Madam, - Vincent Browne's analysis of the EU (Opinion, May 10th) is factually deficient and revisionist.
He alleges that enthusiasm for membership "is the mechanism for the creation of common mindsets that everything about the EU is fine and democratic and fair". I do not know where he might have observed such a mindset: it was certainly not that of the European Council when, in December 2001, it adopted the Laeken Declaration calling for (and I paraphrase) greater clarity in the respective competences of the member-states and of the EU, simplification of the EU's legal instruments, more democracy, transparency and efficiency and a new constitutional treaty to incorporate these requirements. That declaration clearly betokens a mindset very different from the complacent one envisaged by Browne.
He went on to contest the assertion that European integration had preserved peace between France and Germany. The founding fathers of the ECSC and of the EEC saw their enterprise at the time very clearly in terms of peace, reconciliation and reconstruction - but of course they did not have access to Mr Browne's insights and 21st-century hindsight. He might read Tom Judt's excellent Postwar: a History of Europe since the Second World War for a more insightful analysis.
Mr Browne then claims that the EU was not responsible for the regeneration of Europe: it was the Marshall Plan. He is wrong to set these two enterprises in opposition to one another: they were, in many ways, complementary. It would have taken longer for the ECSC and the EEC to make the progress they did had there not been a Marshall Plan. But without the ECSC and the EEC, the effects of the Marshall Plan would have been less far-reaching and less enduring.
Mr Browne's characterisation of the Common Agricultural Policy as an "add-on. . .to soften the blow to farmers" displays a truly breathtaking disregard for the political, economic and social history of the early 1950s. This is revisionism run riot.
Having gone on to describe John Locke's idea of a periodic share-out as unworkable, he criticises the EU for allegedly not having such a mechanism. I would make two points in this connection. The first is that Mr Browne barely mentions the EU's cohesion funds, which are a mechanism (and certainly not a perfect one) to bring about a level of redistribution of welfare between member-states.
The second (and much more important) point is that issues of income redistribution through the tax system (and through the social welfare code) have always been jealously guarded by the member-states as matters for exclusive national competence and sovereignty. If indeed there is an "engine for inequality", it is to be found at national level and is not a creation of the EU.
Finally, Mr Browne characterises the EU decision-making process as having removed democratic control and accountability. He is wrong on two counts. First, the Commission and the Council of Ministers (which are far more transparent and leaky than most national administrations) are accountable to the European Parliament, which is elected by universal suffrage and grossly under-reported by the media (even by such a sharply-focused organ of critical examination as Village magazine).
Second, members of the Council of Ministers are accountable to their national parliaments, most of which (with the honourable exceptions of the Danish and Estonian) have made only the most pathetic efforts to exercise their proper functions in this regard.
It seems that it is not only a certain Minister who pulls his china shop around with him! - Yours, etc,
ALAN DUKES, Tully West, Kildare, Co. Kildare.
Madam, - Anthony Coughlan's approach to Irish democracy is quite revealing of his mindset (May 10th). In his anti-European Union writings he seeks to deploy the 1916 Proclamation, which has no legal standing, rather than the Irish Constitution, which was freely adopted by the people of this State. He seems to believe that the proclamation reflects some immutable laws of nature with regard to sovereignty rather than one minority view among many about how Irish affairs ought to have been managed in 1916. The proclamation is not capable of being the basis for how we deal with the modern world.
Our Constitution defines how we make democratic decisions. It incorporates the settlement of the dispute between the people of Northern Ireland and ourselves with regard to the exercise of sovereignty on this island. It also contains the provisions by which we conduct our relations with our partners in the European Union.
Mr Coughlan refuses to accept this modern definition of sovereignty. His grieving for a lost world of rigid simplicities does not, however, make our choices undemocratic, even when those decisions conflict with the 1916 Proclamation.
The fact that Germany accepts our contribution to its law-making, as we accept its input to ours, is a modern example of how humanity can jointly solve common problems. I am much relieved that Europeans now face each other around a conference table in Brussels, rather than in the trenches in Ypres.
And I think James Connolly would have approved. - Yours,etc,
PROINSIAS DE ROSSA MEP, Labour European Office, Dublin 1.