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The Heartless EUAuthor(s): Julie SmithSource: Foreign Policy, No. 135 (Mar. - Apr., 2003), pp. 85-87Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3183601 .

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have pervasive military structures, but terrorist groups still maintain bases in the Triple Frontier region that includes Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. U.S. intelligence agencies are immortalized in countless books and films, yet they were also unaware of the terrorist networks living in their midst-are U.S. media and academia also partly to blame for this failure?

The extent of the al Qaeda net- work worldwide-from Sudan to the United States, Pakistan to Spain-took much of the world by surprise. It is folly to expect ASEAN

governments, burdened by food riots and pro-democracy protests, to be steps ahead of the rest of the world in sniffing out terrorism.

ASEAN is a flawed organization, both in concept and in implementa- tion. However, ASEAN's rigid non- interference policy-whereby each state deals with its own internal secu- rity matters-is a direct product of the politics of the day, i.e., dictatorships. It's no surprise, then, that ASEAN nations regarded "unresolved Islam- ic challenges" as "purely internal mat- ters"; in this regard, radical Islam is

___A

Was this terrorist attack preventable? Night view of the October 21, 2002, explosion at a Bali nightclub that killed nearly 200 people, most of them foreign tourists

no different than the challenge of tackling corruption, environmental degradation, or separatism.

Recent arrests further weaken the argument that strict regimes can't tackle terrorism. ASEAN has hardly liberalized, yet five months after the Bali bombing, many sus-

pected plotters have been caught in a dragnet that governments world- wide concede is the hard work of the Indonesian police, assisted by Australian forensic experts and the region's intelligence agencies. Like it or not, ASEAN authorities are doing something right. 105

The Heartless EU

CL

By Julie Smith

U Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 40, No. 4, November 2002, Oxford

By many accounts, the European Union (EU) has all the makings of a state:

a common currency, a flag, and even

an anthem. But it lacks a formal constitution-for now, at least. In June 2003, a European constitu- tional convention chaired by for- mer French President Valery Gis- card d'Estaing will present a draft to the leaders of the 15 member states. Giscard and the other participants in the convention hope member states will adopt their document in 2004, just as the EU expands to take in 10 new countries.

Already, scholars, lawyers, and politicians have spent countless hours analyzing and debating what the

union's proper constitutional struc- ture should be, prompting Harvard political scientist Andrew Moravcsik to wonder in a recent article, "Why are there so many Madisons?" His piece, which examines the problem of legitimacy in the EU, appears as part of a special issue of the Journal of Common Market Studies on Euro-

pean integration and enlargement. "Most... members of the Euro-

pean public," Moravcsik writes, "appear to agree that the EU suffers from a severe 'democratic deficit.'" The term, in the context of the EU, refers to the powers that national parliaments have lost to intergov- ernmental bodies such as the Council

Julie Smith is head of the European Pro-

gramme at the Royal Institute of Interna- tional Affairs in London and a fellow at

Cambridge University's Robinson College.

MARCH 1 APRIL 2003 85

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Global Newsstand

of the European Union, which com- prises the national ministers from the 15 member states. But Moravcsik argues there is no need to be concerned about the demo-

Even a new constitution is unlikely to resolve the

question of a democratic deficit at the European level.

cratic deficit, claiming that those who criticize the EU for being insuf- ficiently democratic are comparing the EU with some utopian form of democracy rather than with actual advanced industrial democracies.

The checks and balances enshrined in the EU's existing struc- ture suffice to preserve its legitima- cy, according to Moravcsik. The EU must not be viewed in isolation, he argues, but as part of a multilevel

arrangement in which member states and their parliaments also play a part. And, in modern democracies, governments often delegate to other bodies such as courts, central banks,

and regulatory agencies, so the prominent role of the European Court of Justice and the European Central Bank is no surprise.

Moreover, Moravcsik believes that concerns about the democratic deficit arise because people put too much emphasis on the European Par- liament (EP), the only branch of the EU that is directly elected. According to him, the main source of the union's legitimacy is the "democratically

elected governments of the Member States, which dominate the still large- ly territorial and intergovernmental structure of the EU." This view, how- ever, is highly contested and is not shared by all member states; some, such as the United Kingdom, would concur with Moravcsik on the importance of member states, but other, more pro-European countries, such as Belgium or Germany, would stress that the EP's elections make the union democratically legitimate. In reality, the EU's legitimacy stems from both the states, as represented in the Council of the European Union, and from the people, as rep- resented in the EP. But EP elections routinely experience low turnout: In the United Kingdom, for example, turnout in the 1999 EP election was only 24 percent, compared with 71.4 percent for the national Parliament's 1997 election. Low turnout and a focus on national rather than Euro-

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pean issues in EP elections cast doubt over the EU's social legitimacy-that is, the support of its citizens.

Greater popular participation in the deliberative processes of the EU would not create a greater sense of political community in Europe, posits Moravcsik, in part because the issues tackled at the European level are pri- marily technical. But this argument is misleading. In reality, the EU legis-

lates on a variety of issues that touch people's day-to-day lives: for instance, health and safety directives and lim- itations on the number of hours Euro- peans are permitted to work. Indeed, according to a 1998 study, the union is responsible for half of all domestic legislation passed in the 15 member states and for 80 percent of econom- ic and social legislation.

Moravcsik makes a convincing

argument that the EU is not lacking in democratic practices or formal legitimacy, but a question mark does remain over the union's social legitimacy. Democratic or not, the EU doesn't yet seem to have won over the hearts and minds of its cit- izens-which means that even a new constitution is unlikely to resolve the question of a democratic deficit at the European level. 1u

New Zealand's

Security Blanket By Michael Bassett

* New Zealand International Review, Vol. 27, No. 5, September/October 2002, Wellington

By all indicators, New Zealand is a model inter- national state that has

pulled its weight in international affairs. It joined the League of Nations, was a founding member of the United Nations, and has been a regular contibutor to international peacekeeping. Categorizing its for- eign policy, however, has always intrigued local academics. Some, like cabinetmakers, craft boxes into which theories are stored and neat- ly labeled. Such is the case in David McCraw's recent article in the bimonthly New Zealand Interna- tional Review, where he analyzes the differences between the foreign policies of New Zealand's political

parties. Set against the opposition National Party's "realism," McCraw, a University of Waikato political scientist, paints the current Labour administration in the "lib- eral internationalist" corner: keen on promoting democracy, human rights, disarmament, free trade, and the United Nations. The trouble with such categories is that objects in real life don't always fit their boxes. Both New Zealand's main parties were protectionist until the 1980s, both have supported the United Nations since its creation, and both now favor a structural review of the U.N. Security Council.

A more convincing analysis of New Zealand's foreign policy would argue that both parties have always contained realists and ide- alists. National generally has had more of the former, Labour of the latter. But what ultimately deter- mines the country's foreign policy are the individuals in the ascendant at a particular moment.

In another Review article, Bill English, National's current leader, calls for New Zealand to renegotiate its relationships with Australia and the United States. Realist he might

sound, but English was part of a gov- ernment that did nothing to change the 1987 legislation banning port entry for nuclear-armed and nuclear- powered vessels. That legislation sealed New Zealand's exclusion from regular military exercises with the United States and Australia and reduced the quantity of intelligence Wellington receives. Even now, Eng- lish doesn't explicitly advocate repeal- ing the law, although that conclu- sion surely follows from what he writes. Is he an antinuclear interna- tionalist or just a preaching realist? I suspect he is victim to the disease of political timidity and prefers to fol- low public opinion on ship visits rather than lead it.

Public opinion continually influ- ences New Zealand's foreign policy. And opinion is confined or liberat- ed-depending on your view-by the country's geographic remoteness. The country's leaders, with public support at their elbows, preach to others, whether in Washington, Lon- don, or Beijing. When they do so, they clutch the security blanket that thousands of miles of ocean throw around New Zealand's landmass. The recent explosions in Bali might revive a sense of realpolitik. The event certainly sparked doubt about Prime Minister Helen Clark's claim that New Zealand inhabits "an incredibly benign strategic environ- ment." In crises such as that faced by

Michael Bassett was a Fulbright professor of New Zealand studies at Georgetown University during 2002 and a cabinet member in the Lange and Palmer gov- ernments (1984-90).

MARCH I APRIL 2003 87

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