Closing or Widening the Gap?

Legitimacy and Democracy in Regional Integration Organizations

Andrea Ribeiro Hoffmann, Anna van der Vleuten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317164975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Combining normative analysis and theory-driven empirical research in a comparative framework, this volume clarifies and explains the connections between regional international governance, legitimacy and democracy. It focuses on the quality of democracy and the legitimacy of policy making in multilevel regional systems. The volume offers a much-needed clarification of confusing concepts such as legitimacy, democracy and 'civil society' in non-national political systems. It critically assesses the quality of democracy and legitimacy within different Regional International Organizations (RIOs); it examines how networks of non-state actors become a kind of transnational civil society and assesses their potential for solving legitimacy deficits; and it investigates the impact of democratic conditionality in different RIOs. The contributors deepen our understanding of a relatively new non-state actor on the international scene - the regional international organization - and investigate the potential contribution of transnational non-state actors to the quality of governance at the regional level.

PART 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315572451-1

1 Legitimacy, Democracy and RIOs: Where is the Gap?

Anna van der Vleuten and Andrea Ribeiro Hoffmann

DOI: 10.4324/9781315572451-2

Introduction: A Gap?

In the 1990s, a ‘new wave of regionalism’ rolled over the world and has developed to such an extent that virtually every state in the world is now member of some regional organization or agreement (Breslin et al. 2002). New regional organizations were created and existing ones were revived and enlarged. These regional integration organizations (RIOs) were heralded as the building blocks of a new global order which would be characterized by prosperity thanks to trade liberalization, and by peace thanks to democratization. RIOs would reduce the legitimacy gap which had resulted from processes of regionalization and globalization. RIOs would re-democratize politics.

Have RIOs lived up to these expectations? In the intervening years, several events have cast doubt on their capacity to do so. Regional cooperation was unable to offer a powerful solution to the financial and economic crises that rocked Southeast Asia and Latin America in 1998. Regional cooperation had no answer to increasing ethnic violence and terrorist attacks in Africa and South Asia. And in addition, RIOs were not perceived as democratizing agents but, on the contrary, as bulwarks for elitist policy making in the interest of some happy few. Even the European Union, which can be credited for five decades of prosperity and peace in Western Europe and for housing the world’s only directly elected supranational parliament, continues to suffer from a legitimacy problem. In direct elections to its European Parliament in June 2004 there was an extremely low turn-out, especially in its new member states in Central and Eastern Europe. One year later, French and Dutch ‘no’ votes in the referendum on a proposed Constitution for the EU made it clear that a majority of the people in these countries disapproved of further integration of this kind. Does this mean that RIOs do not, in fact, reduce the ‘legitimacy gap’, but rather widen it? How should we judge their contribution to a legitimate and democratic world order?

These questions have not been answered satisfactorily yet. Research on regional cooperation used to focus on the explanation of the consecutive successes and failures of economic integration (see for instance Axline 1994; Mansfield and Milner 1997; Mattli 1999). The New Regionalism Approaches have explained regional integration predominantly in terms of its success (or failure) as an answer to economic globalization (see Bøås, Marchand and Shaw 2005; Breslin et al. 2002; Fawcett and Hurrell 2000; Hettne, Inotai and Sunkel 1999; Laursen 2003; Schirm 2002; Söderbaum and Shaw 2003). Surely, economic success constitutes an important aspect of legitimacy, more precisely of ‘output legitimacy’ as Fritz Scharpf (1999) calls it, and some argue that this is the only aspect of legitimacy to be found at the regional level. Yet, we shall argue that this is too limited a view.

Other studies focus on democracy and legitimacy at the global level. The “Battle of Seattle” in 1999, when non-state actors representing a wide spectrum of causes joined in mass protests against the WTO, sparked off a stream of literature on transnational civil society and global governance (see Coicaud and Heiskanen 2001; Held and Koenig 2005; Scholte 2002; Zweifel 2006). This literature investigates the legitimacy gap in relation to global and functional international organizations. However, regional organizations differ from global and functional organizations in important respects, both on the ‘demand-side’ – as regards the high expectations citizens have in terms of regional development, security, employment – and on the ‘supply-side’, as regional integration is ‘multidimensional’, including economic, political, social and cultural aspects. For that reason, the issue of legitimacy and regional governance deserves special attention, as also Jon Pevehouse argues (Pevehouse 2002; Pevehouse 2005). He focuses specifically on the issue of whether RIOs contribute to the success or failure of domestic transitions to democracy, showing how regional organizations influence the cost-benefit calculations of domestic actors. He does not discuss democracy within regional governance or the legitimacy of RIOs in a wider sense, but his argument will serve as a starting point for the chapters in the last part of this book.

Of course, there is a wealth of literature on the European Union (EU) and its alleged democratic deficit. Much of the literature, however, lacks a comparative perspective, considering the EU as sui generis, a unique phenomenon, and is therefore unable to explain and interpret developments in other regional organizations. The ideas about the EU, legitimacy and democracy put forward by Philippe Schmitter (2003) and Fritz Scharpf (1999), however, have been used as stepping stones for further conceptualization, adapted to non-European regional organizations.

This volume thus borrows insights from various strands of work on regionalism, global governance, transnational civil society and domestic democracy in order to answer the question of whether RIOs make the gap between governing elites and their constituencies – which has resulted from processes of regionalization and globalization – wider or smaller. Opinions on this question differ and contradict each other. Some argue that RIOs have put the citizenry at a distance, widening the gap between governments and the governed. Others hold that RIOs have enabled the mobilization and development of a transnational civil society which may replace or supplement forms of domestic participation and control (Scholte 2002). Some hold that regional governance makes for elite policy making and suffers from a ‘democratic deficit’. Others, meanwhile, see evidence that regional organizations contribute to a just global order and the realization of democratic values and rule of law both within and beyond states (Pevehouse 2005). It is not our aim to elaborate a ‘user’s guide’, setting out how RIOs should be made more democratic and regional governance more legitimate. We do not argue that RIOs are the ‘good guys’, serving the interests of humanity, or the ‘bad guys’ for failing to fulfil such expectations. The issue, for us, is to investigate the meanings of legitimacy and democracy in a non-national political system. We shall explore the issue from different angles, not focusing on a single RIO but assessing and explaining similarities and differences between RIOs in terms of legitimacy and democracy. This will include the presence of mechanisms which can influence legitimacy at the regional level; the quality of participatory arrangements involving supranational parliamentary actors, subnational state actors and transnational non-state actors; and also the willingness of RIOs to intervene and preserve democracy in their member states.

Key Concepts

Among observers there seems to be a consensus that there ‘is still no consensus on the main concepts in the study of regionalism’ (Söderbaum and Van Langenhove 2006, 9). In this section, we shall present the definitions of the key concepts which have guided the authors of this volume. In several chapters, the authors will further elaborate or refine these definitions.

Regionalization, regionalism, RIOs, region

Cooperation between states takes many different forms, ranging from global agreements to security alliances, customs unions and common markets. Regional cooperation or regionalism differs from regionalization. The latter ‘defines a trade-driven, bottom-up process of intensifying interactions and transactions of private economic and other non-state actors, especially business firms, which leads to increased interdependencies between geographically adjacent states, societies and economies’ (Hänggi et al. 2006, 4). By regionalism we refer to the process of state actors, belonging to a certain region and reaching agreements cross-nationally. As opposed to ‘bottom-up’ regionalization, which is a primarily economic process, regionalism is a ‘top-down’ political process, ‘a conscious policy of nation states for the management of regionalization and a broad array of security and economic challenges’ (Hänggi et al. 2006, 4). States are the central actors from a formal point of view, concluding the agreements which are binding upon all the other actors involved, but this does not imply that state actors are the sole players.

Non-state actors such as business, think tanks and civil society organizations play a role in regional policy making, for instance in the form of ‘track-two diplomacy’ aimed at resolving conflicts between and within states through unofficial contacts and interactions (Caballero-Anthony 2005, 158). In this volume, the concept of state actors refers to the government at the national level as well as to subnational actors, such as state governments in federal states and the governmental representatives of cities and municipalities. The category of non-state actors encompasses actors often referred to as ‘civil society’ and non-governmental organizations, trade unions, but also private interest groups such as business associations. They are often thought to offer a potential remedy for the lack of parliamentary control at the regional level, but of course the fundamental difference with parliamentarians is that none of these actors is directly elected and thus they all represent specific interests without being directly accountable to those whose interests they represent. Part Four of this volume will further investigate the role of non-state actors in RIOs and their potential role in widening or closing the ‘legitimacy gap’.

Regional integration organizations (RIOs) are thus formal institutions which are capable of ‘purposive action like raising and spending money, promulgating policies, and making discretionary choices’ (Keohane 1989, 175). RIOs all differ in their institutional set-up: they can be purely or partially intergovernmental, and have institutionalized decision making along more or less supranational lines. In spite of these differences, RIOs may be distinguished from other forms of international cooperation in terms of three aspects: territoriality, identity and scope.

First, there is the aspect of territoriality. RIOs are composed of states belonging to a region. For that reason, RIOs have a restricted membership, requiring candidate members to be located within a certain geographical area. This territorial aspect makes them a specific kind of international organization, distinguishing them from global or functional organizations. It also begs the question of how to define a region – or: how do we know a region when we see one? A region presupposes some geographical coherence, but geography alone does not determine what a region is. The Pyrenees and the Alps, for instance, with many summits reaching over 3000 metres above sea level, are expensive obstacles to the free movement of goods and people, but they do not constitute the southern borders of the region of Europe. The region of Southeast Asia is composed of island states and of continental states, in spite of ‘the stopping power of water’ (cf. Mearsheimer 2001, 114–27). From these examples, it follows that ‘natural’ borders are not given and natural, but constructed and geopolitical (see Katzenstein 2005, 6–13). Geography is one necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for a group of states to constitute a region. For that reason, territoriality and identity, the first and second aspects defining an RIO, cannot be considered separately.

The second aspect is identity. RIOs often refer to a common identity based on the shared history of this territorial entity. To be member of a region, a nation must share this identity, based on some combination of cultural, economic, linguistic, or political ties (see Mansfield and Milner 1999, 591). The members of a region define and redefine themselves. Identity is intersubjective, as it expresses not only the meaning an actor attributes to the Self, but also the meaning which the Other attributes to the Self. In order to label a geographical area a region, some consensus about the self-definition of the region is required, as well as external recognition of the area as a region.¹This shared regional identity is inst...