Rethinking Democracy and the European Union

Erik Oddvar Eriksen, John Erik Fossum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415690720
• eBook ISBN: 9781136490897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

While the Lisbon treaty was meant to clarify the European Union's role and political identity, it remains a challenge for politicians and decision-makers to define. Rethinking Democracy and the European Union looks at both the concept of the EU as a political system, and analyses the meaning and status of democracy in Europe today.

This book draws upon leading scholars and practitioners from the RECON project (Reconstituting Democracy in Europe) to frame and analyse a range of institutional realms and policy fields, including constitutionalisation, representative developments, gender politics, civil society and public sphere, identity, and security and globalisation. Drawing together these strands, the book questions whether EU politics require a new theory of democracy, and evaluates the relationship between union and state, and the possible future of post-national democracy. Lucid and accessible, this book is at the forefront of the intellectual debate over the character of the EU, presenting research, theory and analysis on a critical political issue of our time.

Rethinking Democracy and the European Union will be of interest to students and scholars of democracy, European Union politics and international relations.

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INTRODUCTION

Reconfiguring European democracy

Erik Oddvar Eriksen and John Erik Fossum

The last months have seen newspapers filled with headlines on the European crisis, the imminent collapse of the European Union's (EU) common currency, the euro, and the repercussions that these events may have. At the time of writing, it is not clear what the outcomes will be. Whether the euro will survive, be reshaped, or collapse, are questions that remain shrouded in uncertainty. The same applies to the fallout for the EU, whether it will continue to survive, and, if so, in what form or shape that will be.

Social science is notoriously bad at prediction. Rather than trying to assess likely outcomes, at this stage we are better served by trying to clarify what is really at stake here. Is the core issue the financial crisis and the viability of the Monetary Union? If so, one might assume that the issue belongs in the realm of political economy, and the main question is that of how we may best manage capitalism in a context of highly integrated national economies. Is the core issue now facing Europe rather fundamentally a political one and pertaining to the nature and viability of the EU? A recent article predicts ‘Europe's return to Westphalia’.¹ It argues that the root of is not economical but deeply political and that what is missing is ‘trust and political will’.

The author of the article questions the ability of central political decision–makers such as France's president Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel to make good on their commitment to protect the euro, a commitment that the leaders stress is ultimately political. Sarkozy noted in January 2011 that: ‘The euro is Europe [. . .] We will never let the euro be destroyed [. . .] It is not simply a monetary or an economic issue. It has to do with our identity as Europeans.’² Sarkozy thus framed the issue as a key determinant for the future of the European community, and, he added, this is a community that we identify with.

This statement suggests that what is at stake is the future of the EU as a community of identification. But if so, what kind of community is it? The problem here is that Europeans do not agree among themselves on the basic contours of the community that Sarkozy refers to; they do not even agree on whether it is a community to identify with in the first place. On this, also, the academic views and positions range remarkably widely. Some have presented the EU as a special subtype of international organisation (Moravcsik 1998, 2001), others have conceived of it as a European super–state in the making (Morgan 2005), and others again have tended to consider it as an experiment in supranational or transnational democracy (Bohman 2007a).

One central issue is the magnitude of state transformation that the European integration process unleashes; the other is the democratic implications that this process will have. Some see integration as producing democratic problems and undercutting democracy as we know it; others underline the democratic benefits that integration brings along. Positions then naturally diverge on the implications of EU dismantling, with some applauding and others lamenting this.

Thus, to get a clear view of what is at stake we need a better understanding of what the EU is, what it does to the member states, and what this entails for democracy.If the EU really does not transform the member states, as we should expect from an international organisation that is an instrument of the member states, an EU collapse will hardly threaten the viability of the member states. This reading presupposes that there is no real identity at stake in relation to the EU and runs against what Sarkozy has claimed. If instead the EU is better understood as a major vehicle in transforming the members from nation states to subunits of a European federal state, then an EU collapse will have significant effects.³ A frequently voiced argument here is that European states’ identities and even state–ness have come to resonate with their European–ness; national law has become so entangled in EU law practice that the states are no longer conventional ‘nation states’. The claim is that Europe has already travelled such a distance down the EU integration path that a reversal back to a Europe of independent nation states will represent a transformative project of near–revolutionary proportions (not to speak of the possible fallouts from the process itself if it does not unfold amicably). There is a clear danger that Europe will be thrown back to the disgraceful power politics of an international order locked up in xenophobic nationalistic struggles for influence and dominance, and/or driven by religious zeal.

The need for democracy

More fundamentally, the present European economic crisis raises a normative claim of democracy. It raises a question of authorisation: Who is authorised to make binding collective decisions? It also raises fundamental questions of accountability: Who can be put to account, through which forums, and through which institutions? What sort of consequences should those responsible face? These are questions also raised by Amartya Sen who underlines that the appropriate response requires rearranging the eurozone. Fundamental action is necessary because democracy itself is at stake here: ‘Stopping the marginalisation of the democratic tradition of Europe has an urgency that is hard to exaggerate’.⁴

At the bottom of every crisis and every political disaster lies the question of justification: Why should we suffer from others’ mismanagement? Why should we pay for others’ recklessness and misbehaviour? Citizens and states all over Europe (and beyond) are deeply interwoven and affect each others’ well–being and freedom in profound ways. People require answers, and they require that the rules they are supposed to follow are also abided by those in power. Only a system of democratic rule can ensure proper authorisation, compliance and accountability.

A major issue at stake in the debate on the EU is therefore that of whether democracy is possible and sustainable at the EU level, and what form this might take. The problem we face here is that the EU is highly complex and quite intractable. The EU's complexity manifests itself in numerous issue–specific debates that are not well connected together. This makes it more difficult to get a clear overarching view of what the overall status of democracy in the EU is. Consider the constitutional dimension (which will be addressed in more detail in Chapter 4). A closer look at this debate yields not clarification but added confusion. Many (notably Eurosceptics) insist that the EU neither has, nor does it need, a constitution (Milward 1992).⁵ Others see the EU as a failed constitutional project, which came to an end when the Dutch and the French rejected the Constitutional Treaty in 2005.⁶ The European Council, the main body in charge of EU treaty changes, has underlined that the Lisbon Treaty, even if comprising a good deal of the substantive contents of the Constitutional Treaty, is not a constitution in a relevant sense, and hence should be qualified by national constitutional law as an ordinary international treaty.⁷ The above positions (unfit for a constitution or a case of constitutional failure) appear in marked contrast to the well–established and already decades–old opinion of legal scholars and practitioners to the effect that the European Union already has a constitution.⁸ This puzzling situation puts the Laeken constitution making effort (2001–2005) in a strange light: Why try to constitutionalise something that already is a constitution? The puzzle does not end here: there is also deep confusion over the constitutional status of the Lisbon Treaty. Can the Lisbon Treaty be understood as a mere international treaty if it is substantively very similar to the Constitutional Treaty? With these questions unresolved we are also not clear on the proper constitutional grounding of democracy in Europe.

The upshot of this is that it is impossible to discern any one single overarching position or view of democracy in the EU. The debate is multidimensional and covers different positions on what the EU is, as well as different conceptions or theories of democracy. Thus, to get a proper handle on what is at stake, we have to try to get a better sense of the main positions in this debate. In the following section we will outline three major positions on the future of European democracy that cut across ideologies and academic disciplines.

Which European democracy?

The first, dominant position takes as its key premise that the nation state remains the main container of democracy. Proponents of national democracy understand globalisation and Europeanisation as undermining the salience of the nation state as the embodiment of democratic government. Conservative Eurosceptics see European political integration as synonymous with the factors that drain out the essence of nationhood.⁹ Social democrats and communitarians claim that the European integration process sustains a neo–liberal supranational order, an order that undercuts both the systems of risk regulation and the measures of solidarity that were such characteristic traits of the European welfare state (see Greven 2000; Miller 1995; Offe 2000, 2003a; Scharpf 1999; Streek 2000).¹⁰ Taken together, these factors are seen to sustain a system of multi–tiered democratic deficits. Many students of democracy go further and argue that the democratic deficit is not merely a contingent matter relating to the effects of globalisation, but refers to a lack of core civic democratic components such as a common European public sphere (Grimm 2004). Some underline the structural character of the problem: it highlights builtin limitations in the size of representative democracy. Robert A. Dahl (1999), for instance, has argued that, beyond a certain scale and scope, representative democracy cannot work; thus, extending representative democracy to the European level lengthens the democratic chain of legitimation and heightens citizens’ alienation. The most obvious solution is to roll back integration. But can the rolling back of European integration rescue national democracy under conditions of interdependence and globalisation?

The merit of this solution is disputed by other analysts who argue that the main challenge to national democracy does not emanate from European integration, but instead from decisional exclusion as a result of denationalisation and globalisation. Dahl's argument about a ‘reasonable threshold’ of size can also be countered:

• The right size of the republic is not clear, as already the American federalists recognised.

• The current interdependent international affairs subject the individuals to foreign decision–making.

• With the deprivation of any form of direct international representation, ‘the relative weight of each individual's vote should be even more severely discounted’ (Marchetti 2006: 302).

• Public deliberation and the mediation of participation through various public spheres may outweigh the loss of direct influence (Bohman 2005: 33).

Moreover, the real democratic problem is political neglect and lack of ability to act on global problems. Many of the decisions affecting national citizens are made elsewhere; or the necessary collective decisions are not made at all. Indeed, these processes reveal decreasing steering capacities on the part of the nation state (see Nielsen 2004).¹¹ When framed in this light, analysts such as Jürgen Habermas (2001a, 2004) have cast European integration not as the nemesis of democracy, but as a means of uploading democracy to the European level. Many representatives of both positions take the nation state as their frame of reference and discuss the prospects for democracy in these terms. Proponents of a European federal state (e.g., Mancini 1998; Morgan 2005) would for instance argue that instituting democracy at the supranational level is the best assurance for sustaining democracy also at the member state level. Within such a configuration, the member states could no longer be sovereign nation states. Some argue that the only viable way out of the present crisis is to integrate further. But will the member states relinquish national identity, and can a European federation develop an acceptable and viable European identity? The answer hinges, at least in part, on how central to democracy is the claim to the effect that, without a collective identity, there can be no democracy.

The second position is made up of transnationalists and multilevel governance scholars who argue that the challenge facing Europe is neither to rescue the nation state nor to upload state–based democracy to the EU level. The EU is seen as a suigeneris entity, a possible alternative to the nation state model.¹² Further, some analysts hold the EU up as a type of polity that has prospects for developing democracy beyond the nation state.¹³ Ruggie (1993) sees the EU as a case of unbundling of state authority and with this a change in the constitutive principle of territorial sovereignty. Transnationalists and multilevel governance scholars portray the EU as made up of a host of new governance structures that combine to make up an alternative to a government above the nation state. To them, sovereignty resides with the problem–solving units themselves (see, for example, Bohman 2007a; Cohen and Sabel 1997, 2003; Dryzek 2006; Gerstenberg 2002). A variety of supranational organisations, transnational ‘private global authorities’ and governance networks engage in rule–making and regulation beyond the state. They are based upon the private law framework of legal institutions but claim legitimacy, serving the public interest. Dense transnational networks and administrative systems of coordination have been intrinsic to the legitimacy of the EU, and some see these as amounting to a form of transnational constitutionalism (Fischer–Lescano and Teubner 2006; Joerges et al. 2004). This debate focuses on the conditions under which decision–making in such issue areas can be deemed to be legitimate. If the self–governing collectivity is part of several communities – national, international and global – the locus–focus of democracy becomes a puzzling matter (Held 1995: 225).

The crucial question that this debate brings forth is whether the state form and a collective identity are necessary preconditions for democracy to prevail, or whether a leaner structure made up of legal procedures and criss–crossing public discourse can ensure democratic legitimation. In short, can democracy prevail without state and nation?

The third ‘cosmopolitan’ position in the debate focuses on Europe as a particularly relevant site for the emergence of cosmopolitanism (Archibugi 1998; Beck and Grande 2005; Delanty and Rumford 2005). Scholars from different disciplines draw variously on transnationalism; on the notion of the EU as a new form of community; and on the EU's global transformative potential through acting as a ‘normative power’ or ‘civilian power’ (Manners 2002; Sjursen 2007). Even though cosmopolitanism ‘is not part of the self–identity of the EU’ (Rumford, 2005: 5), scholars nevertheless recognise the EU as a part of, and as a vanguard for, an emerging democratic world order. It is seen to connect to the changed parameters of power politics through which sovereignty has turned conditional upon respecting democracy and human rights. It can be posited as one of several emerging regional cosmopolitan entities that intermediate between the nation state and the (reformed) United Nations (UN), and which become recognised as a legitimate independent source of law.

Some, notably Cohen and Sabel (2003, 2006) and Bohman (2007a), opt for a ‘cosmopolitanism restrained’, which blends elements of cosmopolitanism with regional transnational governance. They argue for the normative va...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Rethinking Democracy and The European Union
• Routledge Studies on Democratising Europe
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: reconfiguring European democracy
• 2 Europe’s challenge: reconstituting Europe or reconfiguring democracy?
• 3 A democratic audit framework
• 4 Democracy and constitution-making in the European Union
• 5 The EU polity and its pattern of representation: the multilevel parliamentary field
• 6 Gender, justice and democracy in the European Union
• 7 Civil society, public sphere and democracy in the EU
• 8 Democratic challenges to the EU’s foreign and security policy
• 9 Situating the demos of a European democracy
• 10 Cosmopolitanisation in Europe and beyond
• 11 Conclusion
• References
• Index