Who is going to vote for Europe if nobody helps people to feel like Europeans and gives them a good reason to make an effort?
This could have been my question when, on Friday, I was invited to the talk by Andre Duff MEP at Chatham House.
There are not many reformers in Brussels. But Andrew is one of them. He’s a member of the European Parliament with the Lib Dem, staunch federalist, founder of the Spinelli Group and champion of a pan European political party.
Andrew could have answered the question. Half of Brussels is obsessed with regaining the confidence of people – the other half assumes they don’t need it because people neeed them.
Unfortunately this is not the right question to tackle the democratic deficit. People won’t wake up one day feeling Europeans because the Commission has sponsored the right media campaign.
Look at political parties. A political party is a cluster of shared interests and identity. It’s a product of a process and is almost impossible to create from scratch.
Europe has a constituency but it’s in the shadow. It’s a shadow consitutency. It’s formed of people who don’t know to share an identity and interests. People like me: left home, travelled, educated and worked abroad in many countries; little national identity but strong links across borders and boundaries. The internet is our neighbourhood. Train stations and airports our daily stops. We don’t live in geographical and historical proximity but are mobile in a networked society.
We don’t belong to a place and modern democracy doesn’t represent us. We need a new form of representation and Europe is our only chance, but a postnational Europe.
Here is where I agree with Andrew Duff. Europe must go beyond the Member States to discover a new vision. We need a postnatioanl Europe. I make a step further. The future is not the EU but Europeans.
