The elusive transparency

After the Danes “misunderstood” the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, and voted no to it in the referendum, the democratic deficit in the European institutions became a popular theme amongst Brussels politicos, analysts and lobbyists alike. The sudden nervousness took such proportions, that normally trustworthy Eurocrats started using words like “transparency” and “democratic control”.
One might do well to doubt the sincerity of this new-found terminology; Denmark’s “No” was the equivalent of putting a loaded gun to Commission’s head. In order to regain public trust, and prevent a disaster in the upcoming referendum in France later the same year, the Commissioners started to voice support for more democracy. The Danes also made the most of the situation, wrangling more concessions from Brussels, giving Denmark a favoured status in several of the Maastricht issues.
But the isolation of the Brussels policymakers was starting to annoy European voters. As a result, more or less convincing declarations about openness have been reverberating through the Brussels bureaucracy through the rest of the ’90s.
In a recent speech, the European Ombudsman Jacob Söderman stressed the importance of transparency:
”The Community institutions still occasionally give the impression that they start from the presumption that documents are secret, unless the citizen can prove the opposite in court. Taking citizenship seriously means exactly the opposite: access should be the rule and secrecy the exception, which must be expressely justified.”

The Ombudsman also criticised the Council (where the real power dwells, according to most insiders) for not opening its legislative meetings to the public, saying, “transparency is not just about access to documents”.
The Ombudsman’s views on transparency have not appealed to everyone. The conservative parties in the European Parliament, in a vote this autumn, almost succeeded in replacing Mr Söderman with a more traditionally minded Greek. Luckily, Mr Söderman won a second term, albeit with an uncomfortably small margin.
Bringing Brussels closer to the citizens of Europe is a major concern of President Romano Prodi and his colleagues in the Commission. However, the real trick is doing this and at the same time strengthening the federal power wielded by the officials at the “European” level.

The introduction of the Euro and the European Central Bank undoubtedly add up to the most important transfer of power away from governments in the member states in several decades. They do not, however, strengthen the image of “European Democracy”. And this sometimes results in a bad press. Mr Prodi quickly centralised the press and information service under his own cabinet, and told his commissioners to tone down their public appearances (although he had to back away from some of this, Mr Prodi clearly showed that he wanted to speak for the European Commission himself). A restyled press centre and the hiring of Tony Blair’s PR-genius, Alistair Campbell, are some weapons in the President's new media armoury.
Controlling what the newspapers write about Brussels is, however, not always easy. And sometimes even the efforts to show a bit of openness backfire. Take the French journalists, for example. This hard-to-please group became so upset with the fact that the daily press conferences in the European Commission are now broadcast to the general public via the EBS satellite channel, that they simply walked out.
The decision by press chief Jonathan Faull, a Brit, to bypass boring Germanic analysis as well as lengthy Francophone prose by airing both questions and answers directly on television, was too much for the French press. In a city where even the journalists resent public scrutiny, transparency can be an elusive concept.