EDITO- At the last European Council meeting, not knowing what to do right now to get out of the psychological crisis caused by the no votes in France and the Netherlands, the EU’s leaders agreed to prolong the period of reflection. The fundamental reason they are lost, is however, as they are looking in the wrong place: Brussels.
The reality is that the crisis is with all our democratic systems. This does not mean that the EU can pat itself on the back and pretend that there is no problem – quite the contrary. However, it does imply that a fundamental change is necessary for the citizen to re-engage at every level, not just in Brussels.
At its heart, thechallenge is one of changing our mindset. We like to think that we have developed a functioning democratic system – indeed one that is so good that it should be exported by force to countries like Iraq. It is therefore hard for many to accept that the Emperor is now naked, that a post-industrial society of the 21st Century needs a new way of governing. We are rightly awestruck with the heritage we have of governmental systems and institutions that were built to respond to industrialisation, war (including cold war) and the emergence of mass politics.
But unfortunately these structures need major change. To start with the structures of government are hierarchically constructed, with decisions at the top, and execution at the bottom, corresponding to the logic of ministerial accountability, but also to an era when information was power, information was only given to an elite few, and time could be taken before having to act on incoming information. In an era when information is abundant, and the pressure for instant response by a real-time obsessed media is intense, hierarchy malfunctions. Either decisions are rushed, and important perspectives are left out, or informal networks of individuals are created, muddying the lines of accountability and responsibility for decisions that are taken.
Moreover problem issues are artificially cut into policy areas; these are then sliced into smaller chunks, and allocated to a department, which then snips them into smaller bits, which are the handled by a sub-unit. The fact that real world problems are cross-cutting and systemic in their nature is an annoyance, but not one that stops procrustean logic from being applied. Consequently too many challenges are inadequately addressed (environmental being only the most obvious), no matter how many “cabinet committees” or “co-ordination cells” are set up.
The nation state has marked our lives even spreading to new places at the end of the 20th Century. Naturally we have institutions that reflect this. But the fundamental challenges to our prosperity, peace and well-being come from outside any single country’s geographical borders (global warming, financial instability, migration etc.). Even if the European Union were to act as a single entity (which many Member State governments do not wish to see), this problem would remain, as Europe’s success has been precisely to reduce the number of problems which are purely internal in nature, and the real challenges to our peace and prosperity are now in Asia, Africa as well as North and South America.
All could be well if it were possible to mobilise large bodies of citizens either within or across frontiers for a broad platform of change. In reality however, political parties have lost their bases in societies, constantly shrinking in size, as the traditional axis of ideological divide – how to create and spread wealth - has all but disappeared. Socialists may pretend to be more redistributive than liberals, but in reality most mainstream parties in Europe today offer a small variation on a managed free market economy. Why should the citizens get excited about the choice between two or more teams competing to get jobs for themselves, each claiming to be a better technocratic manager than the other?
Citizens do mobilise about specific issues which touch their heart – or their wallet – directly. The rise of single issue groups, and an amorphous self-proclaimed civil society, shows that depoliticisation is not inevitable. However it does reflect the fact that identity with traditional institutions that offer a total world view such as churches, parties and trade unions, are on the decline as individualisation spreads with higher levels of education and growing wealth. Those organisations that can tap an individuals feelings can still mobilise large numbers, but, given their single-issue nature, they are poorly placed to offer trade-offs between issues.
Even more fundamentally, as trade-offs are too often perceived (mistakenly) as zero sum games, the price of being the member of a community is argued over. Basques, Catalans, Scots, Welsh, and the Flemish, are just the most obvious groups among those who challenge status quo of their identity, often mixing perceptions of themselves as a nation or linguistic group, with economic considerations.
The same challenge is presented differently by immigrant communities inside of the European Union, who thanks to the rise of global satellite coverage, and the internet, are able to remain much more in contact with “where they came from”. The myth of a single geographical, linguistic and even ethnic community automatically having a community of identity and interest is thus under severe challenge given this combination of immigration and multi-level sense of belonging. This not surprisingly is leading to a populist reaction.
Given this accumulation of problems, it is not enough to tinker with the EU constitution and pretend that at some point in the future a new treaty can be adopted. As with all organic bodies, our European systems of institutions (national and EU) need a step change. Without wishing in any way to make an exhaustive list, some of the ideas could include: - radically re-thinking the way that issues are looked at: in an era of visualisation tools for complexity management, it seems amazing that most public documents are never anything else than written (left brain, linear-logic) text, and that collaborative dialogue techniques (where each participant is held to have a perspective that is part of the truth) are never used instead of sterile debating methods (where I am right, and You are necessarily wrong); - changing the process for public policy formulation to include actors in multi-stakeholder processes from the get-go, building scenarios of the future, and making publicly available films of the challenges as perceived by the policy maker; - almost eliminating the concept of a ministry, replacing it with teams of ministers and civil servants with different areas of expertise who tackle cross-cutting issues as a team in a systemic way; - clearly separating “thinking” (policy formulation) from “doing” (the administration of policy) and out-sourcing as much of the latter as possible, so as to reduce the size of the hierarchies required, and give focus to what government is about; - making the passage of officials from one level of government (e.g. national to European) as seamless as possible, as well as the passage from government to private (including civil society) and inverse.
What should be avoided is a “master plan” approach. The post-industrial society needs to have an emergent political system that organically grows. And first of all, for right now, it requires that Europe’s politicians should cease to pretend that the problem lies in Brussels. It is time to admit that WE ALL have a problem.
Conférence 'Italie/Europe: La démocratie en danger' avec Beppe Grillo, 6 février 2010 - Paris Marianne Ranke-Cormier, directrice de publication de Newropeans Magazine présente Franck Biancheri, président de Newropeans, un des pères fondateurs du programme Erasmus et directeur de recherche de LEAP2020.
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EDITO - At the last European Council meeting, not knowing what to do right now to get out of the psychological crisis caused by the no votes in France and the Netherlands, the EU’s leaders agreed to prolong the period of reflection. The fundamental reason they are lost, is however, as they are looking in the wrong place: Brussels. 
The three post-war scenarios regarding EU-US relations
