Frank Furedi

EU oligarchs help far right prosper
The leaders of the European Union hate elections to the European Parliament. Why? Because these caricatures of democratic decision-making expose the contempt with which the European public regards the oligarchy that runs the EU.

A survey of 27,000 EU citizens commissioned by the European Parliament indicates that on average only 34per cent of them planned to vote in the elections. In Britain, 30 per cent of the respondents indicated they would definitely not vote.

Voter apathy tells only part of the story. There is considerable evidence that lack of interest in the EU elections is fuelled by a powerful sense of distrust, dissatisfaction and frustration. One German survey of 12,000 Europeans shows 60 per cent of the respondents assumed that one reason why so many of them are not inclined to vote is because they are “being lied to in election promises”. Almost half said they “cannot improve anything by voting”. In Poland and Finland, about two-thirds of the respondents expressed this fatalistic attitude.

Typically the EU political elite presents voter apathy as the unfortunate consequence of public misperception. They suggest that their good works are not appreciated by a public that simply does not get what they do. Public disengagement is rarely presented as an indictment of EU institutions. “It’s not that people are staying away from these elections because they are critical of the European Union and its political process,” claims Hermann Schmitt of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research. From this perspective the public’s lack of interest is interpreted as simply a problem of presentation. That is why the European Commission sought to woo young voters with cool election ads on MTV networks.

However, there is considerable evidence that public disengagement is not the unintended consequence of poor public relations but the outcome of a project that explicitly attempts to distance political decision-making from the gaze of European citizens.

The distinct feature of the EU’s political process is that it is self-consciously founded on the principle of insulated decision-making. From the standpoint of the European political elites, one of the virtues of EU institutions is that they insulate them from the kind of public pressure and forms of accountability that they experience in their national parliaments. Consequently the EU is able to adopt policies that would often prove contentious and difficult to justify in a more open national parliamentary setting.

In effect, politicians can continually hide behind the EU’s invisible decision-making process and claim “it wasn’t my idea” before adding that “unfortunately we have no choice but to go along with this Europe-wide directive”.

Insulated decision-making relies on institutions that are in effect outside the realm of public scrutiny. As Bruno Waterfield writes in an important study for the Manifesto Club, “a unique form of 21st-century statecraft has emerged” that allows “expanding areas of public authority to retreat into a closed, private world of bureaucrats and diplomats”. In effect most EU legislation is formulated by the hundreds of secret working groups set up by the Council of the EU.

Most of the sessions of the Council of Ministers are held behind closed doors and the unelected European Commission has the sole right to put forward legislation. Yet most of the decisions taken by the European Council are concerned with subjects that were previously discussed in national legislatures. These are public-free institutions that are designed to bypass conventional forms of democratic accountability.

The inevitable consequence of the institutionalisation of insulated decision-making is that it diminishes the capacity of European politicians to motivate and inspire their electorate. What appears as a problem of presentation is actually an expression of a style of communication that is suitable for behind-the-scenes manoeuvring but not for public engagement. Invariably they come across as what they really are, bureaucrats, rather than as political leaders. Their ineptness has been exposed time and again as they proved unequal to the task of gaining support for the proposed EU constitution in national referendums.

Is it any surprise that they have decided that referendums are not needed for implementation of the Treaty of Lisbon?

When all else fails, the EU oligarchy attempts to panic the electorate into voting. “If people don’t vote, the danger is that there will be more extremist parties or (parties) from outside the mainstream” in the European Parliament, warns Hans-Gert Poettering, the president of this body. Appeals to keep out extremist parties rather than asking for a positive endorsement has been the main message of the EU oligarchy for this week’s election. The term extremism tends to be used promiscuously to include all Euro-sceptics, including those who reject the EU but regard themselves as pro-European.

The paradox is that the culture of insulated decision-making has created an environment that is hospitable to the growth of political frustration and bitterness.

The manipulative and dishonest style of rule-making confirms people’s cynicism towards conventional political life.

Worse still, the insulation of decision-making directly contributes to the hollowing out of public life, which far too many people see as pointless and irrelevant. In such circumstances movements that are able to politicise people’s anger and dissatisfaction are able to make significant headway.

So it is not surprising that right-wing nationalist parties have succeeded in gaining momentum in countries such as the Netherlands, Austria, France and Poland.

Unlike the mainstream parties, these protest movements have no inhibitions about exposing the democratic deficit that afflicts the EU. However, the support enjoyed by these movements should be seen not as a positive endorsement of a revitalised European radical Right but as a result of the political cynicism provoked by the behaviour of the EU oligarchy. 

First published by The Australian, 4 June 2009