i cannot recall a serious book about the EU winning such acclaim as Larry Siedentop's Democracy in Europe. It has been showered with praise not only by Eurosceptics, but also by pro-Europeans. The Times serialised the book and its author appeared on Radio 4's Start the Week.
But reading the book was a disappointment. Less than half of it is about the EU. Most of it is a discursive-and stimulating-essay on political liberalism. When Siedentop does deal with the EU, he asserts that the Europeans are trying to imitate the Americans in building a federal state. He argues that this would be a desirable venture, but says that the Europeans are not ready for it. And he accuses the French of hijacking the EU with their statist, bureaucratic, political culture, which will provoke a popular backlash against Europe.
The problem with this thesis is that it describes the EU of ten years ago. The idea that Europe's governments are hell-bent on building a federal state had some truth in the era of Delors, Kohl and Mitterrand. Even then, the EU was a compromise between supranational institutions such as the commission, and inter-governmental bodies such as the council of ministers. The interesting change of the past decade, unremarked by Siedentop, is that the balance of power in the EU has shifted to governments. It is they who are running the new areas of integration such as foreign and defence policy, or justice and home affairs. Chirac, Blair and Schröder are not federalists. It is the European Council (the summit meetings of EU leaders), not Romano Prodi's commission, which sets the EU's agenda.
Most EU governments are pragmatic, supporting integration only when circumstances force them to. For example, Siedentop is wrong to say that economic and monetary union is the result of France's desire to exert control over a unified Germany. Chancellor Kohl decided to go for EMU early in 1988, before anyone thought the Berlin Wall would fall, because Delors persuaded him that the exchange rate mechanism-an essential building block of the single market-could not survive the liberalisation of exchange controls. Similarly, the EU's recent efforts to strengthen its foreign and defence policies are in large part a reaction to the turmoil in the Balkans during the 1990s, rather than the product of federalist ideology (and it is the British, rather than, as Siedentop claims, the French, who have been leading on defence).
It is true that the French have wielded undue influence in the EU, but his description of Brussels as a French dominion is also out of date. The dominant philosophy in the commission today is economic liberalism. The commission is forcing the French to open up their utilities markets and to cut back on state aid to industry. And the forthcoming enlargement of the EU will bring in countries which are pro-American rather than pro-French, pragmatic rather than federalist, pro-market rather than statist.
Surprisingly, Siedentop says very little about EU institutions or their failings. And when he does touch upon them, he gets his facts wrong. In different places he says that the European Central Bank and the Stability and Growth Pact have taken away the freedom of member-states to set their own budgets. Neither has done so. The Stability Pact merely attempts to place a ceiling on budget deficits of more than 3 per cent of GDP. Within that constraint, countries are free to set their own tax and public spending policies. He wrongly accuses the commission's competition directorate of caving in to France and Germany on state aid cases. But, with only a few exceptions, the commission has been extraordinarily tough in standing up to the big governments. (One indication of Siedentop's sloppy approach to facts is that he produces an undated table of each member's net contributions to the EU budget. This matters, because there are big changes from one year to the next.)
Siedentop offers few proposals for reforming the EU. He does suggest that national parliaments should form a European Senate to protect the autonomy of member-states, and promote devolution within them. This is an interesting, but unoriginal, idea. It was floated by Michael Heseltine in the mid-1980s and has since been picked up by Joschka Fischer and Robin Cook.
Siedentop writes as if the EU consisted only of Britain, France and Germany. He makes only one reference to EU enlargement. You might expect that a book called Democracy in Europe would consider the EU's impact on democracy in eastern Europe and the Balkans, but those regions do not get a mention. Above all, he is wrong to assume that Europe is trying to imitate the US. The Europeans are struggling to create a more varied and complex system of government than Siedentop imagines-one that is sui generis.
"Democracy in Europe" by Larry Siedentop (Allen Lane, rrp ?18.99) can be bought for ?14.99+99p (p&p). Call 020 8324 5649
