How To Build A More Perfect Union

The United States of Europe isn’t a term to be uttered lightly, yet it was tripping over many tongues — in many tongues — as the Convention for the Future of Europe began last week. The meeting of the 105 delegates to the Convention, drawn from the 15 current European Union member states and 13 candidate countries, is tasked with solving some of the E.U.’s most stubborn conundrums. How to accord the necessary power to E.U. institutions without giving up the democratic control that now resides mostly in national capitals? How to untangle the often overlapping competences of local, regional, national and Continental governments? At a scheduled pace of one session a month under the stern leadership of former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the Convention has a Herculean task to complete within a year’s time.

Though allusions to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia were rife, the two gatherings are vastly dissimilar. In Philadelphia, a group of English-speaking males who had fought on the same side in a successful war of independence had a common vision of democratic government relatively unclouded by cultural and historical differences. What united the delegates in the inevitable late winter rain of Brussels is less clear. There is a general dissatisfaction with the current workings of the E.U., a feeling that the club is unable to punch its weight on the world stage, an uneasy disconnect between the E.U.’s citizens and the bloodless and byzantine machinations of its institutions. Euroskeptics — considerably underrepresented among the delegates — contend that more Europe means just more bureaucracy and less democracy. With all that on the table, the overwhelming sense that something is missing might not suffice to forge agreement. The Convention’s charge to create “more democracy, transparency and efficiency in the European Union” is noble to a fault, but it could easily fall prey to the jealous interests of members who feel they have more tradition to defend than did 13 young states on America’s eastern seaboard 215 years ago.

Despite the nebulous agenda, E.U. leaders know full well that matters can’t continue as they are. It took U.S. President George W. Bush two days to implement an executive order freezing the accounts of 27 organizations and individuals linked to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, notes one E.U. official. It took the E.U. three months to secure the legal basis for the same action “even though everyone wanted it,” the official says. And no one wants to revisit the squalid bickering that took place in December 2000 at the European Council in Nice, a summit that degenerated into an undignified tussle between small and large states before finally approving the historic enlargement of the E.U. by 2004.

The same heads of government, meeting last December at the Palace of Laeken in Brussels, plumped for Giscard to head the Convention. Though he is certainly an ideal avatar of French grandeur, with his aristocratic bearing and keen intelligence, many have questioned Giscard’s credentials for pointing the E.U. toward a future of greater democratic legitimacy. Before Thursday’s session kicked off, many Convention members were up in arms over Giscard’s proposed rules of procedure, which give the 12-person Presidium strong powers for setting the debate. “Giscard knows he’s not a popular man in this house,” says Andrew Duff, a British delegate to the Convention. “But he’ll champion the cause of making a recommendation that the heads of government feel obliged to support.”

Giscard recognizes the challenge. In a 40-minute speech that modulated from French to English to German and back to French, he conjured up the difficulties of steering the Convention past “the yawning abyss of failure” and through “the narrow portal of success.” Rather than a forum for diverging opinions, he called for the Convention “to become the melting pot in which, month by month, a common approach is worked out.” Only if that “Convention spirit” is maintained will Giscard arrive at a “broad consensus on a single proposal” with enough force to prevail once the Convention is over. In the most overtly political portion of his speech, Giscard stressed that the E.U. can’t hold up against other world powers, existing or future, unless its member states work together. “The world would feel better if it could count on Europe,” he said, a Europe that could “proclaim, whenever necessary, a message of tolerance and moderation, of openness toward difference, and of respect for human rights.”

Not much to disagree with there. But while common purpose was being espoused in Brussels, Umberto Bossi, head of Italy’s once-separatist Northern League and part of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s governing coalition, was characterizing the E.U. as a “Stalinist European super state, the Soviet Union of the West.” Meanwhile in Germany, the sputtering economic engine of Europe, the exigencies of an election campaign are re-intensifying the lively tradition of blaming Brussels. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, having quashed a European Commission warning letter over his government’s mounting deficit, appears ready to wage his domestic campaign against Brussels — something his opposition rival Edmund Stoiber has been doing for years.

It’s an old game. As long as E.U. policy is perceived as being made by a cabal of unelected Eurocrats and government leaders in closed sessions, voters can be sold the line that the Union is some malign force. The truth is that Brussels is nothing more or less than what the member governments have made it. Optimists suggest that since government figures are among the Convention delegates, scapegoating Brussels will be difficult. Perhaps. But to stymie that temptation once and for all, the Convention will have to figure out how to tether the Union to the hopes rather than the fears of Europe’s citizens.