Should the drop in consensus for the EU be blamed on the press and its short-sighted reporting or on inefficient governance?
Journalists tasked with following European events run the risk of covertly contributing to Euroscepticism. Correspondents in Brussels are supposed to provide a day by day account of the community’s dealings, marked by frustrating diplomatic marathons, inconclusive emergency summits, long legislative processes, trite bureaucratic expedients, minor last minute compromises and oft repeated clashes involving reciprocal national vetoes. Chancellor Bismarck used to say that “the less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep”. In their own way the Brussels journalist is in a kitchen, though not over a hob, and will tend to describe how a Wurst is cooked rather than informing their readers on what a sausage tastes like. Focused by the job on the minor detail rather than the overall picture, the correspondent runs the risk of transmitting a distorted or in any case disparaging image of the great community construct.
At a time when the European Union is not particularly popular one has to ask oneself to what extent the press is responsible for the general disenchantment that surrounds the unification project in many European countries. In Italy, the mass media risk having an even greater responsibility. By their very nature, 24 hour news channels have to string the news out, exaggerate the impact of the various news items, overdramatise diplomatic relations or parliamentary votes. Information or entertainment? Every day many newspapers tend to lean towards impressionism and to add theatrical spice to the Union’s activities. War, sports and even weather terminology abounds when describing the backdrop or the behind the scene news: clashes tensions, war, attacks, blows, ultimatums, freezes and storms. European dossiers are presented as if they were a long series of battles which necessarily decree victors and vanquished. And it matters little if the next day the situation is reversed and even less whether the journalistic reporting tweaks emotions and provides a distorted image of the European Union, banishes the great advantages that European countries have secured thanks to the community construct into the background and ends up ultimately reinforcing Euroscepticism.
This may feel like a rhetorical statement, but it’s less trivial that it may seem. The integration between European countries has guaranteed 70 years of peace on the European continent, the longest period without a conflict since the 16th century. When François Mitterand in 1995 announced in front of the European parliament that “nationalism is war”, the then French president was looking back at centuries of European history. All too often the gaze looks no further than the short term, to the two bloody world conflicts of the 20th century. Yet the historian Max Roser has calculated that between 1500 and 1800, if one divides this time span into 25 year periods, over 60% of the years, excluding the rather sedate 18th century, is marked by conflicts between the major continental powers. During the last five centuries there have been at least 50 wars between major European countries. Without going so far as to follow the perhaps overly optimistic dictates of Immanuel Kant in his essay published in 1795 –Zum ewigen Frieden – Ein philosophicher Entwurf , translated into English as ‘Perpetual peace, a philosophical sketch’, the long process of European integration has so far dampened the continent’s warmongering tendencies, ensuring a peace that at the end of the Second World War seemed an impossible achievement.
In this context, the European integration process has had an exceptional political, as well as economic, impact. Is it off the mark to ascribe the end of the dictatorships in Portugal and Spain in the Seventies to the gradual expansion of the European Economic Community to Ireland, the United Kingdom and Denmark? All too often it is believed that the Soviet Union and the United States were responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall, and particularly Ronald Reagan’s decision to equip America with its space shield, thus cornering the Soviet’s foreign policy. But Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to reform the state run economy was a reaction to the European decision to complete the single market and bolster the Union. Seen from Moscow’s perspective, the new Brussels’ commitments were considered a threat by the Soviet superpower. Ultimately, the Soviet leader’s strategy to review his country’s economic fabric to keep it in step with the times failed, leading to the dissolution of the Communist empire.
In 2019, the United Kingdom will leave the European Union. For the first time one of the carriages of the community’s convoy will be unhitched, instead of adding more. However, it is symptomatic that the list of those that wish to join Union is getting longer by the day: Serbia, Montenegro, Albania and Macedonia are the first in line. Moreover, the year has just begun that will mark the fortieth anniversary of the first universal suffrage for the European parliament. Almost 350 million European citizens will head for the polling stations between 23 and 26 May in the second largest instance of direct democracy after the one that takes place in India every five years. As a result of the recent institutional reforms, the parliamentary assembly, in conjunction with the Council, now takes on the role of co-legislator in a vast number of sectors: from immigration to consumer protection, from economic management to issues such as energy, the environment and transportation. “There was a time when at European summits the address by the European Parliament president was ignored by heads of state and government”, as a long-standing community officer recently admitted. “The French President Jacques Chirac was known for theatrically reading his copy of Le Figaro… Now his words are listened to very closely, and often lead to questions and reactions”.
As it happens, we tend to forget or underestimate the radical changes that the European Union has introduced on behalf of its citizens. The single market guarantees the free circulation of goods, capital, people and services within a geographic area inhabited by approximately 510 million people and covering an area of 4.4 million square kilometres. Companies are free to export without paying customs duties or having to adapt their products to specific national regulations. Workers can move from one country to another without needing a visa or showing their documents at the border, benefitting from health services in the country where they reside. Investors can purchase shares and bonds on any community market and easily transfer funds and open accounts abroad. The single market has enabled millions of students to study abroad, millions of travellers have taken advantage of the amazing drop in air fares and millions of consumers can make online purchases anywhere in Europe.
For ten years, at first the financial crisis, then the economic one and now the social and political one that burst onto the scene in 2008 with the dramatic bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in the United States is surprisingly challenging this entire outlook. Every European success story is noq vilified. The benefits of the Euro in terms of financial stability, trading instrument, political power are no longer believed. The focus in now on the excessive strictness of the rules, which are deemed too stringent. Even the benefits of the Single Market and the Schengen area are now overshadowed by what’s actually taking place on the ground. There are those who stress a possible over-regulation of the European Commission and those who worry about industrial delocalisation, unfair competition between workers from different countries, legal and illegal immigration. There are even those who wonder how the imposition of taxes remains an almost completely national affair, allowing a number of countries to use their tax regimes rather unscrupulously to attract investments or saving, to the detriment of their neighbour.
In the end, the current situation is shining a light of the increasing weakness of the European construct. The European Union as a confederation of sovereign states seems to have reached the end of the line. The doctrine of keeping one’s house in order, according to which it is possible to set up an increasingly close relationship between independent countries guaranteed by shared rules, is now being challenged by the need to guarantee new forms of solidarity between member states. The mutual control between member states and healthy competition between national governments is no longer beneficial. In fact, in many ways they heighten tension between countries. The current situation has shown how the various crises, whether economic, financial, social or migratory, cannot be solved by a series of national measures, even if they are coordinated amongst each other. The problems drag on, the dossiers are never closed; with the paradoxical result that Europe gives the impression of being ineffective, and thus contributing to a general lack of enthusiasm towards the European project.
On taking over the leadership of the European Commission in November 2014, the former Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker showed he was aware of this vicious circle. Over the years, without any radical change of an institutional nature, he has done his utmost to make the European Union more federal. He laid the bases for a union of the capital market, an energy union and a digital union. He exerted pressure to improve the foundations of the monetary union by fighting tooth and nail to strengthen the banking union as well as promoting a Euro zone budget. He has created two financial instruments – the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI) and the European Defence Fund (EDF), which are supposed to act as an economic and political flywheel for the entire European Union. He founded a new body of European volunteers to help integration among the young, along the lines of Erasmus, the University exchange programme. He also tried unsuccessfully to impose broader forms of solidarity in the management of migrants and refugees, but he did manage to create a body of European customs officials.
The effort has been considerable, and the attempt to federalise the approach is there for all to see. But as said, it is but an attempt. The many principles of a confederation of sovereign states remain in force: among them, the unanimous vote in many areas, including taxation and foreign policy; the absence of net financial transfers from one country to another to solve banking crises or deal with economic shocks; the impossibility of standardising social security and pension regulations.
Two threats hang over the future of the European construct. The current set up has proven unable to solve many new problems, but what’s worse is that this inefficiency is helping to embolden political radicalism in many countries. Those who want to safeguard the community structures must pursue the goal of reinforcing the Union’s federal structure, to make them more effective and thus parry the criticisms made by the more nationalist parties. In concrete terms, this means extending the number of areas in which the Council’s decisions are reached based on a simple or qualified majority, the harmonisation of national tax systems and a further enhancing of the role of the European parliament. It won’t be easy. These days, the difficulties that many countries are having to face induce them to fold back on themselves, rather than embrace the community’s ideals.
The last ten years have brought to light very profound differences between European countries. Getting the South to balance its accounts and the East to welcome migrants are serious issues that have triggered a new wave of nationalism. It would be naïve to solve them by imposing a top-down federal solution. The real challenge in the coming years is therefore to work towards greater European integration, in order to avoid the European construction being put on hold and war returning to the continent, but this must be done while retaining the cohesion between the various European sensibilities. The new French-German friendship treaty signed in Aachen at the end of January, despite its limitations, is a first step in this direction. In Italy and elsewhere, a responsible, informed, unbiased and conscientious press is called upon to play an essential part. After all, this very confused moment in history could provide suffering newspapers with a new raison d’ȇtre. As Paul Valéry used to say, “the future is not what it used to be”.
@BedaRomano
This article is also published in the March/April issue of eastwest.
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Should the drop in consensus for the EU be blamed on the press and its short-sighted reporting or on inefficient governance?
