EU's democratic deficit

Published on Monday 10 March 2008 20:37

Alex Orr (Platform, 8 March) refers to two important introductions in the European Constitution and its almost identical replacement, the Lisbon treaty: a president and a virtual foreign secretary for the European Union. He omits to mention that these two posts are vital for formal international recognition of the EU as a sovereign state. Both documents are explicit: it shall have legal personality.

The treaty of Maastricht made us all citizens of a European Union by virtue of our citizenship of quasi-independent sovereign member states. After ratification of the Lisbon treaty, we will all become citizens of a federal state of 500 million people whose member state parliaments are required to contribute actively to the good functioning of the union.

The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Iraq remind us that only a totalitarian government can hold together peoples of such disparate identities as those now comprising the EU. It already had its unique crime of xenophobia and a European police office (Europol) storing data on its individual citizens, and the Lisbon treaty introduces an operational committee on internal security and a European public prosecutor.

A referendum for Scots would, indeed, restore faith in the democratic process in Scotland but can do nothing to modify the structural democratic deficit of EU institutions or the threat to individual liberty through increasingly sophisticated methods of surveillance at the service of this new and more powerful state.

MARY ROLLS

Westerkirk

Langholm, Dumfriesshire