Democratizing Europe

A. Vauchez, Kenneth A. Loparo, Lucy

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137540904
• eBook ISBN: 9781137540911
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Drawing from recent streams of scholarship, Democratizing Europe provides a renewed portrait of EU government that point at the enduring leading role of independent powers (the European Court, Commission and Central Bank). Vauchez suggests that we recognize this centrality and adjust our democratization strategies accordingly.

1

A Potemkin Democracy?

Abstract: Ever since the 1970s, “parliamentarization” as Europe’s has been conceived as the voie royale to the gradual democratization of EU polity, and reform treaties have attempted to shape and stage Europe as a “representative democracy” comme les autres. Yet, the handling of the recent crisis of the Eurozone over the past six years has highlighted the continued precariousness of democratic legitimacy in the context of the European Union. Drawing on results from the political science literature, this chapter points at the relative failure of this sophisticated institutional engineering of a European “representative democracy,” always at risk of appearing as a mere “Potemkin democracy.” Part of this failure to re-orient Europe’s political trajectory lies, I suggest, in our inability to seize Europe as it really is.

Vauchez, Antoine. Democratizing Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137540911.0005.

It is clear for all to see. Europe does indeed have a problem with democracy, and this is no time to tell the emerging economies that the European Union (EU) “is not in need of lessons in democracy” as José Manuel Barroso, the now president of the Commission incautiously declared. More than 25 years after the diagnosis of a “democratic deficit” was initially formulated, Europe has not been able to shake off the pall of illegitimacy.¹ Over the years, signs pointing to the precariousness of EU’s democratic legitimacy have not been lacking: an increasing disaffection with European parliamentary elections, repeated “failures” of referendums on European treaties, sometimes followed by curious re-balloting, as in Ireland and Denmark, continuous rise of euroskeptics parties, etc. Yet Europe’s democratic crisis recently reached a new record high with the handling of the Eurozone crisis. While the institutions of Europe’s monetary union and economic governance have been more intrusive and more prescriptive, in particular for Eurozone countries and would-be members, the connection to the circuit of electoral legitimacy has become more and more remote. The policies led by the troika in Greece ever since 2010, and the July 2015 Referendum on the bailout conditions have increasingly opposed national democratic legitimacy to the “necessities” of the European Monetary Union as pushed forward by the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB).

In the aftermath of the financial and Eurozone crisis, and the related formation of a economic government of the Eurozone, the issue of democratic sustainability has re-emerged in an acute manner. As scholars and politicians gathered at the bedside of this new “sick man of Europe,” that is henceforth the EU itself, multiple proposals have been raised to put the patient back on the path of democracy, as the turmoil of the economic storm seems to be receding. Over the past few years, many ideas have shared the stage. Some, such as German Christian Democrats, consider that the president of the Commission should be elected by direct universal suffrage; others, such as French Socialists believe democratization of the EU lies in reinforcing its parliamentary branch and in granting members of European Parliament (MEPs) the right to propose legislation. Intellectuals have also voiced their preferences. Thomas Piketty and a group of French scholars have suggested to create a new European Parliament, for the Eurozone, that would be a counterweight to the development of the Eurogroup,² while Jürgen Habermas has been repeatedly calling for a Europe-wide referendum in favor of and against the deepening of European integration, a vote that is expected to have a clarifying effect.³

Making it by faking it

As diverse as they may seem be, all these solutions draw upon the same reformist game plan that has been the inspiration of European political agenda for several decades: once again, as was already the case with the drafting of the European Constitution, the goal is to fit Europe, by force or by choice, into a shoe modeled after national democracies. It is as if we could not think of democracy at a supranational level without replicating the democratic-parliamentary prism of our political regimes. By seeking to insert the words and the objects of national political systems into the European polis, this approach has created many charades and the “magic bullets”⁴, prompting just as many bitter disappointments when these hopes eventually faded. These repeated disillusionments have contributed to what Mario Monti has cautiously termed an “integration fatigue.”⁵ More accurately, this fatigue can be analyzed as a profound disaffection with the European project.

Before all else, a discussion of European democracy implies an inquiry in the very terms and categories that have been used so far to think about democratization strategies in the context of EU polity. This means taking a critical look at its limitations, contradictions and undesirable side effects. This in no way signifies that we should give up on the possibility of a supranational democracy. Nor does it mean that we seek to minimize the importance of consolidating a parliamentary power at the heart of the European edifice, or the substantial advances and progress made in this direction.

The fact is that by seeking to cast Europe in a “national” model, all the institutions—the Court of Justice, the Central Bank, the executive agencies, and to a lesser extent the Commission—that did not fit our view idea of “political” democracies as defined nationally, have been pushed into a blind spot. In a Europe that has so often put its fate into the hands of these “independent” institutions, this exclusion can be likened to a mutilation. At the end of a reform cycle that has seen five intergovernmental conferences and two European Conventions devoted to the “future of Europe,” it is time to rethink the democratization of Europe.

The coronation of Lisbon?

December 1, 2009: the Treaty of Lisbon was at last signed and ratified by all the Member States, and entered into force. This was to be the ultimate crowning moment, the final chord concluding two decades of institutional reform to fill the “deficit of democracy” in the EU. Assembled over the course of innumerable conferences and expert committee meetings, the new treaty was supposed to achieve, it was said, the shedding of the EU’s old skin, and bring to completion the grand European transformation promised by the “founding fathers.”

And indeed the wording had never been so clear: “The functioning of the Union shall be founded on representative democracy,” “Citizens are directly represented at Union level in the European Parliament,” “Decisions shall be taken as openly and as closely as possible to the citizen,” “Every citizen shall have the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union,” etc. The presence of an entire title of the Lisbon Treaty devoted to the affirmation of the “democratic principles” governing the EU was thought to be enough to sweep away the doubts of those who had so often denounced the “diktats” of Brussels’ “Eurocrats” and experts. For henceforth Europe would no longer recognize any sovereign other than the “citizens of the Union,” in whose name all EU public policies would now be set into motion—citizens represented in the highest instance by a European Parliament, symbolically placed first among the institutions by order of appearance in the treaty.

And thus the Europe shaped by the reform treaties reads exactly like our national democracies. Everything is in place to show that in the heart of the European quarter in Brussels there is indeed a complete political system, the first example in the world of a full-fledged supranational democracy. None is missing to Europe’s arsenal of democracy: there is the parliamentary assembly elected directly by the “European citizens” and that lays down the law; there is a Senate of States, the Council of Ministers, that acts as a “second chamber” of the European legislature, there is a “European government,” a role the European Commission intends to fill; there is even a “Court of Justice” to serve as the Supreme Court of the Union.

Better still, the whole repertoire of contemporary national democracies is now found on the European level, with a surprising parallelism of words and forms. There are, pell-mell, the tools of direct democracy (the right to petition and popular initiative); the latest recipes from the participatory movement (institutionalized dialogue with “representative associations and with civil society”); the key buzzwords of new modes of governance (transparency, accountability); and even the “democracy by law” that, via the Charter of Fundamental Rights, allows citizens to assert their rights and freedoms before a supranational court.

No guest is missing at the table of European democracy, it seems: there is the “civil society” of NGOs and platforms of representative associations that have their quarters near the Schuman traffic circle in Brussels; there are the professionals of European politics, the lobbyists, business lawyers, public affairs consultants, parliamentary assistants, whose presence seem to attest that this is truly a new “capital city of influence.” We might even be able to detect an embryo of a European “public space,” if we care to take a look at the numerous think tanks and academic colloquia that steadily fuel the debate about the future of Europe. Little does it matter if the figures periodically brandished by the Commission—the “15,000 lobbyists” active in Brussels, the “30,000 experts” who gravitate around the EU, the “80% of new legislation” in member states purportedly originating with the EU, etc.—are primarily the founding elements of a mobilizing mythology: Brussels has indeed become that full-fledged political space with a practically unlimited field of competence, extending to the regalian prerogatives of currency, justice, immigration and even foreign affairs.

The original sin

“All’s well that ends well”—this seemed to be an appropriate thought once the new treaty had entered into force. At the very least one could say that Europe had come a long way: had not these European institutions constituted a formidable challenge to democracy, from the beginning? Need we recall here the famous “technocratic genesis” of the EU, the original sin of the Schuman plan (1950) that conferred the management of the first Common Market for coal and steel to a High Authority composed of experts, carefully sheltered from national political passions? What a long journey, from the 1957 Treaty of Rome, entirely dedicated to the mission of building the Common Market, without a word for democracy, or even human rights!

It has not been so long since the European Parliament, deprived of all legislative competence, was a body that was so unlike its national counterparts that it did not even bear the same name: the treaties went no farther than to mention a “European parliamentary assembly.” Observers tended to see it as a functional equivalent of the General Assembly of the United Nations, a forum that would of course host the most impassioned debates, but without any grip on political decision making. What was to become of “parliamentary government,” when the European parliamentary assembly was from the outset deprived of any capacity of control over the institution that exercised the power of decision, i.e. the Council of Ministers. The most experienced observers were in the dark, because the words used to designate these institutions (“Court,” “parliamentary assembly,” etc.) were only distantly related to the entities they designated at the national level. Where was the separation of powers to be found, when the legislative and executive “powers” were already, in an unprecedented way, shared across several institutions? What about this Court of Justice whose members were designated by governments? The labels attributed to the new institutions looked more like pseudonyms since the objects they referred to were only distantly related to the “things” ordinarily designated by this same terminology in national spheres. For those accustomed to the classic architecture of national constitutional edifices, the baroque style of Treaties caused a certain confusion.

The paradigm of representative democracy

December 1, 2009: at last all seemed to fall into place, aligned with representative democracy. A “real” political system, not the modest mechanism run by the technicians of the Common Market, at last took up its quarters in Brussels. It had been a long journey indeed, the route peppered with traps and crises of all sorts. What energy had been deployed to bring to life this democracy that seemed impervious to all electroshock therapies! The political prophecy of the “founding fathers” had been long in finding fulfillment, and the birth of the democratic political community spawned by the economic solidarities created by the Common Market had proved to be a long and dragged-out process.

It was indeed difficult to breathe life into this “political system,” buried under a mountain of ferrous scrap and customs duties. Even the most fervent pan-Europeans could not conceal a degree of skepticism for the grand political ambition seemed out of all proportion to the modest beginnings of the European Economic Communities. In 1951 Pierre-Henri Teitgen, figurehead of the European Movement and minister in several cabinets of the 4th Republic in France, mulled over the immense difficulty involved in giving birth to a “political system” in the arid landscape of the coal and steel common market: how could one “bring to life and develop a form of political accountability with respect to a hyper-specialized polity like that of the ECSC?”⁶ Others made similar remarks, among them this member of the European Parliament who expressed his dismay when confronted with a “[European] Assembly dedicated to work that is so technical, scientific and economic” and urged his colleagues not to “forget human feelings”!⁷

Worse still, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  A Potemkin Democracy?
• 2  Europes Way of Government in the Making
• 3  The Crisis of Europes Independent Branch
• 4  Democratizing the Union
• Conclusion
• Bibliography