WORLD VIEW: Political engagement by citizens of the European Union with its decisions and deliberations needs to be encouraged if the EU is to become a more legitimate and functional system of governing. How this should best be achieved is an abiding problem. It has once again arisen in acute form with Tony Blair's decision last week to hold a referendum on the constitutional treaty, now it looks like being agreed under the Irish presidency in June, writes Paul Gillespie
There is a paradox here. Just as citizens want the EU to do more in selected spheres such as foreign policy, security and home affairs, economic coordination and environment, they say they distrust it more. This is part of a wider problem of citizen disengagement from politics - in fact voters distrust national governments much more than EU institutions, according to Eurobarometer polls.
The two factors are related in that national politicians are very reluctant to concede real democratic legitimacy to the EU, even in agreed areas.
Democratic accountability stays at national level, even as sovereignty and decision-making are increasingly pooled. Politicians still play a game of welcoming EU decisions they like and blaming Brussels for those they dislike, even when they have in fact been fully involved with such decisions.
This reinforces the national setting and obscures how much has been transferred to pooled decision-making. A mutual sense of powerlessness develops, in which citizens feel they have increasingly less purchase over decisions and politicians appear increasingly the same to voters. This is partly because they too have less purchase on decisions - even though the overwhelming proportion of public spending remains at national level.
We badly need to invent a new politics which can address these changes. At European level there is a deficit of politics as well as of democracy. Unless choice and difference are offered to voters they are unlikely to make connections or feel a greater sense of ownership for transnational institutions.
In another paradox, the forthcoming European Parliament elections are likely to be fought more on national than European issues - even though the parliament is a winner in the draft constitutional treaty. Many more issues will be decided there jointly with the Council of Ministers if it is adopted.
MEPs complain justifiably that their work receives too little attention at national parliamentary or media levels (but often receive more at local and regional ones). They compare this to the intense international lobbying machine applied to their work, much of it at committee level in the parliament. A good example last week was its decision to refer the Commission's agreement with the US on passenger names to the European Court of Justice to determine whether it breaches the EU's data protection legislation.
The trouble with the European Parliament elections is that voters do not make the connection between voting for individual candidates and distinctive policy outcomes. The European party groups are still too underdeveloped to dominate national elections campaigns. Neither do they put forward their preferred candidates for the office of Commission President, so that the election results would affect the majority political preferences throughout the EU.
Political leaders of the 25 member-states will choose their nominee to head the Commission in the light of the results; but this falls well short of normal political accountability.
It would nevertheless be a great mistake to write off the EP elections as irrelevant. They come at an important time for the EU, when it must adapt its structures through the constitutional treaty to a much bigger membership and an increasingly important international role.
Political change on this scale happens relatively slowly and in response to gradually felt accretion of power and influence.
The political disconnection between national parliaments and EU business has also been marked. It is partly addressed by a clause in the draft treaty allowing parliaments to block Commission initiatives within a specified time if they interfere with "subsidiarity", the right to make decisions at a lower level.
Part of the invention of a new politics will involve national parliaments and their specialist committees monitoring EU business more effectively. This has been happening in many member-states, Ireland included. The experience here with the two Nice referendums and the response to them is watched with great interest by other member-states, including the 10 newcomers. If electorates are engaged and interests mobilised, political involvement and awareness increases.
Referendums play their part in this process. So far Ireland, Denmark, Luxembourg and now the United Kingdom are to hold one on the constitutional treaty, if it is agreed. Spain, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands are considering it, as is the Czech Republic and several other of the newcomers.
The French government is put in a difficult position by Blair's decision, fearful of as close a vote as they had on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, but politically more confident of carrying it now. If President Chirac does decide to hold one, it could become entangled with French attitudes towards Turkey's EU application and the role of Muslim minorities in France.
Many political leaders regard referendums as a populist device easily manipulated by authoritarian governments. But a constitutional treaty refounding the EU on a new legal basis has a more powerful case for being put directly to the people. In that case the looming ratification crisis for the treaty suddenly looks much larger than the question of whether it will be agreed. Much cynical speculation goes into the likely timing of national referendums. Will the UK one be held before the Dutch one, for example, and will the Irish one be held when others have had the chance to vote it down? This raises the question of whether it would not be better to hold referendums on the same day throughout the EU, or in some other way to unify the decision, so that a genuine cross-national debate could be encouraged. That would optimise citizen involvement, as the Commission said last week; but national leaderships do not find it acceptable.
pgillespie@irish-times.ie