Arts & Sciences

Observers of European integration have usually seen it as a bureaucratic process of monetary union governed by pin-striped officials wrangling over farm prices and the exchange rate of the Euro. But European integration has begun to produce a contentious politics in the streets, on the borders, and on the high seas. Consider the following episodes:

• In 1995, Spanish and French fishermen attacked each other's boats on the Bay of Biscay over shares of the world's rapidly declining tuna stocks, a conflict that was only resolved when the European Commission promised to send inspectors onto every ship to keep tabs on their catch;
• In 1997, French and Spanish Renault workers joined their laid-off Belgian counterparts in a massive demonstration after the firm announced the closure of their plant at Vilvoord; they burned a Renault Megane on the steps of the European Commission and ÒkidnappedÓ a fleet of cars ready for shipment;
• In 1998, Italian milk producers, incensed at accusations that they were producing more than their allotted share of European subsidies, blocked the roads to Milan's airport with their tractors;
• In the spring of 1999, in protest at threatened cuts in farm subsidies, thousands of farmers assembled in Berlin for the largest farm protest in the history of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy;
• Last summer, British environmentalists burned fields of genetically-modified crops, and thus obstructed the effort of American chemical giant Monsanto to capture European markets and helping to push Congress to punitive tariffs on European wine and cheese.

Over the past decade, thousands of Europeans have taken to the streets to protest policies that originate with the European Union in Brussels. Not only that: most of the protesters are not wild-eyed radicals, but ordinary people pursuing their everyday claims - housewives, farmers, civil servants, workers, and fishermen. The graph above, which comes from a recent study of European protest events, shows that an increasing proportion of the protests mounted in Western Europe are aimed at EU policies or at national governments that implement them.

Why is there growing protest on the part of ordinary citizens of Europe against the European Union? And is it a danger to the construction of a united Europe? In part, we can understand the growing wave of Euro-protest as the result of "Europhobia" - the conviction that a federal Europe is encroaching on national prerogatives. In part it is due to the EU's attempt to apply uniform regulations to some very different countries. For example, a few years ago, the European Commission decided that the chocolate that Britain's Cadbury's has produced for almost a century is not chocolate because it doesn't contain the same proportion of ingredients as the continental product.

For the most part, however, Euro-protest is neither anti-Europe nor anti-bureaucratic. Taking to the streets is the result of what European scholars are calling Europe's "democratic deficit."

Protest is an expected and a healthy part of democratic politics; what makes it unusually volatile in the European Union is how Europe's institutions are organized. European regulations are passed-not by the elected European Parliament-but by committees of national ministers sent to Brussels by their governments; these policies are prepared by the European Commission in Brussels in consultation with bureaucrats from the member states and with input from the literally hundreds of lobbies and interest groups that have taken root in Brussels. These regulations bypass national legislatures and are implemented by national courts and administrations. When states are remiss or recalcitrant in implementation, they can be taken to the European Court of Justice.

What is missing in this process is, of course, the voice of Europe's voters. A European Parliament elected by direct suffrage of course sits in Strasbourg. But apart from approving the choice of the President of the Commission and acting as a sounding board for political parties, the EP has few real powers-and has used few of these until last year, when it forced the resignation of the Commission over a corruption scandal.

This weakness of the European Parliament produces a vicious circle, resulting in national parties sending out-to-pasture politicians to serve as MEPs, which in turn results in low attendance, poor performance, and little citizen interest in what happens in Strasbourg. Less than 30 percent of the British electorate bothered to vote in last June's European elections. Given the absence of a viable representative institution to reflect their claims during a period in which Europe has taken on more and more powers, it is not surprising that protest against European policies is increasing.

Why don't the member states increase the power of the European Parliament, thereby enhancing its legitimacy and stemming the tide of Euro-protest? Every increase in the power of this directly elected body would decrease the power of the European Council (the periodic assembly of heads of government), and thus of the member states, whose interests are carefully balanced in its proportional voting system. It might also threaten the cosy mutual hand-washing between the Commission's Eurocrats and the lobbyists who help them make policy in Brussels.

But is the rise of Euro-protest necessarily a bad thing? Although protest against European policies is robust, unruly, occasionally violent, it is seldom aimed at the European project as a whole, and it is far from anarchic; on the contrary, protest campaigns usually accompany the periods of especially intense European decision-making and are often calibrated with the efforts of interest group lobbies to secure advantages for their members.

Take the current conflict over genetically engineered foods, with which Monsanto and other multinational giants are flooding the worldÕs markets. European Commission officials were all set to admit GM products into Europe without labelling or separation from non-GM plants until a wave of protest started in Germany, France, and Austria, and spread this year to Britain and Spain. When Cornell scientists revealed last summer that pollen from genetically engineered corn grown in the Midwest interferes with the reproduction of Monarch butterflies, not only Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, but no less a personage than Prince Charles came out against its importation into EuropeÑto the chagrin of the British government and the discomfort of the EUÑwhich had hoped to avoid obligatory labelling of GM foods.

How will such increasingly frequent protest campaigns affect the construction of a European polity? They certainly make it more difficult for Europe's bureaucrats to make efficient and effective policies, and these will be necessary to convince Europeans that the EU is performing. But if we reflect for a moment on how the democratic states of the West were built, these clouds may turn out to have a silver lining. Few states willingly granted civil, political, or social rights to subjects who were deferential to their rulers; citizens had to demand their rights to transform Europe's oligarchies into democracies. Just as nineteenth-century workers and early twentieth-century women had to protest to achieve the vote, Europeans at the turn of the millennium are engaged in a struggle to construct a democratic polity.

Sidney Tarrow is the Upson Professor of Government and Sociology. He is the author of Power in Movement: Social Movements and Collective Action (Cambridge 1998) and is currently in Brussels, working on the Europeanization of protest.