Que Universidade?

(Viagens na minha terra 5)

[...]
Of course, this direct mutual contact between the members of the public was lost in the degree that the parties, having become integral parts of a system of special-interest associations under public law, had to transmit and represent at any given time the interests of several such organizations that grew out of the private sphere into the public sphere. Today, as a rule, they are neither class parties (like old Social Democratic Party) nor interest groups themselves (in the style of the Bond für Heimatvertriebene und Entrechtete or BHE). Rather, it is precisely the interlocking of organized interests and their official translation into the political machinery that lends to the parties a paramount position before which the parliament is degraded to the status of a commitee for the airing of party lines—and the member of parliament itself "to the status of an organizational-technical intermediary within the party, who has to obey its directives in case of conflict." (Leibholz, "Strukturwardel der modernen Demokratie," 97). According to an observation by Kirchheimer this development is linked to the diminishing parliamentary influence of laywers: the advocate type gives away to that of the functionary (O. Kirchheimer, "Majoritäten und Minoritäten in westereuropäischen Regierungen", Die Neue Geselschaft (1959), 256ff), Besides the small group of those considered to be "minister material" and who accumulate leadership positions, a considerable number of party functionaries strictly speaking (apparatchiks, propaganda experts, etc.) and a a mass of direct and indirect special-interest association representatives (corporate laywers, lobbyists, specialists, etc.) get into the parliament. The individual delegate, while called upon to participate in the formation of majority decisions within his party, in the end decides in accordance with the party line. By enforcing the principle that in certain context minorities of delegates must make majority opinions their own, the party transforms the pressure toward ever renewed compromise between organized interests into a constraint enabling it to display external unity; de facto, the delegate receives an imperative mandate by his party. The parliament therefore tends to become a place where instruction bound appointees meet to put their predetermined decisions on record. [...]

(op. cit., pp. 204-205; destaque a negrito de minha responsabilidade)

J. Habermas (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Polity, Cambridge, UK.

Obviamente, o passo seguinte é o corte com os intermediários "correias de transmissão", passando a decisão a ser tomada nas altas esferas, afectando assim directamente as vidas dos cidadãos comuns sem qualquer controlo possível. Este é o principal problema, a meu ver, com o caminho que segue a Comunidade Europeia, de que o "Tratado de Lisboa" é apenas mais um acidente de percurso.
A verdadeira questão não é apoiar ou não a construção europeia, mas garantir que o cidadão comum não é um mero número neste jogo de interesses à escala global, em que uma elite "esclarecida" dita a sorte de todos sem um real sistema de "checks and balances". Conjugando isto com os inevitáveis compromissos que se fazem durante uma carreira política, aumentando sempre o risco da "cobrança" mais adiante, não é um bom augúrio para a Europa do século XXI.