This week’s Economist has an excellent analysis of think tanks and political debates in Brussels. Its main message: “the level and quality of public debate in the EU capital are depressingly low”. I could not agree more having attended and sometimes moderated lots of the conferences or seminars where these debates should take place.
The article blames funding of the Brussels think tanks by EU institutions and corporate sponsors for the poor quality of debate and also rightly points to the fact that Brussels is a rather closed system where “the same folk must deal with each other for years, haggling their way towards policy deals”. I have once called this the “Brussels incest”, a system where anyone wanting to be influential needs to be loved by the consensus leaders in order to be taken seriously. Anyone daring to ask provocative questions during these conferences immediately risks becoming an “outsider” who needs to be shunned for the future.
As the Economist reports, Commissioner Margot Wallström (who is aware of the problem) will be proposing a plan to fund pan-European foundations to foster more political debate. The problem, says the Economist, is that these foundations will be linked to the European political parties, which are “imperfect vehicles for pushing forward debate”. Here I only agree partially. I think using these transnational political party federations could be a good idea because they are less chained by the immediate day-to-day political agenda and could therefore work on finding “the next big idea”.
The real danger lies in spreading these new foundation funds over all European political parties. Why not use the money to set up one European Debate Foundation, which could be run by representatives from all European party formations and which would organise two big events per year (just before the European Council meetings in March and December) where the “next big ideas” can be discussed? One of the “big ideas” that I would like to push (as you can expect when you read this blog) is the ecological re-engineering of the EU.
