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  3. Nobody has a good word for apathy. Arnold Toynbee, a historian, thought it d

Nobody has a good word for apathy. Arnold Toynbee, a historian, thought it d

游客2023-12-22  22
问题     Nobody has a good word for apathy. Arnold Toynbee, a historian, thought it defined the penultimate stage of decadence. Civilisations proceed, he said, from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back to bondage. Apathy is also anti-democratic: democracy requires the informed consent of the governed, and will not last if voters can’t be bothered.
    Europe’s leaders also fret that apathy is anti-European. Popular indifference, they fear, leaves the European Union’s institutions vulnerable to the gusts of popular indignation. Their worry is understandable. The polling evidence, for what it is worth, shows that people who say they know a lot about the EU tend to support it. Those who know nothing and care less tend to be Eurosceptics. So governments and public institutions naturally seek to combat Euro-apathy as much as they can: by public-relations campaigns, by exhortations that Europe must dream (Jacques Delors’s admonition against indifference)—or by stunts such as last weekend’s birthday bash in Berlin to mark the 50th anniversary of the EU’s founding Treaty of Rome.
    If apathy were indeed a threat to European integration, there would seem to be much reason to worry. Apathy is lolling about everywhere. Voter turnout has fallen in every election to the European Parliament since the institution was created. In the most recent one, in 2004, it slumped below 50%—a lower rate than India’s parliamentary polls. The gap between turnout in national elections and in European ones is widening, so the problem seems especially acute for the EU.
    Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has a website where people can file online petitions. It is an unscientific measure of popular concerns, but intriguing nonetheless. A recent petition asking Britain to hold a referendum on any EU constitution got a few thousand electronic signatures. One  opposing road pricing got a few million.
    It is hard to measure degrees of apathy non-anecdotally because people tend to react badly to polling questions such as "Do you care two hoots about the EU?" But lack of knowledge might be taken as a proxy for lack of concern. Here too the evidence is discouraging. Some three-quarters of Europeans, asked to rate their own knowledge of the EU, say it is modest or non-existent, and this share is rising, not falling.
    Yet is it really true that apathy is an obstacle to European integration? A certain amount of apathy is understandable, perhaps inevitable. The EU’s institutions are remote and deliberately complex (deliberately in the sense that they seek to balance pan-European decision-making with national checks and balances). Most voters have no idea who represents them in the European Parliament and would not recognise a European commissioner if one turned up on their doorstep.
    There are also reasons why apathy might have grown. Historically, the term entered common use after the First World War, when it was associated with shell-shock and depression. The EU is suffering from the bombshell when French and Dutch voters rejected the draft constitution in 2005. It can also be argued that economic sluggishness and high unemployment (at least until the current recovery) have led to a continent-wide depression.
    More important, apathy has its compensations, especially for Europhiles. Without it, European integration would not have gone as far as it has. There was almost no debate about the content of the constitution in the referendum campaigns in Spain or Luxembourg, which approved it by wide margins. The voters who looked most closely at the text were in France and the Netherlands. Similarly, Britain debated the merits of the single currency more extensively than any other country. But Britain stayed out, while others adopted it without discussion.
    European integration can proceed without popular enthusiasm because of its character: the EU has a large regulatory component and much integration proceeds through rules-based co-operation. Rules and technical standards are peculiarly unsuited to mobilising popular opinion, whether for or against.
    Most people are content to leave them to experts. Integration by regulation proceeds under the voters’ indifferent gaze. In that sense, apathy is the Europhiles’ best friend.
    Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has learned this lesson. The "Berlin declaration" to mark the 50th birthday was written in secret and signed only by the EU’s own representatives: Ms. Merkel as holder of the EU presidency and the heads of the European Commission and Parliament. It seems likely that any revised constitutional treaty- will also be cooked up in semi-secret, with the aim of ratification by national parliaments, not referendums. Let sleeping voters lie.
    But there is a further manifestation of apathy to consider: a behavioural condition associated with it, known as "learned helplessness". In 1965 a psychologist, Martin Seligman, subjected two groups of dogs to electric shocks. The first group could end the punishment by pressing a lever. These dogs recovered quickly; in a subsequent experiment, they learned to avoid further shocks by jumping a low wall. The second group had a lever that did nothing. They became apathetic and in the subsequent experiment simply cowered on the electrified floor, unable to escape the shocks. They had "learned helplessness".
    In Europe, the treaties of Maastricht and Nice were rejected by Danish and Irish voters, only to be largely implemented later. If the constitution is successfully revived—a big if—it would continue this pattern. Some EU leaders may hope that, if they do this often enough, apathetic voters will learn that they are helpless to stop further integration, even when they want to. [br] What lesson does Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, learn?
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答案 European integration can proceed without popular enthusiasm because of its character. EU has a large regulatory component and rules-based co-operation. Rules and technical standards unsuited to mobilising popular opinion. Integration by regulation proceeds under the voters’ indifferent gaze.
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