"Disaster," "pathetically low," "wake-up call": The European commentary on last Sunday's EU parliamentary elections is uniformly gloomy. On a low voter turnout throughout the union, ruling and pro-federalist parties have suffered losses whereas Euro-skeptic parties have gained their biggest representation ever. This does not bode well for the future. For instance, the draft constitution that is being discussed in Brussels today does little to inspire those who did not bother to vote on Sunday.
Among the nonvoters, the new member countries of post-Communist Central Europe have probed new depths of apathy. In Slovakia, only 17 percent of eligible voters bothered to cast a ballot. Poland, which accounts for almost half the population of the new member states, hardly fared better, with a turnout of just over 20 percent. Countries that were supposed to rejuvenate the EU with their neophyte energy seem to have lost their enthusiasm almost before they joined. What's happened?
Some say that the populations of the new member countries have a problem with the market economy. Others blame the insufficient Euro-enthusiasm on the region's conservative political cultures, rooted in religiosity. The president of Poland, Alexander Kwasniewski, seemed to agree when he criticized his own people, in a radio program, for being "politically immature."
Yet such an analysis does not explain the Polish reaction Sunday and, if anything, makes it even more difficult to fathom. After all, the same Polish society which is considered to be "immature" in June 2004, last year voted 77 percent in favor of joining the EU, on a turnout of 60 percent--presumably displaying both maturity and a solid pro-European vocation. Likewise, a majority of Slovaks voted in their country's accession referendum and 92 percent of them voted in favor of joining the EU. Can entire societies go from mature to infantile in a matter of months?
That's unlikely--and there is a better explanation. Let's assume for the sake of argument that people in Central Europe are no less rational than people elsewhere, and that they are just as discerning in determining where their own interests lie as are people elsewhere. All else being equal, then, could it be that events which transpired in the period between the two votes persuaded millions of people that their original enthusiasm had been misplaced?
The public in Central Europe cannot have failed to note at least four stories that emanated from Brussels, and which may well have had an impact on their view of the club they just joined. First, a week after the successful Polish referendum, Former French President (and EU Constitution shepherd) Giscard D'Estaing proposed scrapping the Nice voting formula. That formula--which gave Poland 27 votes in the Council of the European Union, thereby ensuring that at least one new democracy would be among the EU big hitters--is something Poles had regarded as an important success. The prospect of it disappearing left an impression of EU underhandedness that was unmistakable. Poland's historically justified fear of a Western sellout of its interests received a powerful boost.
To mark the accession of countries impoverished by communism, most continental EU states passed legislation barring entrants from enjoying the full benefits of the single market and discriminating against their citizens in access to jobs. Given the preordained restriction of farm subsidies to a quarter of the sums that farmers in the old member countries receive, it was easy to conclude that membership was a matter of form rather than substance.
Next came the abandonment of the stability pact, railroaded through by France and Germany. This proved that the distribution of votes in the European institutions, far from a question of mere prestige, was a vital tool of policy. The citizens of countries which have suffered painful austerity measures to conform to the criteria, including those Central Europeans whose fiscal policies are on a path to join EMU, undoubtedly concluded that the EU, instead of representing an extension of democracy to the supranational level, was a political duopoly run in the interests of its central powers.
Fourth, and perhaps most astonishing, was the demand, repeated several times in the last few weeks by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, that new member countries increase their corporate taxes to French and German levels. Never mind that the demand had no basis in European law and could never be enforced. What Mr. Schroeder took to be an uncontroversial statement of mild Euro-socialism, voters in Central Europe heard as a direct challenge to their own aspirations for prosperity.
It was the repeat of the sorry tale of the association agreements from the 1990s that were supposed to favor future members but did nothing of the sort: They could export as many satellites or computers chips as they wanted to, provided they didn't try to export their grain, coal or steel. Under an equal-tax regime, Central Europe will presumably be forced to compete for foreign investment with Germany--all other attractions having been equalized out of the picture--on the quality of motorways and general standard of living.
Apart from the symbolic but marginal benefit of offering the ability to travel around the EU with an identity card rather than a passport, the EU has not yet touched the lives of Central Europeans in any way. No EU institution has been moved to the region, no new political initiative towards the EU's new Eastern neighbors of Ukraine, Belarus or Russia has been launched. There are no brave new plans for tying the region's infrastructure to the rest of Europe.
In fact, this long-delayed, most-recent enlargement is the most frugal ever. It will cost each citizen of the old 15 EU members €70 over the next three years. Each cow in the old member countries gets 10 times that subsidy every year. When you add the anti-American hysteria emanating from the core, which goes down badly in the new democracies, Central Europeans have good reasons to be disappointed.
The lesson of this voter-participation fiasco is that instead of offering an opaque new constitution, the EU should set about helping the former captive peoples of the Soviet empire rejoin the family of free, prosperous nations. This was a goal that could have fired the imagination of millions of Europeans, just like the rebuilding of Europe from the ashes of World War II energized the generation of their parents and grandparents.
It is indeed a wake-up call. Unless the EU unites the peoples of Europe before it proposes greater unification of its own institutions, it will suffer another defeat. The draft Constitution--wordy, obscure and collectivist--is not likely to persuade those who voted for Euro-skeptics Sunday. And until Sunday's nonvoters are reinvigorated, the document is unlikely to be ratified in referenda that have been pledged in several countries, including in Central Europe.
Much better that governments agree to put the draft Constitution in the freezer than for electorates to reject it. It is not too late to spare the EU a humiliation it does not need.
Radek Sikorski is director of the New Atlantic Initiative at the American Enterprise Institute.
