Devolution

The multi-level polity which is emerging in the EU signals a new combination of opportunities and threats and this needs to be managed with skill and sensitivity if an enlarged EU is to be a dynamic, democratic and cohesive entity. A future Union of up to 30 members will have to be more responsive to its citizens than the present system; in other words the EU will have to devise more porous structures and more iterative strategies to open itself up to sub-national actors on the one hand and to civil society on the other. Localities and regions will have to play a more prominent role because, as a recent democratic audit put it, the EU often seems to be 'the preserve of a small cosmopolitan elite' which bypasses the ordinary citizen (Loughlin et al: 1999).

Until recently there were two main schools of thought on the EU - integrationists, who believed in strengthening common institutions like the European Commission and the European Parliament, and inter-governmentalists, who want the EU to be no more than a members' club, or an agent, to further the interests of national governments. As different as they are in principle, these two schools of thought are at one in thinking of the EU as a debate between two parties - the EU institutions on the one hand and Member States on the other. Slowly but surely, however, two additional schools of thought are making themselves felt:

• First, we have the Subsidiarity school, a passionately pro-European school which wants the EU to open up to sub-national actors like regions, cities and localities. The Committee of the Regions is a major advocate of this school of thought.

• Second, there is the Euro-sceptic school, which contains elements which are not just sceptical about the EU but which are becoming ever more opposed to it, and would actually like tosee a major re-nationalisation of powers.

Pro-Europeans, whatever their hue, need to remember that the Euro-sceptic school, no matter how unattractive it may be in cultural, political and intellectual terms, could garner popular support if the EU remains what it is today - namely a remote entity which seems marginal to the concerns of everyday life. The Nice Summit was supposed to ensure that the EU would remain an effective entity after enlargement. But what exactly did Nice achieve? According to one perceptive commentator Nice left much to be desired because:

The EU is supposed to be capable of taking decisions without falling into permanent deadlock, and of taking them in a democratic, transparent and legitimate way. The danger is that Nice will prove to have failed the test on all counts…By opting for greater complexity in order to reconcile their differences, the EU leaders will make their system less transparent, and less open to democratic control, whether by the European Parliament, or by national parliaments …The EU cannot delay much longer a fundamental choice between clumsy inter-governmentalism, and a clearer constitutional settlement to transfer more power to common institutions. (Peel: 2000)

Notwithstanding these problems, there were some encouraging signs at the Summit, above all the agreement on the 'post-Nice process', which involves a new inter-governmental conference (IGC) in 2004 to deal with competence and constitutional issues. The objectives of the 2004 IGC include the simplification of the present Treaties, the future legal status of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, a review of the division of powers between EU institutions, national governments and regional authorities and the role of national parliaments in the EU's decision-making architecture. At the end of the Nice Summit, however, there was a widespread conviction that 'the traditional IGC process of the kind which produced the Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice Treaties had probably run its course' (Palmer: 2000).

The viability of a European Union of up to 30 members will depend on what happens after Nice, especially on what happens when the twin processes of widening and deepening have to co-exist within the Union. If the EU is to have a viable future then Nice will need to be both an end and a beginning. It will need to be the end of a process which treats the Union as a members' club for nation states. And it should be the beginning of a process in which the Union admits to being a wholly new kind of polity, a multi-level polity in which the EU is more than the sum of its parts, a polity in which supra-national, national and sub-national energies are brought to bear on the key challenge, namely, how to combine subsidiarity with solidarity - equality in diversity in other words.