A Democratic Europe: An Alternative to the European Union

As an MP 50 years ago, Sir Richard Body was one of a small group to recommend that Sir Anthony Eden attend the conference laying the foundations of what was to become the European Union. In the following years, he discovered that the hidden agenda behind this development was the creation of a European superstate which would strip national parliaments of their powers. Since then he has been an articulate opponent of the federal model favoured by France and Germany. In this book he argues that Europe needs a new framework enabling her many nations to take part in a democratic way. In other words, an intergovernmental rather than supragovernmental system with power concentrated at the centre. To the extent that the EU retains supragovernmental structure, it escapes democratic control and accountability. MPs themselves can no longer be held accountable for what goes on in Brussels and Strasbourg. As Body points out, the issue of power is closely related to that of scale, which is one of the main planks of John Papworth's radical work at Fourth World Review. He calls this the curse of bigness (also of centralisation), when systems and structures move beyond the human scale. We need an urgent review of the relationships between scale, power, centralisation and democratic accountability.