The convention on the Future of Europe has completed its listening phase and moved on to the much more interesting and controversial stage of formulating its initial political judgments on the EU. This will be concerned with how executive power should be organised and made accountable within a radically enlarged and reformed EU. Is it possible to create a European demos, in the sense of a transnational political community, and a public sphere, in the sense of many different arenas of transnational public
The convention and the Inter-governmental Conference to follow it face a huge challenge in tackling these large political questions, which make the EU the most important experiment in transnational democracy today. Government representatives, members of national parliaments and MEPs are directly involved, meeting for the most part in public.
If the convention is not to be sidelined by inter-governmental diplomacy it will need to assert its democratic credentials in coming months and take centre stage as the main forum to discuss how politics should be organised in the huge transnational area emerging from EU enlargement.
Ireland's engagement with the European issues contained in the Nice Treaty has made it something of a case study of popular involvement in European integration. We are the only member-state to have had a referendum on Nice, arising from a narrow constitutional definition of sovereignty. It will be surprising if Ireland is the only state to have a referendum on the next treaty, arising from the convention.
The suspicion of referendums elsewhere in the EU - arising from different histories and exposures to Bonapartist, populist or fascist use of them to endorse authoritarian rule - becomes less easy to sustain when the issue of the EU's own democratic deficit is put on the political agenda by the convention's deliberations and the forthcoming shock of rapid enlargement.
Ireland is not only better informed, it is now more prepared for political argument and contestation about the future political direction of European integration. It is not so easy to assert, as many anti-Nice activists did, that the inevitable outcome is a federal and militarised superstate - nor for pro-Nice campaigners to disguise ambitious plans for an EU constitution and a more politicised transnational public sphere.
The Irish case lends weight to the forthright conclusion Thomas Risse draws from recent research on the subject*: "Contestation and politicisation is constitutive for a democratic polity, including the European polity. And it serves a European purpose, since it is bound to increase the issue salience and significance of European affairs in the national polities . . . Raising the salience of the EU in the national polities will not drive the Europeans apart, but pull them together in the European public sphere."
Contestation and political argument are as important at national as at European levels in order to encourage that breakthrough for democratic politics. If they are absent, policy will remain the preserve of elites and awareness of European issues will remain low. Democratic competition and argument therefore help to create a demos. If such politics are concerned with the location of executive power media will follow and help create a European public sphere.
It is wrong, too, to counterpose the European and the national in either/or fashion when approaching this subject. There is plenty of evidence that identities are increasingly multiple in today's Europe; indeed the primary cleavage is between those who identify only with their nation-state and those who combine national and European identifications in various ways.
The convergence of political attitudes and contested positions on the future of Europe between the different member-states is clear evidence that a European public sphere is indeed emerging. One does not have to wait the full development of transnational interest groups, political parties and social movements to confirm this. Nor should we assume that a "community of communication", often incorrectly taken to require a common language for a public sphere, is necessary either.
Because of the irreducible cultural diversity of Europe dialogue, contestation, recognition and shared or disputed memories will characterise the emerging polity more than the uniformity and homogeneity normally, if spuriously, associated with the nation-state. After all, the EU is a union of states and peoples, a hybrid construction that lies uneasily between a state and an international organisation.
The likely outcome of the convention and the IGC will certainly confirm this hybridity. Some will see it as transitional towards a federal entity, others as a continuing open experiment in transnational democratic governance.
The polarisation between federal and inter-governmental camps within the convention has produced different models for an executive presidency. The Chirac/Aznar/Blair model would see a strong president oriented towards external, foreign and security policy based on the member-governments, running parallel to the Commission. This is strongly criticised by those who believe it would marginalise the Commission's independent role and initiative and open the way to a directory of the larger states. A duplicating structure with two presidencies would be more complex, confusing and less legitimate, they say.
It may be that the idea of unifying the two presidencies, but subject to a dual accountability through a congress of national parliamentarians elected along with the MEPs in the European Parliament, would satisfactorily address this inherently hybrid polity. Joint elections to these two bodies, or even direct elections of a dual-role president, would involve a giant leap in the construction of the polity.
Its defining characteristic would be European citizenship, conceived as separate from the national but not in competition with it. The social prerequisites of a transnational system of democracy would include greater multilingualism, more effective cross-national political parties, more interactive media and a greater commitment to educational openness. But a start has to be made with politics. That is the convention's main challenge and opportunity.
*Available in the Briefing Book for the ARENA/IDNET conference on Europeanization, Collective Identities and Public Discourses, University of Oslo, October 11th, 2002, at www.arena.uio.no/events/idenetgeneral.htm