Ambassador's Corner

WEEKLY MESSAGE FROM AMBASSADOR JOHN BRUTON

June 2, 2009

A visit to Brussels and Dublin

Last week I spent most of the working week in Brussels, and a very enjoyable weekend in sunny Ireland where temperatures were actually higher than in Spain.

In Brussels I met with the Vice President of the European Commission, Jacques Barrot [second row, second from right, in photo below showing all European Commissioners]; the EU Commissioner for External Relations, Benita Ferrero-Waldner [first row, extreme left]; and other key officials in the European Commission, the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament. I also met with the European Policy Centre, the Centre for European Policy Studies and the American European Community Association.

The world’s largest multinational democracy goes to the polls

This week starting Thursday, the voters of the 27 European Union Member States go to the polls to elect 736 members of European Parliament. The democratically-elected European Parliament amends and adopts legislation governing 500 million EU citizens. The rôle of the directly-elected Parliament in passing laws for 27 nation-states makes the European Union the only truly multinational democracy in the world. No other multinational organization has a directly-elected Parliament.

The distribution of seats in the European Parliament reflects population but with a bias in favour of smaller countries.

In general, the European Parliament [left] enacts legislation jointly with the Council of Ministers of the European Union [below] under a procedure known as co-decision. In the Council of Ministers, Ministers from the Governments of the 27 States look at the same legislation as the Parliament from the perspective of their own State. In a sense, the Council of Ministers performs a rôle similar to that of the United States Senate (i.e. representing states), while the directly-elected European Parliament is more like the House of Representatives.

There are significant differences, of course, between the European Union and the United States systems.

Individual members of the European Parliament cannot initiate laws themselves. Draft laws are usually put forward by the European Commission in the EU. Both the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers can amend legislation and both can request that the Commission bring forward legislation on a particular topic. The Commission frequently brings forward draft laws in response to such requests.

Sometimes the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers will disagree on how to amend a legislative proposal. In this case, they will negotiate with one another and agree on a compromise proposal, as happens when House and Senate versions of legislation on a particular subject diverge. These negotiations take place away from the public eye, another similarity with the US system.

If the Lisbon Treaty is ratified by all 27 Member States, the powers of the European Parliament will substantially increase. Whereas, at the moment, the Parliament is a co-equal legislator with the Council of Ministers on 75% of all topics dealt with at EU level, under the Lisbon Treaty it would become co-equal on almost 100% of the topics.

Already in 2006, the European Parliament has seen its powers increased by allowing it to scrutinize whether and how EU laws have been put into practice in every Member State.

The European Parliament has a good record of getting its ideas accepted. When the co-decision procedure is used, more than 80% of the European Parliament’s amendments to legislation are ultimately adopted and converted into law. [Click on chart below, left, for detail.]

In the US Congress, a huge volume of legislative proposals are initiated, but very few of them ever become law. During the 109th Congress elected in 2004, for example, 10,703 public bills and joint resolutions were introduced, but only 417 or 4% became public laws. This happens partly because there is no restraint on the number of Bills individual Senators and House members can put forward.

In contrast, in the EU, Members of the European Parliament cannot initiate legislation on their own and members of the Council of Ministers can only do so only in very limited circumstances. As stated earlier, the Commission is, generally speaking, the sole initiator of EU laws. But the Commission only puts forward proposals for new EU laws after extensive consultation and when it has satisfied itself that there is a good prospect that both the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers will agree with the general terms of what it is proposing. Thus, in the EU, laws, once proposed, have a very good chance of being passed in one form or another. This is not the case with the thousands of draft laws put forward in Congress, most of which never come out of Committee.

The Commission, like the US Administration, sometimes may object strongly to amendments being proposed by either the Parliament or the Council of Ministers to legislation it has put forward. The European Commission can, in those circumstances, delay further progress by insisting that the Council of Ministers vote by unanimity, and unanimity among 27 Ministers is not easy to find. But this is a power the Commission is reluctant to use.

Many worried, when the European Union enlarged to a total of 27 Member States, that the legislative process of the European Union would be slowed down because, it was feared, majorities would be harder to find in both the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers. Most experts would now agree that this has not in fact happened and that the pace of legislation in the enlarged Union has been similar to that when there were fewer Member States.

One would think, as the powers the European Parliament (EP) have been increased, that an increasing proportion of EU citizens would turn out to vote for their Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). Strangely, this is not the case. The first direct election to the European Parliament (EP) took place in 1979, at a time when the Parliament’s rôle was purely consultative, and 62% of the citizens of the then 9 Member States turned out to vote. In 2004, although the Parliament’s powers had been substantially increased in the meantime, only 45% of eligible voters voted – much less than in 1979.

Leaving out countries where voting is compulsory, the turnout varied in 2004 from a high of 82% in Malta to a low of 16.7% in Slovakia. That said, the overall turnout was similar to the turnout in an off-year Congressional election in the US, when there is no Presidential election on the same day. In the 2006 US Congressional elections, voter turnout was 36.8% for the House of Representatives and 29.7% for the Senate, both less than the 45% turnout in the 2004 European Parliament elections. 

The US experience suggests that turnout in the EP elections would be much higher if Europeans were also allowed to vote directly on who should be the President of the Commission, on the same day as they vote for their Members of the European Parliament. The much higher US turnout in Presidential election years suggests that this would be the case in Europe too.

An interesting study entitled “The European Parliament – More powerful, less legitimate?” by the Centre for European Policy Studies cited a number of reasons for lack of voter interest in European Parliament elections. These include:

• “European policy on the whole is rather difficult to politicise.”
• “The multilingual nature (of its debates) reduces capacity for a quick exchange of pertinent viewpoints.”
• “The lack of a clear divide between governing and opposition parties means that coalitions shift from policy issue to policy issue.”

In most EU Member States, MEPs are chosen on the basis of lists of candidates already placed in order by their party. Voters choose among parties rather than individuals, and this makes the elections less interesting, especially if the parties’ policies of European (as distinct from local or national) issues may not differ all that much.

My own personal opinion is that voters are usually more interested in people than they are in either parties or ideologies. So if we wish to get more voters to come out to vote in European elections, we must personalize the European Union. Every few years, the Presidential Election personalizes the choice that Americans make between two individual candidates for President. That choice engages voters’ imaginations in a way that voting for party lists never can. It also creates a personal link between each American voter and the person who presides over their Union.

The direct election of a European Parliament may be a sign of things to come in global governance. Most political and economic developments that affect our daily lives nowadays are shaped by global forces, forces which are beyond the full control of even the largest national democracies. If rules made to govern global forces are to have democratic legitimacy, we will have to extend democracy above the level of the nation-state. To democratize globalization, other parts of the world may have to introduce regional multinational democratic systems like the European Parliament. The election of the European Parliament this week is an important signpost for global democracy.

Please send me your comments about this or any of my weekly messages or other EU matters. I look forward to hearing from you!