved to be a nightmare.
This outcome is exactly what Jacques Delors had in mind when he pushed for the monetary union. The idea was that by making the states forgo the power to print money, this would have – sooner or later – created the need for them to also forgo the remaining ones (taxation and defense) that justify their very existence.
On this count Delors was right. Dramatically so. The reality is that the time for mere tactical adjustment is over.
He was, however, wrong if the final objective was to recreate at a European level a new “modern state” like the ones who emerged in the nineteenth century and whose crisis is no less acute than the European one. We need a European democracy that will be different from the one we have experienced at national level, because democracies and demoi are no less in crisis at national levels.
This is the very “name of the game” the European institutions and together with them the European citizens are facing. True we do not have a European demos and a European public opinion; but if we do not find ways soon to start having a serious Europe wide debate on substantive political choices, the won Union will simply die on us, out of neglect. It is also disappointingly true that the turnout of the European parliament has steadily declined just as its power has steadily been increased; but if we don’t find a way to represent people, the economic and political costs on everybody’s life will be huge.
I don’t believe that a super State should be imposed on national States just when states are trying to face up to the reality of a hyper flexible networked society. Consequently I don’t think the solution lies in European citizens directly electing the European president (although one can interpret a similar move in allowing the rule in which the winner of the EP elections backs and therefore chooses the candidate for the President of the Commission).
Solutions?
Making ERASMUS for all could be an interesting option. If the (state) school was a main driver in the making of states, it makes perfect sense that studying abroad should be compulsory or a strongly encouraged component of the curricula of students. Vision, an Italian think tank, calculated that only one third of the money spent by the European Commission on farmers would pay for all students to study at least six months abroad at least once during their high school and once during their undergraduate years.
Another idea would be to reward transnational parties and allow for the creation of transnational electoral constituencies. Votes that a French candidate would get in Italy or an Italian in France should count more if we want people to be chosen not on the basis of the idea that they will represent their territory, but that territories will count more by establishing a common will. Likewise, people, especially young people working or studying across European citizens, should not be bound any longer to a certain region. Electors and candidates should be able to choose if they want to play into a Europe wide contest that can easily work alongside place-based ones. Nowadays global citizens are instead technically speaking discriminated by democratic mechanisms that still do not consider the reality of transnational lives.
Transnational democracy also calls for a much wider use – at European level – of the Internet for making people express their wills. Electronic voting is nowadays a mature technology. Let’s use Europe to mainstream it into democratic mechanisms which cannot be any longer the ones which were invented at the time we did not even have telephones.
Last but not least we must make people directly decide on important matters without intermediaries who have not always added any obvious value to the final decisions. The British lesson is somehow very telling. The British have dared to make their people (in fact a part of them) to decide if they still want be the UK; and they will soon have them to choose if they want continue to be part of the EU.
This certainly implies a risk. And sometimes mistakes. Democracy is, however, about a collective learning experience. Mistakes are made even by bureaucrats. The difference is that they are at least an opportunity to grow when they are the result of the decision of the people.
At the end of the day not even William Pitt would have ever accepted somebody to be taxed by somebody to whom he never gave the power to do so. Europe has simply forgotten in recent years the most basic lesson of democracy. In order to survive it must now become the platform where democracy itself will adapt to a technological revolution which is already everywhere.
Francesco Grillo is an author and visiting scholar at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He is director of the think tank "Vision", managing director of the consultancy firm "Vision & Value" and advises the European Commission on innovation. He is a regular columnist on Italy and Europe for the Italian newspapers Il Messaggero and Il Gazzettino.