The future of European democracy

Abstract

Given that we have democracy of a kind in most of Europe, and that there seems a reasonable prospect of its survival in, and extension to the rest of, the sub-continent, this article asks whether and to what extent we also need European-level democratic politics and how we might hope to achieve this, against the background of the current crisis. This article examines the ‘democratic deficit’ in the EU and the tensions between its formal decision-making structures and the growth of what has been called ‘executive federalism’, and also between collective planning and deregulation.

Keywords

democracy European Union executive federalism

Max Weber taught us that we must expect our work to be superseded, but this is a more immediate threat with a topic such as this one. Since much of what follows is rather pessimistic, I shall begin with some optimistic assumptions, since otherwise all bets are off. I am assuming that the EU will survive, that the Euro will survive, and that the existing member states will remain democratic enough to satisfy the Copenhagen criteria.¹ Given, then, that we have democracy of a kind in most of Europe, and that there seems a reasonable prospect of its survival in, and extension to the rest of, the sub-continent, the question is whether and to what extent we also need European-level democratic politics.

In the early days of what has become the European Union the answer was: ‘Yes, of course, to an extent determined by progress of the integration process and cautiously implemented along with it.’² This meant in practice a system of parliamentary assemblies recruited from national parliaments and, eventually, a directly elected parliament. It is worth recalling that Jean Monnet argued as long ago as 1953, in relation to the ECSC, that a parliament was indispensable, ‘based on a desire to bring our institutions to life, a process in which, by necessity, this new European Parliament must play an essential part’ (European Parliament, 2010).

Much of the weakness of European democracy, as well as many of its other dysfunctional features, can probably be explained by the way in which a model developed for the six members of the Coal and Steel Community at the beginning of the 1950s was gradually scaled up to the current EU and its nearly thirty member states. David Held and his co-authors have brilliantly described the way in which the world has become the victim of the success of post-war initiatives such as the UN, NATO and Bretton Woods. In this argument (Hale et al., 2013: 224), ‘the very success of global cooperation, by deepening interdependence, has led to the emergence of second-order cooperation problems’. Something like this certainly seems also to have happened at the European level, especially in relation to parliamentary democracy.

Stefan Auer (2012: 77–8) has neatly brought out the paradoxes of the EU’s evolution:

The attempt to build a European supra-democracy by undemocratic means has backfired. The attempt to turn the peoples of Europe into Europeans through a common currency, common citizenship and freedom of movement has resulted, paradoxically, in strengthening the forces of extreme nationalism. The attempt to weaken German influence in Europe by integrating it more firmly into a radically transformed EU has significantly increased economic and political imbalances, unwittingly empowering Germany vis-à-vis its European partners.

The elected parliament surely has to be the main focus for questions about European democracy. There are at least three other areas in which one might locate weaker forms of democracy: unanimity and/or majority voting in the Council, deliberative activity here (Dann, 2002: 10), in the College of Commissioners (Egeberg, 2006) and elsewhere (Joerges and Neyer, 1997; Christiansen, 2001) and the relatively problematic referenda carried out in some member states on European issues (Hobolt, 2006), as well as the interaction of EU institutions with ‘civil society’ (Friedrich, 2011; Liebert and Trenz, 2011). I shall not discuss these in detail here.³

What we have had in Europe is a set of rather halting attempts to remedy the perceived democratic deficit of the EU and a counter-argument which says, in essence, don’t bother. One line of argument suggests that the telos of the EU is that of a regulatory state (Majone and Moravcsik); another that democracy need only exist at the realistic level at which it functions more or less well: that of the national state. In a related move, the German Constitutional Court argued for the primacy of democratic national parliaments unless and until there emerges a democratic European polity (BVerfG, 2009). This line of argument replicates, not surprisingly, the line taken by opponents of cosmopolitan democracy, that it would only make sense if, per impossibile, there were a world state with a world government. There is, in other words, a fundamental intellectual debate about the place of democracy in the EU which is now rare in relation to the national state. This compounds the problem to which, for example, Antje Wiener (2008: 204–5) has drawn attention, of the absence of shared cultural frameworks: ‘as long as exclusively organisational practices such as voting are transferred to the transnational realm while cultural practices are not transnationalised in equal measure, the voting procedure will be perceived not only as distant, but also actually lacking democratic legitimation’.

Is the European Union democratic?

It seems too easy to assume that a union of democratic states is eo ipso democratic, but a poor cook can make a dog’s breakfast out of the best ingredients. The EU cannot, I think, claim to be fully democratic while its legislature takes the form it currently does. European democracy, we might say, has only two sets of problems: structural and functional. Structurally, the European Parliament (EP) lacks the most fundamental legislative competences. At least the UK’s House of Commons can in extremis trump the Lords and presumably talk the monarch out of exercising her theoretical veto power: the EP, by contrast, can dismiss the Commission but not circumvent the Council. The more serious problems are, however, functional: as John Palmer (2006: 106) neatly put it: ‘European elections are simply not about enough at present to capture the imagination and enthusiasm of the electorate. A vote in the European Parliament election has no executive outcome.’As analysts such as Joe Weiler and Hauke Brunkhorst have argued, in their different ways, the EU does have a kind of democratic constitution, but not one which anyone much recognizes as such, and it is easy to see why.⁴ Even the most sophisticated account of the EU’s ‘mixed constitution’ (Telò, 2011) fails to convince in the light of the current crisis in which, as Sonia Lucarelli (2011: 204) points out, the EU institutions ‘have deprived the member states of sovereign powers without providing adequate guarantees that the overall multilevel system is based on a principle of governance for, by and with the people’.

Attention has in any case shifted, with good reason, from the EU institutions, most recently the Court, to the intergovernmental level. If the 1980s were the decade of, inter alia, talk about the democratic deficit,⁵ the 2010s look like being the decade of ‘postdemocratic executive federalism’.⁶ The term ‘executive federalism’ entered the discussion in a relatively optimistic analysis of the EU by the legal theorist Philipp Dann. In his brilliant PhD thesis, Dann (2002: 3) defined the EU as a ‘semi-parliamentary democracy’: ‘a system based on a negative parliamentary power to determine the executive and a consensual method of decsion-making’. Executive federalism more broadly is, he suggested, a feature of many federal systems in which ‘making laws is the domain of the federal (in the EU: supranational) level but implementing that same law is the domain of the state (or here: national or even subnational level)’ (Dann, 2002: 5) In the case of the EU, the three components of executive federalism are ‘an interwoven structure of competencies’ (p. 7) complemented by a single institution or ‘institutional core’ (p. 12), in this case, the Council of Ministers (pp. 6–9) and mediated by substantially consensus-based decision-making (pp. 9–12). Dann (p. 9) cites the model of consensus democracy advanced simultaneously but independently by Arend Lijphart (1968) and Gerhard Lehmbruch (1967), in which ‘culturally, religiously, linguistically or otherwise divided societies developed an original mode of decision-making which enables them to find a peaceful way of dealing with cleavages and conflicts’.

In Dann’s model, the interweaving which for Fritz Scharpf (1988) classically led to the ‘joint decision trap’ (Verflechtungsfalle) is a virtue:

Weaving together legislation and implementation, this structure also demands the prominence of executive actors in the law-making procedure of the federal level since only the bureaucracy of the sub-level has the knowledge, resources and power to render the common legislation workable. (Dann, 2002, p. 13)

What role has the European Parliament in this system? Quite a substantial one: ‘the EU will not be a parliamentary system but the EP already is a strong parliament’ (p. 23). Dann distinguishes between two types of parliament: the debating parliament found in Europe (including, of course, the UK) and the ‘working parliament’ exemplified by the US Congress, where the action is focused not in the debating chamber but in committees and where the Congress works within a system of separated powers. The Bundestag, he suggests, is a cross between the two types; the French Assemblée Nationale largely fails either to influence legislation or to control the executive. The EP, he suggests, is a variant of the working parliament which he terms a ‘controlling parliament’, notably in its negative power to dismiss the Commission.

Yet though the EP is more than a fig leaf for absolutism,⁷ there is

a deep flaw in the elective system of executive federalism. This is the question of accountability.There is no direct and clear connection between the European citizen’s right to vote (on the European and on national level) and the governing personnel. Instead, every vote given is manifold counterbalanced and dispersed by other elections, at other times and in other places. It is a vote without consequences.

However, Dann goes on (p. 28):

the problem of accountability in the EU is rooted in the federally shaped institutional structure which necessarily demands the cooperation between the federal levels and different governments.What is a gross violation of democratic principles on one side, turns out to be the life insurance of the federal system on the other side.⁸

Thus, the European Parliament ‘makes the best of an overall problematic institutional setting’. (Here Dann points to the analogy with the German Bundestag.) Dann takes the demands of democracy more seriously than the partisans of the regulative state. His argument from Germany has, however, the disadvantage that, whereas it would be hard to find a German citizen who saw the activities of his or her Landstag or local Senate as more important than those of the Bundestag, it is equally hard to find a European who would see the activities of the European Parliament as more important than those of their national parliament. Nor is the German polity dominated by unelected politicians and senior officials (with the partial exception perhaps of the judges of the Federal Constitutional Court) in the way the EU polity is. There may well be good reasons for this, but it does not reinforce democratic legitimacy.⁹

Since Dann moved on to other topics, the term ‘executive federalism’ has taken on a more polemical edge, marked by Habermas’ addition, in an article in Die Zeit on 20 May 2010, of the adjective ‘post-democratic’ and the assertion in the title of his article that ‘Europe must choose between transnational democracy and post-democratic executive federalism’.¹⁰ Here he referred to an earlier and rather different use of the term by Stefan Oeter (2003). In the passage Habermas (2012: 6) cites, Oeter (2003: 102) stresses a specific aspect of the process:

In the EU system, the bureaucracies of the member states to a large extent evade the controlling functions of their domestic (national) parliaments by shifting the problems to be decided to the level of the Union. But at the European level they are subject to nothing even approximating the same degree of political oversight as in the national constitutional systems.

The result is a system of what Max Weber described (in relation to the Imperial Geman foreign ministry) as organized irresponsibility. But Oeter, like Dann, stresses that this is a feature of all federal systems, and his recommendations for further democratization are similarly cautious. The choice can only be one between more democracy or more bureaucracy at the European level: a retreat to national democratic structures is not an option, since so much policy is now located at the level of the Union (Oeter, 2003: 104). However, the EU’s federal nature excludes any radical application of majoritarian democracy:

The heterogenity of the nations and societies united in the EU is unquestionably too great for the majority principle alone to lead to decisions which would be universally accepted as legitimate. Federal systems like the European Union.cannot avoid building in strong elements of a consociational system. (Oeter, 2003: 103 – my translation)

The hybrid character of the EU is a strength, not a weakness; he ends by suggesting that the best prospects lie ‘in a cautious and gradual optimisation of the existing institutional structures’ (p. 117).

Habermas’ perspective, nearly a decade later, is considerably darker.¹¹ ‘Executive federalism, already implicit in the Lisbon Treaty’, threatened to ‘expand into a form of intergovernmental rule by the European Council, moreover, one which is at odds with the spirit of the treaty’. ‘In this way, the heads of government would invert the European project into its opposite. The first transnational democracy would be transformed into an arrangement for exercising a kind of post-democratic, bureaucratic rule’ (Habermas, 2012: 52). ‘The alternative’, he goes on, ‘is to continue the democratic juridification of the European Union in a consistent way.’

I shall not here go into the details of Habermas’ analysis and his suggested remedies, but it would be hard to deny that the continuing Euro-crisis (of the continent, not just the currency) has reinforced the tendencies he identified. They have of course been present in the ECSC/EC/EU from the beginning, notably in the Franco-German alliances with which they began and which have continued to the present (Krotz and Schild, 2013). ‘Merkande’ may be much less of an item than ‘Merkozy’, but the structural imperative remains, given that the two other leading EU states, the UK and Italy, ruled themselves out of a leadership role through different forms of political irresponsibility (Cameron’s ‘country suppers’ are not quite Berlusconi’s bunga-bunga parties) which, however, are similar in their effects.¹² As for the remedies, Habermas’ principle (Habermas, 2012: 28–9 et seq.) that we have a kind of double mandate as citizens of national states and of Europe (and also, one might add, of cities, regions, etc.) seems the right starting point.

Two elephants

It is probably not surprising if post-democratic executive federalism has reinforced the already growing current of populist Euroscepticism, embodied in Britain by UKIP. So far I have focussed at some length on executive federalism, but post-democracy at both national and European level deserves more serious attention. The debates on the EU’s democratic deficit converged with diagnoses by Colin Crouch (2004; 2008) and others of more endogeneous trends in modern states towards post-democracy.¹³ A regime like Berlusconi’s would presumably have been much the same whether or not Italy had been a member of the EU, though its membership may have made his eventual removal easier. Vivien Schmidt (2006) provided one of the best analyses of the often pernicious effects on European democracy of the interface between the European and national levels,¹⁴ and Claus Offe and others have warned that extending EU-level democracy might further undermine democratic practices in the member states.

This is one elephant; the other is something revealed and exacerbated by the 2008 crisis but with a much longer history: the evolution of the EU itself from something like a social democratic project, born of the post-war consensus, into what Wolfgang Streeck (2013) has called a neoliberal transnational consolidation state, presiding over those of the member states. Post-democracy for Streeck is the political superstructure of an increasingly neoliberal state form, whether inside or outside Europe.¹⁵ He takes a broad view in disciplinary terms, pointing up the limitations of social and political theories of crisis or democracy which abstract from political economy (p. 17) and a long view of the current crisis, from which similarities across European capitalism outweigh the ‘varieties’ (p. 13).

The neo-Marxist crisis theories of the 1970s were right, Streeck argues, to focus on the antagonistic relations between capitalism and democratic politics.¹⁶ Habermas and others were, however, wrong to assume that economic contradictions could be displaced into the political and broadly cultural sphere and to direct their attention to these (pp. 37, 41). At the economic level as well, capitalism ‘bought’ time, deferring economic and social crises ‘first by means of inflation, then through state indebtedness, then through expansion of private credit markets¹⁷ and finally – today– through the purchase of state and bank debt by central banks’ (p. 15). Modern governments have two constituencies: the voters and the markets. International capital now influences politics not just indirectly, by choosing to invest or not to invest in national economies, but directly, ‘by financing or not financing the state itself’ (p. 124). Debt policy becomes international financial diplomacy (p. 132). Or, one might add, in the European case, the domestic policy of the transnational European polity.

In Streeck’s analysis, then, we are not so much in late capitalism as in late democracy. Democracy loses its redistributive capacity (promise or threat, depending how you see it) and becomes ‘a combination of constitutional state and public entertainment’. Capitalism has been ‘de-democratised by means of the de-economisation of democracy’ (p. 28). Among the intellectual roots of de-democratization are a domestic and a transnational variant. The domestic one is in the theories of ‘ungovernability’ which parallelled and in some respects overlapped with the neo-Marxist crisis theories of the 1970s.¹⁸ These analyses focussed on inflation (Hirsch and Goldthorpe, 1978), union power (Brittan, 1975) and hedonistic culture (Bell, 1976) and were presented in a broader form by Crozier et al. (1975).¹⁹

For the transnational variant, Streeck refers to the 1939 paper by Hayek (1980), discussed in more detail by Christoph Deutschmann in this issue, which argues for an interstate federation which would ‘neutralize’ (Hayek, 1980: 271; Streeck, 2013: 146) the democratic institutions of the member states. This, Streeck suggests, brushing aside what by the 1980s was a ‘residual social democratic programme, persisting in the community institutions in Brussels but in practice long since obsolete’ (p. 149), and the ‘so-called European Parliament ’ (p. 162), is essentially the direction which the Union has taken. The circumvention and undermining of democratic institutions in member states and at the European level are not just a reaction or over-reaction to the current crisis (nor, he would probably add, the result of the extension of European law in some earlier Court judgments analysed by Fritz Scharpf (2012; 2013b) and Christian Joerges (Joerges and Rödl, 2008)) but something intrinsic to the ‘international consolidation state’ which the EU has become.

Following this rather devastating analysis, Streeck’s proposals come as an anticlimax. They amount in essence to a combination of street protest, ‘bypassing the blocked channels of institutionalized democracy’ (Streeck, 2013: 223) and a new Bretton Woods regime in Europe of fixed yet variable exchange rates, allowing devaluations where necessary and retaining the euro as a secondary currency. This is hardly convincing. The toothpaste of the euro was undoubtedly spread too wide, and it would probably have been better to have left it in the tube for a bit longer, but even if it could and should be put back, it is hard to see how this could be more than the first stage of an alternative programme for the EU.

Conclusion

We are left, then, with the dilemma to which, in their different ways, Schmidt, Offe and Streeck (as well as many others) have pointed: whether to strengthen what is left of national democracies by cutting back the powers of the Union, as Streeck recommends, or attempt to democratize it. The question raised by Deutschmann (in this special issue) of when the Hayekian rot set in takes us to the heart of fundamental issues in our understanding of what has become the European Union. In focussing on the interplay between the interests, more or less well understood, of the Community/Union and member states and the institutions representing them, we have paid too little attention to two other tensions. First, the underlying tension between the overall institutional matrix of the Union and what Giddens calls EU2 and in practice has often meant the Franco-German dyad. Second, that between the largely centrist (social/Christian democratic) integration project and the market liberalization whose underlying dynamic was better understood by Marxist and neo-Marxist analysts than by those who focussed on its surface appearance in the removal of geographical barriers to trade. This version of economic liberalism, like its national version in the nineteenth century, calls for a new transnational social democratic response.

Such a project would have to be very different from the currently proposed schemes which would either strengthen the influence of markets, such as the proposal for a European finance minister, or be essentially cosmetic, such as the direct election of the presidents of the Commission and Council. It would also have to pay more attention both to the diversity of European states and regions and to the interrelation between economic and other aspects of life. This would, of course, take time (probably decades) and therefore be no immediate alternative to the neoliberal crisis programme now under way.

In the longer term, there is, however, no attractive alternative. The growing financial, economic and social catastrophe of the last few years has surely undermined the plausibility of a ‘regulatory state’ approach and the neoliberal drift in legal and political integration diagnosed by Richard Münch (2008) and more recently by Streeck. Even the administration of the monetary union, let alone European public policy as a whole, is too fraught and contentious to be bagatellized by intergovernmental manoeuvring. The apparent truism that you need a demos to have a democracy may be more of a half-truth. Habermas, who of course slogged out the ‘no demos’ argument with the legal theorist Dieter Grimm over a decade ago, counters it by standing it on its head, though with perhaps a hint of functionalism (in the sociological sense of the term): ‘the enduring political fragmentation in the world and in Europe is at variance with the systemic integration of a multicultural world society and is blocking progress towards the constitutional civilizing of state and societal relations of violence’ (Habermas, 2012: 7).²⁰

Rather more concretely, though in a similar vein, Ivan Krastev (2012: 7) has moved from a pessimistic paradox to a more optimistic one:

The EU is an elite project sustained by the European elites’ respect for democracy. Today it is also an elite project endangered by the elites’ fear of democracy. Unable to bring democracy to the European level owing to the lack of a European demos and frightened by the spectre of anti-European populism at the national level, many European politicians are ready pre-emptively to turn their backs on the Union.

But he goes on to note another paradox confronting these national elites:

It is widespread disillusionment with democracy – the shared belief that national governments are powerless in the face of global markets – that may be the best hope for reconciling the growing tension between the goal of further European integration and the goal of deepening democracy in Europe. (Krastev, 2012: 8)

One of the few bright spots in the otherwise dark picture of the EU’s current state is that we Europeans still mostly ‘trust’ (whatever that means)²¹ the EU more than our national governments and parliaments (European Commission, 2013: 5). This is of course a backhanded compliment to the EU, which has enjoyed, if that is the right word, a score of just under a third over the past two years, as compared with a similarly steady quarter or so for its national counterparts. Although the gap has narrowed over time, this is, however, a result which casts an interesting light on arguments such as those advanced above by Dann and Oeter, and most recently and eloquently by Streeck, and familiar also in the work of Claus Offe and others, that any attempt to democratize the EU risks further undermining democracy at the national and subnational levels at which it still more or less functions.

This is, of course, an issue familar to ‘real’ doctors, as opposed to people like us holding or working towards PhDs: will the proposed cure be more dangerous than the disease? We probably have to recognize that now is not the time to regale the increasingly desperate people of Europe with more constitutional or other innovations.²² On the other hand, they are all too aware that (hopefully democratic) politics is needed in Europe to deal with global capitalism.²³ As Habermas (2012: 103) put it, ‘Politics, not capitalism, is responsible for promoting the common good.’ And as Vivien Schmidt points out:

Politicization, in any event, will be increasingly hard to avoid, given the awakening of the ‘sleeping giant’ of cross-cutting cleavages in member states, with the rise of splits between pro-Europeans and Eurosceptics in mainstream parties of the right and the left, and the likelihood of much more hotly contested, politicized EU elections than in the past, even if they remain second-order elections. All of this could be a good thing for democracy.

It may be that we need also to rethink the nature of democracy at both the national and the European level. In an important and neglected recent book, Jeffrey Green (2010) has argued for a spectatorial model of democracy focussed on the regular exposure of political leaders to forms of interrogation which they do not control and manipulate. Modern publics have neither the time nor the inclination to engage substantially with political issues,²⁴ but as more or less informed spectators they can exercise an important supervisory function. Theories of representative democracy put too much stress on the electoral process, and those of direct and deliberative democracy raise unrealistic expectations,²⁵ while a modified version of plebiscitary democracy can enforce what he calls ‘candour’ on political leaders.

In an argument which resonates with Bourdieu’s ([1979] 1984) analysis of political exclusion and Crouch’s discussion of post-democracy,²⁶ Green in a sense sets a spectatorial thief to catch the post-democratic media-manipulative thief (Berlusconi e tutti quanti), recognizing, as Habermas and other democratic theorists have done, the implications of the fact that we now have an essentially mediated relationship to political debate.

How might this approach illuminate European politics? Green urges us to turn our attention to political leaders rather than legislative outputs – an approach which seems at best inappropriate to the EU and at worst to reinforce the current emphasis on EU2 and Merkel’s charisma of office. On the other hand, theories of the EU as a regulatory and audit-based state do capture an important aspect of its operations, and of the more effective areas of activity of the European Parliament. In national politics too, at least in that of the UK, there has been a notable shift of emphasis in the recent past from the show in the Chamber to the investigatory role of parliamentary committees. The EU’s current political authorities might not stand up well to spectatorial democracy, but the politics of the Union, though for geographical reasons inevitably remote from most citizens, is a good deal more open to scrutiny than that of most member states, and its representatives relatively open to public attention – where they can attract it.²⁷ There is perhaps the possibility of a virtuous spiral in which upgraded EU presidents, high representatives and commissioners begin to look and act like representatives of a serious political entity. A European Union which addressed these internal issues, as well as the overarching global crisis of capitalism, might do much to revive democracy at the national and the European level.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my colleague Elaine Campbell for drawing my attention to Jeffrey Green’s book, and to David Spence, Richard Beardsworth and the organizers of, and participants at, conferences in Trento, Cardiff and London (BSA Theory Group) for comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

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