Kozlowski: Europe’s democracy problem

The eurozone is in deficit trouble.

In the short term, it faces the five-alarm blaze of the… The eurozone is in deficit trouble.

In the short term, it faces the five-alarm blaze of the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain), deficits and bailouts, austerity, recession and angry Germans. This is the big and obvious problem.

But there’s a subtler and more insidious problem that fewer people have noticed: a democracy deficit. Many major changes are being made without the advice and consent of the governed: from the structure of bailouts to the increased integration of the EU, lessening national sovereignty, to a series of modifications to the EU treaty to technocratic governments that have taken power in some countries without popular mandates. And the arrangements could adversely affect both the continent and the rest of the world.

Even in good times, the EU is not especially democratic. The European Commission, which calls most of the shots in Brussels, is elected by national parliaments rather than directly by the people. The European Central Bank is appointed by agreement of various heads of state. Other regulations are written by bureaucrats not even nominally accountable to any elected body.

Even the European Parliament has its problems. For one thing, it’s very difficult to establish trans-European political parties, as Conservatives in the U.K. hold very different policy positions than those in Italy or Sweden. The Lisbon Treaty, a modification to the EU constitution, requires ratification by all 27 member states and has failed in every country to which it has been subjected to referendum. Those referendums were ultimately rendered irrelevant when the parliaments of those countries voted to ratify anyway, entirely disregarding the referendum results. And if you were to conduct a poll in Germany about EU bailouts, you would find that the views of ordinary Germans differ markedly from those of the Bundestag, the country’s federal legislative body.

None of these things, taken separately, would be a big deal. After all, we consider our own country fairly democratic, and yet Congress votes on unpopular laws all the time. A constitutional amendment could be passed without any input from the people. Some things need to be kept isolated from politics because they’re esoteric, and others need to be left above politics, such as federal judges and the appointment of generals.

In the European Union, however, an entire government and series of governments is setting up a large bureaucracy that is both immensely powerful and not directly accountable to the people. This can lead to disaster — if the U.S. Constitution had gone into effect without a majority of the states ratifying it, I doubt that it would have lasted more than just a few years.

Granted, riots in Greece were always going to be ugly — nobody likes being told that their paycheck and benefits are going to be cut or that they’re going to have to pay more in taxes. What’s galling, however, is being told that these things are all going to happen through the actions of a government you never elected in order to satisfy the demands of some Germans and, worse still, surrender to the French. This also allows the political parties in Greece to paper over an inconvenient fact — that they’d lied for years about those benefits, because maintaining them was fiscally unsustainable. It’s much easier to blame it all on the Germans than on Greek politicians and those who elected them. A European democracy deficit becomes a strong argument for leaving the euro behind entirely: Why should a country belong to an organization that does things the citizens don’t like, with no obvious option for getting them to stop?

Finally, a nonconsensual centralization of power often breeds discontent. Consider Yugoslavia. Marshal Tito tried to bring the fractious Balkans together and rule them from Belgrade, and within 10 years of his death peripheral nations like Croatia felt marginalized. There was an outbreak of nationalism and the messy breakup of Yugoslavia.

I’m not suggesting that the EU will experience the equivalent of the Yugoslav Civil War, but when there finally is a backlash against an overweening Brussels, when nationalist political parties gain power in various member countries and when the people of those member countries fail to see the benefits of being bossed around by leaders they didn’t elect, there’s a very real potential for a messy breakup.

Europe has flirted with not-very-democratic governments in the past, and all of them ended badly. It looks as though the EU might be continuing in this unfortunate pattern.

Write kozthought@gmail.com.