I've been traveling in Europe on business for the past ten days, and earlier this week in Brussels I had the opportunity to take a tour of the European Parliament there. I say "there" because there is a whole other European Parliament edifice in Strasbourg, France, where the body meets for plenary sessions 10-12 times per year. The Brussels location is used for committee meetings and other sessions. The cost of sending truckfuls of documents and hundreds of Members (plus some staff) back and forth to Strasbourg once a month is astronomical. The carbon emissions must also be staggering to comprehend. But like so many other things about the united Europe, this is just another trade-off that was made to keep one of the big member states (in this case France) happy.
We had a great young tour guide, a beyond-fluent English speaker who works for a Member of the Parliament who shall remain nameless and unidentified by country. Our tour guide describes himself as a "Euroskeptic" but seems to respect much of the work being done there.
I knew next to nothing about the European Parliament before my visit. But I've learned a few fascinating things that I thought Kos readers might also be interested to know.
Some fun facts about the European Parliament:
The Parliament first met in 1952 as the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community, the predecessor to the "Common Market" AKA the European Economic Community, which was established in 1958 by the Treaty of Rome.
Outside the Parliament chamber is an enormous curved wooden edifice with hundreds of door handles that looks like the world's largest filing cabinet. Each door has the name of a Member on it and these are their public mailboxes. Although mail is delivered to their offices, anyone wishing to send form letters or leaflet them all has the ability to do so simply by having the patience to open every single door. I saw a few famous names like "Le Pen" (father and daughter) and Kinnock (wife).
The number of seats is a function of the number of member states and also their relative population and GDP. The usual suspects have the largest number of seats: Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain.
Seating in the Parliament chamber is in a large semi-round, with many rows of curved blond wood desks. Members do not sit together with the rest of their national delegations, nor with their parties as we understand parties, but rather with their "political groups." These groups are made up of coalitions of the Member State parties with similar philosophical outlooks. They are artificial in nature in that they exist only within the context of the Parliament and their expenses are entirely borne by the Parliament (i.e., by the taxpayers of Europe). In order to form a new political group one must have at least 20 Members from a minimum of five countries speaking a minimum of four languages. Only a few Members remain unaffiliated.
Despite the fact that there are 785 Members, and they sit in a chamber where each seat is equipped with an electronic voting console, almost all votes are conducted by show of hands. As our tour guide said, pointing at the podium, "There's a guy who sits up there whose job it is to count the hands." Electronic votes (which they call roll-call votes) are the rare exception, and not the rule. This means, among other things, that there is no permanent record of most votes cast, and thus no accountability for them.
This last point was astonishing to me.
I started peppering our tour guide with questions. I mean, it's obvious why the Members wouldn't mind this lack of accountability, but these Members are supposedly democratically elected in their home countries. Why don't the voters demand it?
The answer is, apparently, that most Europeans don't view the European Parliament as having anything to do with them or their lives. They vote for representatives but then know and care little about what those representatives do. They care far more about the acts of their own national legislatures. This is not exactly shocking, except that by our tour guide's estimate (confirmed by my colleagues working in Brussels), roughly 70% of all European legislation is coming out of the European Parliament, and not out of the national legislatures.
Think about that. Imagine 70% of the laws that affected you were being made in a body that didn't keep track of who voted for what.
Despite the obvious antidemocratic implications of the voting system, and despite all the bureaucracy and duplication inherent in the EU government and its various agencies and instrumentalities, in recent years I have come to a great deal of respect for the EU. It leads the world in many areas like consumer protection, regulation of antitrust and unfair competition, recycling infrastructure, etc. Imagine what it could accomplish if European voters were able and willing to fully engage with it.