By ROBIN SHEPHERD From today's Wall Street Journal Europe.
The Czech parliament's reluctant approval of the European Union's Lisbon Treaty last week was hardly an occasion to boast about. Even the country's prime minister, Mirek Topolánek, felt obliged to note that it was no time for "euphoria" -- the Czechs, he all but admitted, had been pushed into it as "the price of membership." Not what you'd call a ringing endorsement.
But hailing it all as "very good news" that will enhance the prospects for Ireland's repeat referendum later this year, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, was reveling in it. It was an event, he said, that reflected a "commitment to a more democratic, accountable, effective and coherent European Union." Contemporary Europe is a world of competing realities.
For the commission and its ideological praetorians, the path of history is preordained. Paradoxically, though, its end state is never defined. And so we are heading toward "an ever closer union" whose benefits we must accept on faith. In this version of reality, words do not mean what we think they mean.
"No" in a ballot on a treaty is not an acceptable response. Strange constructions such as "failed referendum" enter the discourse. Failed? Did someone lose the ballot boxes? Did the voters perhaps turn up on the wrong day? Is that what happened in France, the Netherlands and Ireland? Do we say that a general election failed if the party we support loses?
In this world, deception has become an acceptable course of action: The original European Constitution called the EU's mooted foreign policy supremo the "Foreign Minister" while the Lisbon Treaty -- a completely different document, we are falsely told -- calls the same position the "High Representative for Foreign Affairs."
In this world, democracy is a second-order priority, but it is also a world in which that blindingly obvious conclusion can never be openly acknowledged. Hence the obfuscations. Hence the impenetrable jargon. And hence that growing sense of unease among those who see value in cooperation between the nations of Europe but for whom liberal democracy is an end in itself. It is a sense of unease that this is all sliding out of control.
Stating the nature of the problem, though, is easier than suggesting a solution. Consider the British Conservative Party -- the most prominent opponent of deeper integration in mainstream European politics. It has been launching rhetorical broadsides against the "Brussels elite" for years. Simultaneously, the Tories have consistently signed up to every treaty that has been put before them in government. Margaret Thatcher's famous Bruges Speech of 1988, for example, unfavorably contrasted the centralizing tendencies of Brussels with decentralization policies in Mikhail Gorbachev's Soviet Union. And yet only two years earlier the same Margaret Thatcher had signed the Single European Act -- the most important document in the European integration process since the Treaty of Rome.
Opponents of deeper integration seem as proficient at falling into line on the European Union as they are at subsequently weeping about it. Perhaps that's because they have never really defined what it is they want. If all political organizations must be underpinned by democratic principles, we must be prepared for some radical changes to the EU we envisage. Even among the Lisbon Treaty's fiercest opponents it is not clear that their concerns about the EU's democracy gap have yet been pushed to their logical conclusion.
Take Libertas, the Irish group that led the "no" campaign against the Lisbon Treaty in last year's referendum. It says it will contest next month's European Parliament elections on pledges to ensure that all EU treaties are passed by referendums in every EU member state, to make every EU law subject to a vote in the European Parliament, and to ensure that all EU officials with "the power to decide on a law" are democratically elected. These are noble sentiments. But they would not on their own address the core problem.
And that problem is that democracy is impossible without a demos. There is no "European People" for the European Commission to be accountable to. Primary political loyalties reside inside the nation state, the only place where a genuine demos exists. The democratic deficit, therefore, is not so much due to the lack of referendums, inadequate powers for the European Parliament or an absence of accountability generally. Rather, the problem is the presence of wide-ranging powers in a set of institutions that don't command the loyalty of the people over which they rule.
The challenge for Europe's democrats is to define precisely which issues can be dealt with outside the realm of the nation state and which must return to it or remain within it. The point of departure, then, must be a clear recognition that all policies that remove legislative prerogatives from the nation state to Brussels take those powers outside the democratic realm. The logic of this cannot be ducked.
There are some, of course, who might say that that is a price worth paying. Cooperative arrangements at the supra-national level allow for economies of scale. Nations can far better achieve their goals via the multiplier effect of working together even if that does hurt democracy at the margins.
The problem is that the harm to European democracy can no longer be described as marginal. The repeat referendums and the deceptions that have surrounded them have set new and dangerous precedents in the political culture of Europe. The price we are paying has become too high.
So does this mean that the entire project must now be unraveled? Should it be scaled down to nothing more than a glorified free-trade zone? It doesn't and it shouldn't. The EU could still engage in an enormous range of activities, from cooperation on energy policy, through foreign and defense policy to the environment and a host of others. But that cooperation must satisfy a number of conditions in order to be compatible with democracy.
First, all decision-making powers must return to the intergovernmental level. As the likely low turnout in June's European elections will again show, the European Parliament is an irrelevance to most Europeans. Scrap it.
Second, the treaty-based nature of the contemporary EU means that agreements have the kind of once-and-for-all character that does not allow people to change their minds. That is not democratic. A new formula should be worked out in which agreements have validity for only fixed time limits, after which they can be reviewed.
Third, the competences of the European courts should be restricted to enforcing only those policies that have been agreed upon by unanimity at the intergovernmental level. The idea that treaty opt-outs agreed by member states can simply be overturned by EU judges is an affront to democratically elected national governments. It also contributes to a sense among many citizens that Europe is deceiving them.
Even from this brief list of suggestions it is clear that there would be an almighty struggle over them. But scoring debating points against the excesses of the status quo will no longer suffice. The opponents of an "ever closer union" need to spell out a viable alternative.
Mr. Shepherd is director of international affairs at the Henry Jackson Society.
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