Leonard: Why many MEPs don't believe in the European Union

Europe's Self-Hating Parliamentarians. By Mark Leonard
Why many MEPs don't believe in the European Union.
WSJ, Jun 09, 2009

The European Parliament is in the throes of an early midlife crisis. Although newspaper headlines are focused on the strong performance of center-right parties, the 2009 vote is more likely to be remembered for the election of so many self-hating parliamentarians.

A substantial minority of members (MEPs) see their role as reducing rather than expanding the European Union's power. This is a remarkable change for a body that fought tooth-and-nail to extend its authority every time a new EU treaty was negotiated.

The paradox of the European Parliament is that as its power has grown, the public's interest in its activities has declined. Each election has brought lower voter turnout than the one before. Even more brutal than this year's turnout: Many of parliament's new members don't believe that the body in which they sit should be allowed to exist.

Take the colorful Geert Wilders, whose anti-Islamic-immigrant party shot up to second place in the Netherlands with 17% of the vote after the Christian Democrats, who won 19.9%. He ran on a manifesto that included a pledge to abolish the European Parliament. In the United Kingdom, the two biggest parties were the Conservative Party (committed to abolishing the Lisbon Treaty) and the Independence Party (committed to getting Britain out of the EU). The British National Party picked up two seats with its pledge to "end the blood-sucking scam" of the EU.

In Austria, the xenophobic Freedom Party got 13% of the vote with a call to remove the EU from Austria's affairs. A party set up to protest against the abuses of the European Parliament managed to pick up 17.9% of the vote. Anti-European populists also picked up significant support in Hungary, Denmark, Slovakia and Finland.

This trend tells us a lot about the dynamics of the EU as a political system. From the beginning, European integration has been defined by two trends: technocracy and populism.

On the one hand, the EU is the ultimate technocratic project. The so-called Monnet approach -- named after the key architect of European integration, the French official Jean Monnet -- is designed to generate a consensus among European diplomats for limited projects of practical cross-border cooperation. Each of these projects should lead to further integration in various policy areas.

The success of the technocrats has been phenomenal. They created first a coal and steel community, then a customs union, then a single market and even a single currency.

It was the very success of the EU as a bureaucratic phenomenon that fueled a populist backlash. This first started as a localized phenomenon, with Margaret Thatcher famously demanding a refund for Britain in the 1980s. Now, it is a pan-European force. The populists come from the left and right, but their common complaint is that the EU is an elite conspiracy, a project to build "Europe against the people." In its place, they plan to mobilize the "people against Europe."

Though people in Brussels talk about technocracy and populism as opposites, in fact they are mutually reinforcing. The more EU leaders try to remove European integration from national politics, the more brittle the EU's legitimacy becomes, which in turn means that policy makers want to further evade public opinion. And the more technocratic the EU becomes, the stronger the calls for democracy and referendums, which in turn create a space for populist parties to emerge.

Since the moment that Jean Monnet turned his mind to uniting Europe, technocracy has been a cornerstone of the EU. Populism has now been sanctified as part of the EU's structure through the introduction of referendums and elections to the European Parliament.

If national and EU officials are going to avoid total gridlock going forward, they will need to deepen their understanding of the domestic politics of the 27 states of the EU and spend time analyzing and engaging public opinion.

In order for the EU to emerge from its midlife crisis, the next generation of EU technocrats will need to be populists as well.

Mr. Leonard is executive director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.