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The aversion that many in Britain now feel towards the EU springs from the right instinct but leads to the wrong answer. Undoubtedly, Brussels disdains democracy and luxuriates in unaccountability. David Cameron’s hollow compromise will do precisely nothing to address this. Yet at the same time, a vote for “Brexit” in the forthcoming referendum is not the answer either.
[...] This is, in an important respect, the deeper cause of the aversion that many in Britain instinctively harbour for the EU. And they are right: the price of de-politicising political decisions has been not merely the defeat of democracy at EU level but also poor economic policies throughout Europe. [...]
Today Europeans everywhere, from Helsinki to Lisbon, from Dublin to Crete, from Leipzig to Aberdeen, are feeling let down by EU institutions. Many are attracted to the idea of tearing up the EU, except that they remain wedded to the single market. Brexit campaigners are promising voters that they can have their sovereignty and access to Europe’s single market. But this is a false promise.
A truly single market, a genuinely level playing field, requires a single legal framework, identical industry, labour and environmental protection standards, and courts that will enforce them with the same determination throughout the single jurisdiction. But this then also requires a common parliament that writes the laws to be implemented across the single market as well as an executive that enforces the courts’ decisions. [...]
But what is the alternative? If neither the retreat into the cocoon of the nation state nor surrender to the disintegrating democracy-free zone known as the EU are good options, is there a third way?
Yes, there is. It is the one that official “Europe”, and some local elites, resist with every sinew of their authoritarian mindset: a surge of democracy, orchestrated by Europeans seeking to regain control over their lives from unaccountable technocrats, complicit politicians and opaque institutions.
On 9 February some of us, convinced of the above, are gathering in Berlin to found a new movement – DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025). [...]
One simple, radical idea is our motivating force: to democratise the EU in the knowledge that it will otherwise disintegrate at a terrible cost to all. Our immediate priority is full transparency in decision-making (live-streaming of European councils, Ecofin and Eurogroup meetings; full disclosure of trade negotiations; ECB minutes, etc) and the urgent redeployment of existing EU institutions in the pursuit of policies that genuinely address the crises of debt, banking, inadequate investment, rising poverty and migration.
Our medium-term goal is to convene a constitutional assembly where Europeans will deliberate on how to bring forward, by 2025, a fully fledged European democracy, featuring a sovereign parliament that respects national self-determination and shares power with national parliaments, regional assemblies and municipal councils.
Is this utopian? Of course it is. But no more so than the notion that the current EU can survive its anti-democratic hubris, and the gross incompetence fuelled by its unaccountability. Or the idea that democracy can be revived in the bosom of a nation-state asphyxiating within transnational “single” markets and opaque free trade agreements. [...]