After the peoples of France and Holland overwhelmingly voted to defeat the European Constitution in 2005, Margot Wallström, the Commission’s vice president responsible for ‘communication strategy’, said she wanted to debate with opponents of the EU project.

After reading commissioner Wallström’s stated desire for a debate I approached her in June 2005 with the proposal of a public meeting in London at which she and a representative of my organisation, the Democracy Movement (an all-party campaign) would put forward their different visions. I invited her to choose someone to chair the meeting and suggested that both sides could have an equal allocation of tickets for the members of the audience. The DM offered to pay all the costs of the meeting.

Initially, her chef de cabinet in Brussels responded by email to say Ms Wallström was considering this proposal. However, since then, despite repeated attempts to discover her decision I have been met by a wall of silence. I now repeat my invitation, though, if it would be easier for Margot, I would be quite happy to arrange for the debate to take place in Brussels or Stockholm; in fact, wherever and whenever she wants.

Why have you gone so quiet, Margot? Could it be that you are not so confident that you have the answer to the key question a growing number of people across Europe are asking: ‘What function exactly does the EU now serve?’ What justifies the huge transfer of powers from elected national parliaments and the big sums of money taxpayers from the Nordic countries, Germany, Britain and Holland now must hand over to the fraud-ridden budget of the European Commission? The tired old (and implicitly anti-democratic) arguments about there being ‘no alternative’ to political integration, it being the ‘inevitable destiny’ of our continent simply will not wash anymore with younger generations of Europeans. Nor is the extremely tasteless and desperate assertion that Ms Wallström employed on the site of a Nazi concentration camp just before the French and Dutch referendums that to vote against the European Constitution would be to risk another holocaust very persuasive.

I want to see instead a serious and rational debate that examines the possibility that the countries of Europe can co-operate politically, trade together and culturally interact without centralising supreme law making power in a series of unrepresentative and corrupt institutions in Brussels (for the twelfth year running the Court of Auditors have not been able to pass the Commissions’ accounts). Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and other the other 190 plus non-EU nations of the World are able to co-operate internationally without subordinating their systems of government to a higher authority, so is it not now time to ask whether the current members could not develop an alternative, more modern and more de-centralised model of joint problem solving? As the European Commission, so far, has refused to engage in the debate, let the debate start without it. The Democracy Movement has published its own alternative proposal entitled Vision Europe (http://www.democracymovement.org.uk) and we invite all individuals and groups to respond to it and communicate their own rival perspectives.

Even following the French and Dutch referendum results the European Commission is pressing ahead with plans the creation of a more integrated criminal justice system and police force, common foreign policy, among other measures that were included in the European Constitution. At a debate in London back in July, Valerie Giscard d’Estaing, the chief author of this document, said that it would be implemented anyway as the France people had ‘not really’ voted to reject it; they had been voting about other things, he claimed. Would this very grand political figure have said this had the French voted ‘yes’?

A growing percentage of laws that are imposed in the member states have their point of origin in directives and regulations originating in Brussels. Once the EU legislates in a given area where it claims ‘competence’ the elected national parliaments and governments have no choice but to enforce these measures locally because EU law is superior to national law. Last year, following a parliamentary question by the Christian Democrat Johannes Singhammer, the German Justice ministry revealed that of the 23,167 legislative acts passed by the Bundestag since 1998, nearly 19,000 were based on EU legislation, 80%. I would like to see the elected representatives of the people in each EU country ask their own governments this vital question. Regardless of whether we are for or against European political integration surely we should be told the truth about where ultimate law making power now actually lies? Only then will we be able to make an informed opinion on what we want to see happen in the future.

As the German-born British Labour MP Gisela Stuart has argued, the continuing drive towards European political integration has potentially very dangerous implications. If more and more important matters are determined by EU institutions that are remote from the ordinary citizens of the member states, if voting in national elections becomes seen as irrelevant, then, as she argues, many voters will turn to extremist political movements and direct action. Look at the riots in Hungary because of the way in which the government in Budapest has been forced to implement public spending cuts and tax increases by the European Commission as a preparation for entry into the euro. Supposing the EU does eventually get its wish and have a common foreign and military policy determined by majority vote, what do you think will be the reaction of voters in countries that are out-voted and forced to support conflicts they have no wish to participate in?

It is inconceivable that difficult decisions concerning how to respond to globalisation, the pensions’ crisis, immigration, terrorism among other questions, can be taken centrally in Brussels in defiance of whatever it is Swedish and other electorates desire. There can be no ‘one size fits all’ policy approach because Europe is characterised by political, economic and cultural diversity. The lesson of history is that you cannot have a single government without a single people. Political systems to be stable and legitimate must be underpinned by a common sense of identity. Until the peoples of Europe come to define themselves, of their own free will, as owing their political allegiance primarily to a Pan-European state, then the project of directing more law making power to the political elite in Brussels can only end in conflict and inner turmoil. This will be the opposite of what we are told the founding fathers of the European political dream believed would happen.

Perhaps it is because Margot Wallström and the other members of the Commission now appreciate that Europe’s defining reality is a fundamental diversity that they are unwilling to test their outdated ideas in the public arena. They are not so confident today that their vision of a centralised unity is indeed ‘inevitable’.

Marc Glendening Campaign Manager Democracy Movement