I attended two citizens’s debates on the EU’s constitutional crisis in the last few days and got ample confirmation that we are just whistling in the dark when confronted with what is probably one of the EU’s most serious crises.
The first debate on the June 2007 roadmap (taking place in the European Parliament on 9 May) was totally dominated by two MEP “elephants” of the Constitutional debate, Jens-Peter Bonde and Inigo Mendez de Vigo. Both these “anciens” are so “locked” into the technicalities of the Constitution debate that they can no longer see beyond the horizon of their institutional logic. Their interventions, although entertaining, left me certainly on my hunger for a visionary counter-medicine to the “future-of-the-EU paralysis” that I see everywhere in Brussels and other capitals.
Fortunately, the panel also included Raymond van Ermen whose vision for a “way out of the constitutional crisis” comes close to my own ideas as set out in a recent article I wrote for Diplomatic World. But Raymond’s plea for a new “sustainability” vision of Europe did not get any serious reaction from both MEPs.
What most speakers agreed on, though, was that the German Presidency has returned to “methods of the past”, namely intergovenmental talks behind closed doors to revive the dead constitution. Did Frau Merkel ever read Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”?
The willingness (or lack of it) of European political leaders was also raised during a “European Citizens’ Consultations” meeting on 10 May. During that event, a representation of European citizens handed over the results of a Europe-wide consultation of citizens on future priorities for the EU to Commissioner Wallström and two MEPs. With her usual flair, Margot Wallström tried to keep up appearances and promised that the commission will take the “citizens report” seriously. I know that she means it but do her fellow commissioners? And does the German Presidency? It seemed to me significant that no representative of Presidency was present during the handover event.
My conclusion and recommendation: if political leaders ignore us, let’s ignore them in return. Let’s work on a new vision for Europe with a strong participatory dimension and forget about the petty institutional tinkering which they try to sell as the “future of the EU”.