Since the rules of democracy became common knowledge, the citizens have been able to give themselves direct representatives to represent them as far as exercising their constituent power is concerned. It is no longer necessary for them to apply to elected officials to fix the rules of the game applicable to themselves. There is no doubt that we are nowadays capable to gather some fifty Elders across Europe in order to frame up its constitution, whose content is almost determined already.
By beginning to endorse the definition of the concept of democracy, which is hardly in doubt any more, the Union will endow itself with the first attribute it still needs to become a political entity: a truly fundamental law. This here means the rules of democracy that Europe had already exported throughout the world a few centuries ago and that are now better explained nowadays 1. The Union will need to give itself at least a second attribute in order to exist politically: the capacity to speak with one voice on the diplomatic scene. Signing the birth certificate of a political Europe will be the Europeans’ wedding present to each other after a sixty-year engagement.
Morphing from an inter-governmental entity to a union of federal states – a quantum leap — the European Union will put an end to three anomalies with regard to democracy. The citizens, the theoretical holders of the constituent power, will gain mastery over their institutions. They themselves will define the nature of the competences delegated to the European level. Given that these will evolve over time as world affairs take more and more importance, the Union will be endowed with an Upper House welcoming the constituents’ successors with a view to their permanent updating. With a permanent right of veto at its disposal against acts contrary to the main principles, this Upper House will also exercise preliminary constitutional review, curbing statutory inflation.
A second progress as regards democracy is that European representatives will be directly elected by the citizens, thanks to the proper voting system, the one that gives power to a genuine majority. Euro-MPs will no longer be people who failed being elected to their own Parliaments.
The third progress is that by being elected in wider constituencies, those representatives will gain international prominence and become the spokespersons of half a million voters if the European Parliament is limited to 500 seats. Thus placed on a par with the national governments, they will take the lead of the Union, for the same people will not be able to represent both the national and the European interests, which do not necessarily coincide.
But this is not all. If the federal principle enables the citizens to share out their sovereignty and vote at different levels (according to the “immediacy” principle), the party that they support must be represented. Democracy can only function if the voting system is not the same on the two sides of the border. Bipartisanship will make political stakes identical in all the countries of the Union. Protest parties or those defending a unique cause will have to blend into two large European parties and the two chief families of thought, the alternance of which in power in a democracy conditions the optimal dose of State that the society needs.
The European public space will no longer be reserved to the elected representatives, their collaborators, the lobbies and the European civil servants. Activists will now be able to talk with their counterparts on the other side of the border. The European poll will no longer serve faction leaders to count their supports at national level. Better still, an added value of the European construction will emerge. By virtue of the hierarchy of norms, member states themselves will now be subjected to the rules of democracy now clearly explained. States that will have taken too much liberty with the main principles of Law will have to refocus on their function. Major reforms will again become possible throughout the Union, which will make Europe more popular.
Contrary to the generally accepted idea, the European debate does not oppose federalists to sovereignists, for both need the federal principle in order to debate at the European level. The disagreements bear on the division of competences and the degree of state intervention. European expenses will be able to justify European taxation, liable to be administered at the national level just as local taxation. National taxes will not be harmonised by decision of European authorities but through imitation or persuasion and under the effect of competition between the states, anxious to remain competitive. Jurisdictional disputes will be mediated by a supreme instance that will produce a jurisdiction henceforth purely bearing on the problems of democracy. The European Union will then have gained its full legitimacy.
- The first constitutional project for Europe, a compilation of the treaties that was rejected by the French in 2005, was accompanied by a European Charter of Fundamental Rights, an order placed with the offices of the Commission in 2002 in order to fill a gap. This Charter lent credence to the idea that those rights pertain to the cultural sphere. Sociologists will find in it a compendium of the media stereotypes of our time. Cf. Jean Baechler, A propos de la Charte européenne des droits fondamentaux, Commentaire, n°104, Winter 2003-2004. ↩︎