The State of the European Union 2017

121 / 150

REVIVING THE DEBATE ON POLITICAL UNION AFTER BREXIT
121
pro-disintegration movements and parties will
come up against a clear, prior and resolutely in-
tegrationist and pro-European momentum on
the part of the Union come the elections this
year (especially in France and Germany).
For a future Convention to be a complete
success and to ensure that the European people
do not reject its conclusions, as happened in
2005, the Convention has to be as participative
as possible for European citizens. The last word
has to go to them, limiting to the maximum the
decision-making power of intermediary bodies
in which only the state powers and the European
institutions are represented (as was the case, for
example, of the Praesidium of the Convention
of 2003).
In other words, it would be necessary to or-
ganize the governance of the Convention so
that European citizens really do decide, through
their involvement in the Convention’s decision-
making process from start to finish. The citizens
of each State, then, after being able to draw up
projects of their own on decisions of the
Convention and also when it came to ratifying
its conclusions in a referendum, would under-
stand what they are ratifying and vote accord-
ingly. Only those who are involved in a decision-
making process from start to finish understand
the process and its outcome and can claim them
as their own.
The constant need to improve the quality
of European democracy
Beyond the current crisis in the Union, what is
happening on a global level is a crisis of repre-
sentative democracy.
The European Union is currently suffering
from the same symptoms as the national de-
mocracies of its member states. In the same way
that in these (on the right and on the left) the
vote is on the rise for political parties that spring
from the identification of that crisis to champi-
on changes in the representative model, the
European Union should foresee that only sur-
mounting both crises simultaneously will restore
citizens’ faith in the European project.
The revival of the political debate in the EU
must begin by getting beyond the idea of po-
litical union as an issue only involving nation
states, without prejudice to the reasonable cal-
culations that recommend confirming that the
realistic ceiling of the debate is the concept of a
federation of nation states11. Above all, it is
without prejudice to the inescapable certainty
that “welfare state and democracy together
form an inner nexus that in a currency union
can no longer be secured by the individual na-
tion state alone”.12
On the basis of these considerations we can
conclude that, along with the institutionalisa-
tion of the reform of the structure of EMU, cer-
tain reforms that would have considerably im-
proved the quality of democracy in the Union as
a whole and which were left with no legal back-
ing in the Treaty of Lisbon (because of the pace
of the historic process of European integration)
appear more reasonable than ever and could
11The current President of the Commission said recently
“we should stop talking of a United States of Europe”. See
Juncker, On the political future of Europe, speech delivered
on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the creation of
the Notre Europe Foundation, Paris, October 2016. Avail-
able at:
ambitious-europe.html.
12Habermas, J.: The players resign, interview given to the
channel Zeit on line on 22 July 2016. Available at: http://
eu-crises-english/seite-3. See also by the same author,
“Bringing the Integration of Citizens into Line with the
Integration of States”, European Law Journal, vol. 18, no.
4, 2012, pp. 485-8. This appropriate phrase from Habermas
is reminiscent of Rodrick’s famous trilemma.