Democratising the EU from Below?

Citizenship, Civil Society and the Public Sphere

Ulrike Liebert, Alexander Gattig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317152941
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For the European Union of the 21st century, the search for sustainable prosperity and stability includes the challenge of reconciling democratic ideals and practices with the construction of a European constitutional order. From the 2001 Laeken Summit to the 2009 Lisbon Treaty and beyond EU leaders have repeatedly set out to bring citizens closer to EU governance by making it more democratic and effective yet several national ratification referendums have shown that publics are divided about whether and why to endorse or veto complex EU reform packages imposed from the top down. Despite these limitations people do effectively engage in the making of a European polity. By initiating national court proceedings active citizens are promoting fundamental European rights in Member States' practices. As party members they contribute to shaping mass media communication about, and national publics' understanding of, European political alternatives. As civil society activists citizens help build social networks for contesting certain EU reforms or advocating others. Last but not least, as voters in national and European elections they choose between competing party visions, and national parliamentary stances regarding the role of democratic citizenship. This original contribution to the debate about democratic citizenship vis-à-vis the challenges of economic globalization and European political integration presents critical explorations of different fields of direct, representative, participatory and deliberative democratic citizenship practices that affect the transformation of Europe.

Chapter 1
Democratising the EU from Below? Citizenship, Civil Society and the Public Sphere in Making Europe’s Order

Ulrike Liebert

For the European Union of the 21st century, the search for a more inclusive constitutional settlement entails the challenge of balancing efficient governance – not the least of financial, economic and state debt crises – with popular democratic legitimacy. Arguably, the democratic life of the European Union is a question not only of appropriate supranational institutional design, but also of the quality of democratic institutions and practices of the member states. Construction of such a multilayered regional polity entails the challenge of reconciling the diversity of established – and that is predominantly national – citizenship practices with evolving norms of European constitutionalism. From the EU’s 2001 Laeken summit to its 2009 Lisbon Treaty, the relationship of citizenship to the European institutions has become a particularly contested field. Citizens have litigated for European Citizenship rights, thus challenging the Court of Justice to socially embed European constitutionalism; citizens’ contestation have troubled national and EU elites during EU treaty reforms, such as in the 2004–5 and 2008–9 ratification referendums. Political parties, civil society organisations, and the mass media – rather than wholeheartedly engaging with the making of the European would-be democratic polity – they have been driving the politicisation of the EU (de Wilde and Zürn 2012). At the same time, by taking issue with the scope, level or exclusiveness of European integration, individual as well as collective acts of participation, litigation and contestation have arguably enhanced the Europeanization of domestic politics and the construction of transnational identities on which the evolving “community of Europeans” relies (Risse 2010).

Yet, the scholarly debate is still inconclusive as to what lessons can be drawn from these challenges for a democratic theory of European constitutionalisation and integration. Are expanding transnational citizenship rights and EU constitutionalisation predicaments or preconditions for European democracy (Bauböck 2004; Crum 2011)? Is a “new citizen politics” (Dalton 2008) the “right or the wrong sort of medicine for the EU” (Hix and Bartolini 2006)? More in particular, are popular participation and public deliberation “misleading ideas” and responsible for the collapse of the European Constitution project (Moravcsik 2006)? Or are European federalists right when making the case for continuous constitutional experimentalism in the EU “in order for democracy not to become an empty shell” (Moravcsik and Mény 2009)? Again, if the EU is a dynamic and contested entity, what kind of order is likely to emerge from the struggles among competing visions for reconstituting European democracy (Eriksen and Fossum 2012: 22–34): An “audit democracy” where member states delegate competences to the Union’s regulatory regime but where democracy remains wedded to the nation state? A “federal multinational democracy” based on a supranational democratic constitutional state? Or a “regional-European democracy” based on government without a state? What are the presuppositions for each of these models of reconfiguring democracy regarding, for instance, the role of citizenship, of political parties, of civil society or of the media?

This book submits some of these competing ideas about democratic citizenship in a legitimate European order to social scientific analysis. Bringing together explorations of different societal fields that are involved in the reconstitution of Europe, the chapters included in this book contribute to the study of the European Union from below, or to the political sociology of the EU. They provide comparative accounts of whether, to what extent and how the old EU and the new member states from East Central Europe differ when viewed from the perspective of “democratisation from below”. Empirical analyses of democratic practices in the making of a European social and political order result from a larger research programme addressing the questions of “Unity amidst variety? Intellectual foundations and requirements for an enlarged Europe”.1 To answer these questions, we suggest exploring how European citizens, civil society, the media, political parties, parliaments and courts engage with the ongoing reconstitution of democracy in the EU. Our working assumption is that the politicisation of EU constitutional reform in the member states need not necessarily lead to mass popular “constraining dissensus”, stalemate, or crisis of the EU. On the opposite, it is a necessary requisite for democratising the EU: Depending on the quality of the democratic linkages provided by their domestic courts, on their EU treaty ratification procedures, the quality of their mass media, of political parties and of civil society organisations, member state democracies will ignore, resist or successfully accommodate the emerging patterns of political conflict about EU polity making.

This introductory chapter is structured as follows: it starts by discussing the state of the art of democratic theory of European integration, or of the empirical democratic theory beyond the state. It then develops the conceptual framework, hypotheses and methodological tools that inform the empirical analyses. Finally, it provides an overview of research findings by way of short chapter synopses.

Democratic Theory beyond the State (of the Art)

This book aims at developing the state of the art of the democratic theory of European integration – and more broadly: political sociological approaches to democratic practices beyond the state – by exploring key episodes of European politics and polity reform. More specifically, we intend to make three original contributions to the developing political sociology of democratic integration beyond the state:

• Taking issue with the reductionism of elitist accounts of EU treaty reform that are out of sync with evolving social and political demands and participatory practices, we complement these by means of a more realistic framework of the EU as a self-constituting political union of states and citizens that is embedded in fields of social practices.

• Conceiving of the self-constitution of the European order as a process of constitutionalisation driven by judicial decisions, on the one hand and treaty reform choices, on the other, we put normative theoretical controversies about the feasibility of different models of democratic constitutionalism in the EU to the test by empirically exploring democratic practices that are involved in making the EU’s order.

• Finally, building on the state of the art of empirical analyses of European integration – recent studies of European contestation, political conflict and claims-making – we develop a deliberative-discursive approach, conceiving of the Europeanization of member state democracies as well as the democratisation of the EU as socially embedded complementary processes that are shaped by institutional forms, structured by actors’ aims, and framed by public discourses.

In the following, these propositions will be described in more detail and in relation to the evolving state of the art of European constitutional politics and that is, the analyses of democratic integration.

First, our framework of democratic constitutionalism beyond the state aims to correct the conventional elitist focus on EU treaty reform in its two main varieties: liberal intergovernmentalism and the model of delegating national regulatory powers. On the one hand, the intergovernmental focus on treaty negotiation, such as the pioneering study by Thomas König’s and Simon Hug’s “Policy-making Processes and the European Constitution” (2006), a comparative study of all old and new EU member states in the Intergovernmental Conference of June 2004, explains treaty reforms as an outcome of state and government preferences in constitutional treaty negotiations. Here, the authors deliberately exclude domestic democratic processes as well as transnational dynamics. Thus, due to the restrictions of their methodology they can neither fully account for the ratification crisis or for the subsequent redesign of EU constitutional treaty reform; nor are they capable of assessing the impacts of domestic democratic infrastructures and processes on the EU’s crisis, choice and change. On the other hand, Giandomenico Majone’s account of the EU as a confederal model of negative self-regulation reaches “beyond intergovernmentalism” to explain the delegation of rulemaking powers to the European institutions by contracts and treaty amendments (Majone 2005: 162; 64). Yet, assuming that “international economic integration, the Nation-State and democracy” to be “an impossible trinity” (Majone 2005: 181), integration and democracy are conceived as a “big trade-off”, even a “category mistake”, due to federalist bias that allegedly explains the failure of federalist aspirations (Majone 2005: 23ff.; 204; 219). The present book, by contrast, aims to fill the lacunae left by intergovernmentalists while, at the same time, submiting the “big trade-off” claim advanced by confederal models of self-regulation to empirical scrutiny, by exploring fields of democratic practices involved in the EU’s multilayered political community “in the making” (see Eriksen 2005; Evas, Liebert, Lord 2012).

Second, our book contributes to understanding the relationship of democracy and European integration by reviewing normative theoretical accounts of democratic constitutionalism in the EU (Eriksen and Fossum 2000; Eriksen 2004; Eriksen 2005; Habermas 2001; Tully 2007; Franzius and Preuss 2011) in light of empirical evidence (Eriksen and Fossum 2012). For this purpose, we conceptualise EU constitutionalism first and foremost as a long-term process that is increasingly relevant not only to experts, political elites, interest groups and public intellectuals, but also to European citizens and the general public at large. In opposition to authors who claim that the EU simply did not need and was not ready to create a Constitution (Grimm 1995; Moravcsik 2006; cf. Eriksen 2009; Liebert 2012b), the authors of this book conceive of the EU’s constitutionalisation as an ongoing process of development, including failures, relaunch, and eventual redesign, depending on sustained exchanges between European citizens and political elites. In this context, Bauböck argues that citizenship rights will have to extend beyond nationality and state territory if liberal democracies are to remain true to their own principles of inclusive membership and equal basic rights. To explain the forms and extent of the public’s engagement with EU constitutional politics involves issues of democratic quality of domestic politics and, thus, not only of democratically designing the EU. These issues, in turn, require studying the Europeanization of national democratic processes and, specifically, the “politicisation” of domestic EU politics: “[Only] by deliberately politicising the issues involved at the level of Europe as a whole and by gradually building up expectations … with regard to citizenship, representation, and decision making can one imagine a successful constitutionalisation of the EU” (Schmitter 2000:119; cf. Schmidt 2006; Hix and Bartolini 2006). Thus, for assessing democratic practices involved in EU constitutional politics we use “postfunctional” approaches to European integration that are premised on the assumption of mass public politicisation (Marks and Hooghe 2008). In sum, this approach conceives of democratic constitutionalism in the EU as an ongoing process of conflict and integration, triggered by political spill-over mechanisms and unintended consequences, in particular in terms of politicisation. In response to the post 2008 financial and state debt crisis in the Eurozone some political leaders have called for strengthening the community method for completing EMU from above. Yet, from a bottom-up perspective we would neither expect a fully fledged political federation nor a confederation restricted to market integration. Instead, for the sake of effective problem-solving, EU powers of positive regulation in socially sensitive realms will depend on conventional forms as well as unconventional new modes of generating democratic legitimacy across and beyond state borders. In that respect, a political-sociological approach to European constitutionalism allows empirical testing of claims about the conditions on which the legitimacy of the evolving EU – and its progressive treaty reforms – rely.

Third, as contributions to advancing the political sociology of European integration, we empirically explore the patterns and dynamics of the contentious politics of European constitutional development in the intermediary domains of citizenship, civil society (including interest groups), political parties and the mass public sphere. For this purpose, our analytical framework is informed by conflict approaches to European political sociology, focusing on protest and “contentious politics” (Imig and Tarrow 2001) and on political conflict about European integration and the EU (Marks and Steenbergen 2004; Fligstein 2008; Kriesi et al. 2012). While Imig and Tarrow’s conceptual framework focuses the efforts of European citizens to make demands directed towards the supranational level of European government through social movements, protest politics, and contentious political action, Marks and Steenbergen and Kriesi et al. investigated patterns of conflict that are arising at the national and supranational levels of European Union politics, including a range of different actors. Building on this research stream and, specifically, Medrano’s analysis of the discursive framing of European integration on the one hand, and of survey data on public support for the EU, on the other (Medrano 2003), the present research, instead of stressing the divergence of “national cultures”, also seeks to understand patterns of transnational convergence. For our purposes, we complement existing frameworks for studying protest movements such as “claims making analysis” (CA) by developing the methodology of “comparative political discourse analysis” (ComPDA, see below).2

Our book aims to develop these lines of research in two ways. On the one hand, we expand the analyses into further fields of social practices where European citizens can (and did) get involved in the making of the EU’s order – in particular by “litigation and adjudication”; “referendum participation in EU politics”; “political party communication”; “national parliamentary ratification”; “civil society participation” and “national and European electoral participation”. On the other hand, for empirically analyzing political conflict on EU constitutional reform the present analytical framework does not remain restricted to individual or collective preferences and claims-making. The construction of Europe’s constitutional order as analysed here is conceived as a discursive battleground between competing ideas, frames, norms and justifications, conducive to “European stories” that are being de- and reconstructed by “intellectual debates on Europe in national contexts” (Lacroix and Nicolaidis 2010). “Making the European Polity” is seen as a process of “reflexive integration in the EU” where deliberation is a key for reflexively organised processes of collective learning (Eriksen 2005). As Eriksen et al. demonstrated, the deliberative dynamics developed by the “Convention on the Future of Europe” has strengthened the differences between the member states; hence, these dynamics did not produce a European culture of consensus and constitutional patriotism (Eriksen et al. 2004). To review this claim in light of post 2004 developments, we comparatively reconstruct political discourses regarding national and European identity, EU constitutionalism, and democratic principles (Dryzek and Berejkian 1993; Triandafyllidou, Wodak and Kryzanowski 2009; Liebert 2012a, 2012b). We argue that, unlike earlier phases of constitutionalisation, constitutional treaty ratification has sparked significant transnational discursive interaction, creating convergence as well as divergence of national political discourses, by contributing to the structuring of political conflict across European member publics (see Evas 2007; Liebert 2007; Maatsch 2007; Packham 2007; Rakusanova 2007; Wyrozumska 2007). As a key proposition we contend that this process has contributed to re-articulating and transforming patterns of conflict that have hitherto shaped political life in Western European along national lines. Yet, these patterns do not easily provide bridges for including the new lines of political conflict that have emerged in the new democracies in East Central Europe.

For further developing our contribution to this evolving research field, the next section will clarify the key concepts, analytical framework, and the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Graphs
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Democratising the EU from Below? Citizenship, Civil Society and the Public Sphere in Making Europe’s Order
• 2 Still ‘between Eros and Civilisation’? Citizens, Courts and Constructing European Citizenship
• 3 Disaffected Citizens? Why People Vote in National Referendums about EU Treaty Reform
• 4 Ignorant Gatekeepers against the EU? v National Political Parties in European Political Communication
• 5 Watch-dogs that Cannot Bite? New National Parliamentary Control Mechanisms under the Lisbon Treaty
• 6 A Panacea for Democratic Legitimation? Assessing the Engagement of Civil Society with EU Treaty Reform Politics
• 7 Still “Second Order?” Re-examining Citizens’ Voting Behaviour in European and National Elections 1999–2009
• Index