European demos again

No time for a local government green paper post today, as I’m travelling, but a quick word on Jon Worth’s interesting post yesterday on the EU demos.

Jon takes the notion of the EU demos – the idea that there isn’t a single political community of Europe – and kicks it in the head for a while. He says:

People will vote for things if they understand its relevance to their lives; it’s not about whether they feel part of a wider group, a people, a demos. For this my father is the prime example. He was born and brought up in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire but has lived for most of his adult life in Newport in South Wales. He speaks no Welsh, still backs England at rugby, and would never say that he is Welsh. He’s not in any way, as far as Klaus or others would term it, part of the Welsh demos. But he’s an intelligent man and realises that Newport City Council and the Welsh Assembly are important – they impact his life. So he votes.

While I agree with Jon that the lack of an EU demos doesn’t stop the EU from working, or people from voting, I think he slightly misses the point.

The EU works, in a way, as it is at the moment – people vote out of fear, duty or self-interest for the European Parliament. Their national governments wheel and deal in the European council, and everyone’s happy.

The demos point is about a sense of common purpose, and a single political space. Without that collegiality, Europe won’t have the authority to make difficult political choices and will need to continue muddling through with compromises, majority voting, and the power imbalance between parliament and member states.

That collegiality is hard to build because national level discussions dominate the debate and the member states are a strong and historically validated power-level inserted between the voter and the institution. That doesn’t happen with Newport CC – the newspapers published in Newport still report on Parliament. Interestingly, some people have concerns that it is starting to happen in Scotland.

To get Europe to a place where its democracy is credible enough to take the big decisions needs more than institutional reform. It needs a European political discussion space, online and in the press; and it needs transnational election campaigns, so that people who vote for the Labour party in England know they’re voting for the same thing as someone voting for PASOK.