Doomthinking or a real problem for Europe

The European  Union may well be at a cross-roads, facing a serious legitimacy crisis, with its citizens “threatened with an unconscious drift to disharmony, a loss of social cohesion, a recurrence of racism and a deficit of democratic accountability.”

A few years ago lots of patriots thought their country could be part of one bigger unity, and perhaps that could be an and of the internal battles of small groups wanting to divide their country in smaller countries. Hope was put on something which would be  like the United States of America with one currency and people living together in peace.

A few years later they feel like their members of parliament have abandoned them and that the dream is nearly going to burst like a soap-bubble.

The Irish president Michael Higgins noted that 2013 was the year of the citizen and highlighted the democratic credentials of the European Parliament, the only directly elected arm of the EU. He said on Wednesday 17 April in the parliament in Strasbourg:

“European citizens are suffering the consequences of actions and opinions of bodies such as rating agencies, which, unlike parliaments, are unaccountable. Many of our citizens regard the response to the crisis as disparate, sometimes delayed, not equal to urgency of the task and showing insufficient solidarity,”

“Many of our citizens in Europe regard the response to the crisis in their lives as disparate, sometimes delayed, not equal to the urgency of the task and showing insufficient solidarity with them in their threatened or actual economic circumstances.

“We cannot allow this [unemployment] to continue,” he said. “There is nothing more corrosive to society and more crushing to an individual than endemic unemployment, particularly among the young.”

In a bid to plug the gap between leaders and electorates, it seems likely that Europe’s biggest political groups will each put up a party candidate for president of the European Commission. At the post-speech press conference with President Higgins, EU parliament chief Martin Schulz threw his weight behind a directly-elected head of the EU executive.

Social Democrat Martin Schulz, president of the EU parliament aided by some new powers and an economic crisis, and his allies received the opportunity to move the parliament again towards the centre of the action.

According to Schulz the European Parliament elections are currently seen by many “as something to bother with if you have five minutes to spare to put a cross on a piece of paper.”

Higgins pointed out, “the citizenry needs to be offered a real choice rather than variations of the same choice.”

Martin Schulz during the election camapign in 2009 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Schulz does not seem to have such nice thoughts about the growing European Union. He takes a rather darker line:

“The EU is really threatened by failure,” he says, frowning. “I think we should not underestimate the dramatic reality … Here, or in Brussels, I have the feeling that people are not taking sufficient account of what is going on in Europe … The moment people withdraw their support from an idea, the idea is finished.” The consensus on Europe, he adds, “is in a kind of freefall”.

According to my small mind the problem lie in the urge to grow too quickly and wanting to take new countries in the Union which have not proven to be economically nor politically stable nor democratic. A main problem also is that not enough countries are willing to  see themselves as a small link of the European chain. Too many countries still look at themselves as a country on its own instead of being part of one greater country or union state. The continued negative press media making people afraid to invest their savings is not helping the economy our of the dry well. If EU leaders persist in sticking to economic policies that throttle growth and lengthen the dole queues, accompanied by the language of technocracy, the Union will face an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy. Also when they take the trust away by endangering the savings of the people and by not keeping their words, changing laws so that previous promises are broken, people will totally loose not only interest but also confidence in the system.

The parliament is the only directly elected EU institution but it has not enough to say or the individual countries listen not enough to it or keep doing their own thing and wanting their own course to continue. More people could believe in the EU when the governing comities of the individual countries would show more respect to the governing European Parliament members. The European Institution has also more chance of engaging the public when they feel the measure presented are really taken and followed up and that their tax-money is not just spend at hours of debates without any results.

Today  the people will not trust the banks nor the politicians any more because they feel being left in the cold by those politicians which have often so many connections with the financial world that it is part of their extra income and why they protect lots of those people who fooled and ripped off many citizens. This mistrust for the economical and  political system has created a political class that is completely disconnected from the rest of the community.

Schulz’s brand of frank talk is the kind of thing that infuriates many national politicians, who still instinctively dismiss European parliamentarians as second-raters. But he has plans to elevate himself to the front rank of European leaders. His term as president of the parliament runs out next year. Though he has not yet officially declared his hand, it is widely believed he will then be a candidate to be president of the European Commission, the EU’s powerful executive, currently headed by the Portuguese politician José Manuel Barroso. New rules that give a much larger role to the European Parliament in the election of the commission president may well work in his favour.

Please do find the interesting interview by Gideon Rachman at the Dinner with the FT: Martin Schulz.

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