Despotism In Brussels? Misreading the European Union

The process of European integration that has produced the European Union (EU) is the most ambitious and most successful example of peaceful international cooperation in world history. In the last half-century, Europe has liberalized trade, coordinated macroeconomic policies, and centralized regulatory decision-making. The single market and single currency mean that most new western European laws and regulations covering commercial and financial matters now originate in Brussels rather than in national capitals. A majority of Europe's leaders, businesspeople, and citizens believe the EU has contributed to the spread of unprecedented prosperity, peace, and democracy throughout the region.

But Larry Siedentop, an American-born lecturer on political philosophy at Oxford University, believes that all is not well in Brussels. In Democracy in Europe, he argues that the specter of "bureaucratic despotism" haunts the continent. "The rapid accumulation of power in Brussels," he warns, is transforming the EU into a centralized "tyranny." Economic liberalization has produced an ironic consequence: the triumph of the French dirigiste model of a centralized, autonomous state bureaucracy. The EU is becoming an alien "government of strangers" imposed from a remote capital -- akin to an early-modern absolutist state. Regulation by the Brussels bureaucracy erodes local self-government and corrupts individual Europeans by breeding "fear, sycophancy, and resentment" in place of traditional civic virtues such as "emulation, self-reliance, and humility." If nothing is done to reverse the trend, European citizens will rise up against the EU in war or revolution. In sum, "the prospects for Europe are bleaker than they have been since 1945."

Only one solution, Siedentop maintains, can now save Europeans from the tyranny that befell their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century forebears: a written federal constitution that unambiguously defines the rights and responsibilities of the EU and of national and local governments. This constitution must eschew existing European models and take its cue from eighteenth-century America -- James Madison's "compound republic" -- with its complex separation of powers, split both horizontally (among branches of the EU) and vertically (among Brussels, the member states, and subnational bodies such as regional governments). But no pan-European constitutional debate has yet taken place, Siedentop complains, because the "triumph of economic language" has "impoverished" political discourse among European elites. Where, he asks repeatedly, are Europe's Madisons?

European constitutional construction will not be an easy task, Siedentop argues, for stable federal institutions rest on three shared cultural elements. The first is a common religion; a federal Europe must therefore be Christian. The second is formal designation of a common language, which can only be English. And the third is a shared legal culture, for which Siedentop recommends, somewhat vaguely, that the European constitution draw on the British common-law tradition that strengthens local elite politics and respect for lawyers and legal culture.

A European federal constitution grounded in these values and finding institutional expression in a pan-European "senate" elected indirectly by national governments, Siedentop concludes, would create a transnational "political class" committed to the jealous defense of local self-government against the "new Leviathan." Europe would be saved from itself.

NO HEIR TO TOCQUEVILLE

Siedentop's book is titled Democracy in Europe because he takes Alexis de Tocqueville's eponymous classic as his explicit model. Siedentop begins with a nostalgic glance at the constitutional convention at Philadelphia in 1787, followed by an admiring recollection

of how Tocqueville -- of whom he is a biographer -- illuminated the foundations of the young republic. The rest of the book boldly applies the Frenchman's theory of American politics in the 1830s to contemporary Europe, with no concession at all to the intervening 170 years and oceanic leap.

The parallel is intriguing. Tocqueville came to America convinced that the major political challenge of his age was to discover how a stable republic could be created on a scale larger than a city-state. In the United States he found an answer: the dispersion and devolution of political power through a written constitution, the rule of law, and federal decentralization. These formal institutions, Tocqueville believed, rested in turn on slowly evolving cultural predispositions for self-government, intermediate associations, respect for the law and lawyers, and Christian charity. This cultural and institutional view of modern democratic stability, Siedentop notes, was "bound, sooner or later, to suggest a possible model for European federal union." Democracy in Europe takes up the challenge.

Since Siedentop's book appeared in the United Kingdom last year, it has enraptured the country's normally understated critics. Journalists herald it as "the subtlest and most sophisticated book on the EU" and "a book for every chancellery across our continent." But is Siedentop really the Tocqueville of European integration? Should readers on the American side of the Atlantic, where Democracy in Europe is now appearing, look to it as a guide to Europe's future?