The histories of European unification and of West European democracy during the second half of the twentieth century have often been considered as separate or even antagonistic processes with the institutions of European integration being regarded as bastions of bureaucratic rule. A More Democratic Community challenges this assumption and argues that European integration benefited from the democratic accountability of member states while contributing to the validation of national democratic institutions. However, it also unveils a paradox: as integration deepened, it diminished the power of national parliaments, sparking a democratic accountability crisis within the Community.
Sara Lorenzini and Umberto Tulli are professors at the Department of Humanities and at the School of International Studies, University of Trento
From Preface (pag.V-VII)
Democracy was a shared ideal in political elites but did not enter immediately project Europe. In historiography, the inception of the European project is mainly described as the result of three concurring plans: Europe as a continental project for maintaining peace in Europe; Europe as a transatlantic project to fight the Cold War; and Europe as a project to support the declining and eventually collapsing colonial empires. The democratic character belonged to all three different albeit intertwined projects, but it was not especially stressed. Only partially did European integration identify with establishing supranational self-governing institutions that would cement democracy. The reason is obvious, up to a certain extent. It lies in post-war European states' resistance to a federal project for uniting Europe. It was fundamental that European construction was voided of much of its political potential to ensure that cooperation in the European project would not undermine national sovereignty. Therefore, democracy was not to be part of projects for Europe: it was a domain réservé, like defense, a prerogative of nation-states. The troubled agony of the project for a European Defence Community in 1954 and of the European Political Community attached to it made it especially clear. Scholars rightly focus on the "two forgotten communities" as the lost opportunity for substantial powers for the European Assembly. Of the several projects for uniting Europe, the Council of Europe, born in 1949, was the only European space to discuss democracy and rights. After all, even the idealistic Union of European Federalists had a vague conceptualization of democracy as a European value. Their idea of Europe "was certainly not directly identified with democracy, political unification or any particular economic model." Neither the Spaak Report that launched the negotiations in the mid-1950s nor the 1957 Treaties of Rome expressed any clear commitment to democracy as a fundamental principle and membership criterion. Civil or human rights received no mention in the preamble of the EEC treaty, which provided just a general reference to liberty. Only later, in what Daniel Thomas describes as the decade of the "community of parliamentary democracies" (1962-1969) was the priority of democratic principles and institutions increasingly endorsed, albeit in somewhat marginalized documents (the European Parliamentary Assembly document known as the Birkelbach Report) or in contested projects such as the Fouchet plans of 1961/62, which mentioned defending democracy and human rights as an objective.
Parliamentary democracy was fundamental in defining a Western style of government in Cold War terms. But what about the role of dependent territories? Right after the war, many West European countries were colonial empires in decline. Facing increasing pressures for decolonization, they resorted to European solidarity as a tool to preserve the empire. The civilizing mission was inspired by the idea of defending European values and democracy. In his plans for the League of Nations, Jan Christian Smuts was clear that spreading civilization was a fundamental task of free democracies. Democracy was not per se in the civilizing mission package of the interwar years. Double standards applied: democracy was desirable for the white people in Europe, but surely not for the colonies. Differentiated regimes were in place in terms of rights and citizenship. After all, many intellectuals still identified with the words of historian Hugh Seton-Watson, to whom decolonization was not "a glorious extension of democracy, but a tragic delay of civilization, like the fall of the Roman empire." Democracy was a constituent part of civilization, a particular trait of the West and the civilized Global North. But was teaching democracy to newly independent countries in Asia and Africa on the "to-do list"? It was often not. In the discussion around the Union française in 1946, Léopold Senghor praised the draft constitution because it was based on the prospect of a federal democracy, which offered a new humanism connecting the colonies and France. However, he was quite the exception: most African founding fathers of the post-colonial world did not insist on democracy as a political project. They were not interested in cooperating with the EEC in order to import European concepts of democracy. They were interested in trade and development and adopted the language of development as the tool for real, practical emancipation.
Courtesy by Berghahn