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Integration and legitimation

The European Union (EU) leadership, which is consolidating the framework agreed upon in June for the Reform Treaty in place of the aborted constitution, is again beset with the issue of the mode of ratification. Although national parliaments are expected to endorse the document in most cases, strong demands for a referendum from some quarters underline the potency of Euroscepticism even 50 years after the inception of the EU. Britain’s opposition has predictably seiz ed the chance to press Prime Minister Gordon Brown to redeem the government’s promise of a plebiscite on the failed charter. The Labour party leadership has contended that the current treaty is not the same as the constitution and therefore ratification by parliament should suffice. The Conservatives dismiss this argument as an attempt to shy away from an open and transparent debate. But regardless of the predilections of both sides, the assumption that prima facie, a referendum is a more democratic form of decision-making — because citizens directly participate in such an exercise — is true only in theory. If legislative decisions are susceptible to manipulation by the majority, the ‘yes or no’ format of referenda is subject to the criticism that it oversimplifies issues. Moreover, as demonstrated in France and the Netherlands in 2005, a referendum can be hijacked by other issues, with the whole exercise being turned into a verdict on the incumbent government’s performance.

Governments have also converted plebiscites into populist tools on controversial questions, as it happened in the United Kingdom over the proposed adoption of the euro currency and in France over Turkey’s membership of the EU. In fact, the referendum option has been foreclosed in the post-war constitutions of some EU states following its abuse under the Weimar Republic. Given the relative merits and demerits of the two devices, adopting a rigid stance on one or the other is to hold the current Treaty hostage to the machinations of political opponents. The more basic task before the EU is one of investing the exercise of treaty formulation, as well as its adoption, with popular legitimacy. The single market, a single currency, borderless travel, and much else that were only in the realm of ideas five decades ago can now be taken for granted. Europe’s leadership should drive home the message that individual member-states will be better equipped to confront the challenges of global competition under the banner of a united Europe, in much the same way that they had achieved prosperity, stability and peace in the decades after the second world war.

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