How to lose your democracy and your friends
Taking part in the elections for the European Parliament would be one of the nastiest things Britain has done in years
Theresa May’s government has blundered through Brexit, pretending it was serious about leaving the EU but really only wanting to re-negotiate the UK’s position in it. Britain’s democracy is being smacked around the head as a result, and the country is faced with the prospect of a Marxist government. But these problems are so far contained within the country that they mostly concern: the United Kingdom. And that’s how it should be — good or bad, Britain should bear the consequences of what it has done with the result of the 2016 referendum.
But by taking part in the elections for the European Parliament in May, Britain will be collecting all of its anger, indecision, and constitutional contortions about the referendum and saying to its European neighbours that they need to bear some of the consequences, too. It will be inserting its pitiful politics into the democratic dreams of millions of people on the European Continent, many of whom have enjoyed far less representative government than Britons have, and all of whom need the European Union to work. Put aside your issues with Brexit for a moment and ask yourself, do they deserve that?
The 2016 referendum means nobody in EU countries will ever again believe that Britons are committed to the EU, or that they should be trusted with influencing its institutions. But if Britain’s stay in the EU is extended past May, they are on the verge of being asked to run elections which are commonly held as some of the EU’s most important for years, knowing that Britain’s nearly ten percent of MEPs will have no interest in EU citizens’ lives and making the EU work.
Elections obviously mean that voters get to tell their representatives how they would like to be governed, and the political system gets re-legitimised if turnout is high enough for pro-system parties. Involving too many people in an election who aren’t interested in, don’t care about, or have been loudly against, the system, undermines confidence in it while making it hard to interpret the results of voting. It also invites immediate questions about whether an alternative electorate would have produced a different result, and if the people elected are the right ones and are enacting legitimate policies. Britain participating in the parliamentary elections will trigger these questions, perhaps distorting the campaigning before voting has even started.
Now take that problem and multiply it by the decisions that the EU will have to make partly through the May parliamentary elections. The results will influence who becomes the President of the European Commission, as well as other top jobs like who leads the European Council, parliament, and central bank. And that’s before we get to the parliament’s role in budgeting and membership expansion.
The EU’s institutions need to be legitimate so that they can help to address problems that have bedevilled member countries for years. Unemploymentremains above ten percent in Greece, Spain and Italy; and national debt is close to or over 100 percent of GDP in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus, Belgium, France, and Spain. These are the consequences of the financial crisis that haven’t been dealt with, and that’s before we get into a slowing German economy.
Now consider the state of democracy across Europe. Of the 27 countries other than Britain in the EU, the Economist’s Democracy Index considers only ten of them to be full democracies, and the rest to be flawed ones. Belgium gets a score lower than Cape Verde; Bulgaria is worse than Botswana; and Croatia has a poorer score than Colombia. Perhaps there is no reason why European countries should be more democratic than ones elsewhere, and the OSCE agrees at least with regard to some of them: last year it said that Hungary’s parliamentary elections in April were ‘characterised by a pervasive overlap between state and ruling party resources’ and voters were hindered in making informed choices because of ‘intimidating and xenophobic rhetoric.’
The 2016 referendum showed that a majority of Britons really aren’t into the EU, confirming decades of polling about their being indifferent to the European project. Regardless of whether the UK were to leave through interim arrangements, established trade agreements, or signing a new trade agreement of its own, it needed to at least get out of mechanisms for governing EU citizens’ lives. Europeans should only be asked to take Briton’s views on the EU seriously again when they have voted in another referendum to remain, with a majority so large that it’s obvious there won’t be another one.
Millions of people in EU countries know what it’s like to live under dictatorship and conflict, and dream of a peaceful life in which they can get jobs, bring up their children, see some of the world, and get a feel for the freedom that was long denied to many of them and their parents. They need legitimate elections to help them to do that. And they’ll suffer from Britain — a country which is admired or lambasted for getting too much of its way in the world over the past few hundred years — refusing to take responsibility for the consequences of what its people think and getting out of the way.
You can loathe your fellow Britons if you want, thinking them stupid for voting to leave the EU and not up to taking part in the governing of the country. But that’s for Britons to argue about. Making the UK take part in the parliamentary elections would hack away at the legitimacy of EU institutions and undermine the power of EU citizens to determine their future.
What gives Britain the right to do that?
