Nach den Europawahlen und im Vorfeld der Verfassungsreferenden: Wie kann die EU besser vermittel

Dieses ‚CEPS Policy Brief Paper‘ zählt eine
Reihe von konkreten Vorschlägen zur Rolle auf, die die
EU-Institutionen, nationale und regionale Akteure,
Medien sowie akademische Einrichtungen bei der Vermittlung
der EU spielen können.

Introduction 

The European Union suffers from not only a
democratic but also a communication deficit. In
the same way as both problems are intertwined,
so are the symptoms. The last elections to the
European Parliament suffered from a record low
turnout and the election campaigns were run
mainly on themes relating to domestic politics,
resembling small plebiscites on the
government’s performance at the national
level (Kurpas et al., 2004). Only Eurosceptic
parties made strong gains, advocating the
withdrawal of their countries or strong
downgrading of the EU’s competences. These
results highlighted two painful realities.
First, they re-confirmed the trend since the
first EP elections in 1979 that citizens
increasingly see less reason to vote in
elections that do not give them ‘a real
choice’ such as voting for the Commission
president or to express their socio-economic
preferences by voting for a party that can
deliver on these preferences if it comes to
power. Second, voter apathy indicates that the
importance of decisions at the Community level,
along with the role of the European Parliament
and its impact on national policy, is not yet
established among citizens. Some of the reasons
for this failure are structural, such as the
lack of a strong European identity; some are
legal or institutional and thus hard to change.
For instance, as long as the parties
represented in European Parliament do not
emancipate themselves from their national
counterparts and manage to run an election
campaign with candidates for the Commission.
Some parts of this paper have been drawn from
Meyer, Christoph (2003), pp. 35-43. Sebastian
Kurpas is a Research Assistant, Christoph Meyer
is a Marie Curie Fellow and Kyriakos Gialoglou
is a Research Fellow at CEPS. Unless otherwise
stated, the views expressed are attributable
only to the authors in a personal capacity and
not to any institution with which they are
associated. presidency, campaign dynamics and
voter turn-out are not likely to
change. 

At the same time, democracy is not a
mechanical process of aggregating preferences
and determining majority opinion. We argue that
one important problem is that citizens lack the
knowledge to form an opinion about how their
views could be advanced through the EU.
Moreover, in the battle for public opinion,
pro-EU voices have often been too weak in the
past to make an impact and convince citizens
that European integration increases, not
diminishes their autonomy to govern their lives
in a global context. If this situation
continues, national governments will find it
more difficult to convince their citizens to
ratify the Constitutional Treaty and to
constructively engage in EU governance. If the
Constitutional Treaty is rejected in more than
a few member states, it may either need to be
renegotiated or will be delayed until later
referenda deliver the ‘desired’
result. Yet this state of limbo and fudge is
neither good for democracy nor for the
EU’s ability to provide solutions to
common problems. The deficits of EU
communication and democracy will be manifested
as much at the member state level as in
Brussels.

The Introduction has been taken directly
from a 
CEPS Policy Brief

written by 
Sebastian Kurpas

, 
Christoph Meyer

and 
Kyriakos Gialoglou

. 
Click here 

to read the document in full.