Two unions an ocean apart but not so different

By Martin Woollacott

LONDON: It may seem a long way from Florida, where the tussle for the American presidency is in its final stage, to the south of France, where European Union leaders will meet in Nice next month to decide on various reforms. But the problems of the two unions are not as different as might at first appear.

The loss of legitimacy in the new world is matched by a failure to gain it in the old. And, in each case, a probably illusory remedy is sought in institutional changes which may not deal with underlying causes.

The United States is suddenly full of plans to reform the electoral college, and, after a money-driven campaign, there are many Americans who want campaign finance reform, although they know they are unlikely to get it in this coming term.

Europe is talking of constitutional changes like those for a new European second chamber or for the direct election of the president of the commission. Such ideas are not for discussion at the Nice Summit, where the proposals on the table concern the re- weighting of national votes, the reduction of national veto powers, and the redistribution of commission portfolios.

These, if agreed, may make the union more efficient and occasionally allow a majority of members to push through decisions unpalatable to a minority. But they will not make the union one whit more democratic in terms of accountability to its citizens. That is why the broader reform proposals, recently revived by Joskscha Fischer, the German foreign minister, will be in the background as a possible means of redressing Europe's democratic deficit.

That phrase may underestimate the difficulties. Nick Clegg, a Liberal Democrat member of the European Parliament, warns in a recent pamphlet of the possibility of "a full scale rout of the EU institutions". Turnout for European elections, he says, may sink as low as 20 per cent in many countries in the next decade. In Clegg's view, the emergence of the council of ministers as a directorate, issuing orders to commission and parliament alike, can only reinforce this tendency.

Yet he is not warm to the idea of a second chamber, which he thinks would add complexity without enhancing democracy and which would be dogged by absenteeism. He recommends instead a common sense trimming of the European Commission's tasks, so that it could revert to its innovatory and strategic role, while a more rigorous parliament kept both commission and council under effective surveillance.

National parliaments and governments have more legitimacy in the eyes of citizens than the union's institutions, yet this too is eroding, as the review of voting levels in European countries earlier this week in the Guardian showed.

Rather than contrasting the faith citizens have in national governments with that in the European Union, it may be more appropriate to conceive of a spectrum of distrust of politicians wherever they are located. The level of distrust has been rising in both Europe and America for a long time. In 1960 three out of four Americans agreed that politicians in Washington could be trusted; by the 1990s three out of four agreed they could not be trusted.

The question would-be reformers have to ask themselves, of course, is whether political disillusion is a product of the misbehavior of politicians or of the malfunctioning of constitutional arrangements, or whether it has deeper causes.

The work of Robert D. Putnam, whose studies of civic engagement began in Italy, where he described profound differences between the north and south, and continued in the United States, suggest that political disillusion is a function of a general shift away from almost every form of social connection, from playing bridge or entertaining at home to going to meetings or standing for office.

Social capital, the accumulation of habits and attitudes that build trust in economic and political life and which, among other things, school people in democracy, has accordingly diminished, he argues in his book, Bowling Alone. The causes he assigns, in various tentative proportions, to generational change, television, suburban sprawl, and new ways of working.

Others have examined some of these changes in many countries, as the prevalence of the term "civic society" indicates. But Putnam's is an outstandingly comprehensive, painstaking, wise, and historically aware investigation.

His thesis is that Americans born between 1910 and 1940 represent a "long civic generation" who were more engaged than either their predecessors or their successors for a variety of historical reasons. It was this generation which maintained community in American neighborhoods through a thick web of social connections and sustained churches, charitable organizations, veterans' bodies, business groups, sporting clubs, and political parties.

As they pass from the scene, all these suffer or are transmuted into associations that may have huge "memberships" but which are, in fact, professionally led advocacy organizations, whose members contribute only money.

Political parties come to depend more on paid staff rather than unpaid volunteers and active members, and more on advertising and media management rather than on citizens attempting to convince one another. It is not at all clear, Putnam adds, that the hopes that the internet will supply some of these deficiencies will be justified.

Putnam is editing a book which examines trends in European and other countries. The picture, he says, is one of a continent not yet "exhibiting anything like the same dramatic decline" but nevertheless moving in a similar direction. "On some core features of civic society -- religious involvement, union membership, party membership, voting, trust in public institutions -- the figures are going the same way."

Lack of long runs of data on such habits as entertaining at home make it difficult to track the more informal social connections of Europeans, but intuition suggests they too are going the same way. In some countries an equivalent to the American "long civic generation" may be identifiable, in others, like Germany, the opposite might be deemed to be the case.

Yet in a much more patchy way, it can be argued, such a generation can be discerned more diverse than its American equivalent because of the different experiences of European states and running on a different time scale, but one that has also been giving way over the years to less engaged successors.

This would be the generation whose leaders reinvented much of European politics after the war and who created the European Community. If the kind of analysis which Putnam and other social scientists offer is accepted, the central political problem in both continents is civic rather than constitutional or legal.

How to overcome it is, naturally, the hardest part of any analysis, but recognition of the priority of that task would be a good start.

-- Guardian News Service