‘The dictator is coming.’

This frank speech was later leaked to the press, leading to anti-government protests and clashes with the police that left more than a hundred people wounded. Yet the target of people’s anger was not Orbán, the self-proclaimed adherent of illiberal democracy, but rather his liberal, pro-European predecessor Ferenc Gyurcsány, whose government paved the way for the Fidesz landslide victory, enabling the ensuing consolidation of Orbán’s rule. What Gyurcsány represents in the context of post-1989 democratic transformation in Central and Eastern Europe is the failure of pro-European, liberal elites to gain sufficient public support for economic and political reforms (as I discuss further in Chapter 5). The governing elites’ reliance on technocratic rationality backfired, leaving many people across the region feeling that their revolutions were ‘stolen’ (Krapfl 2013). What was particularly disconcerting was the ability of many former communists to reinvent themselves as passionate adherents of free market liberalism and European integration. They succeeded in transforming their pre-1989 political capital into considerable private wealth (Tucker 2015), which in turn endowed them with more political power. The widespread perception that politicians of all stripes were corrupt was thus not without justification. This is an aspect of populist rebellions in new member states that tends to be overlooked. In Hungary, following Gyurcsány’s fall from grace, Orbán’s party won the elections to the European Parliament in 2009, and national parliamentary elections in 2010. With his popularity unabated at the time of writing, Orbán is arguably one of the few remaining politicians who has shaped European politics for more than two decades (and in this respect, is on the path to overtake both Angela Merkel and Juncker). This is not to ignore the divisive nature of Orbán’s policies, or the nefarious methods he used to pursue them. Yet what is particularly interesting about his spectacular success in Hungary for the present book, is the extent to which it reveals democratic dysfunction across Europe.

In response to a number of pressing challenges, particularly over the last decade or so, the European Union has unwittingly exacerbated the crisis of representative democracy. As ‘emergency Europe’ (White 2015) has become the new normal of this experimental polity, unsettling the existing governing structures, the theoretical frameworks underpinning the European project ought to be questioned as well. To do so, I turn to political and legal thinkers including Hans Kelsen, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt, who confronted a more dramatic and altogether more serious challenge to democracy: the constitutional breakdown of the Weimar Republic followed by the rise of Nazi Germany and the devastating impact of the Second World War. While the concept of popular sovereignty was at the centre of debates about democracy in the first half of the twentieth century, more recently its usefulness has been questioned. Ironically, discussions about sovereignty were declared retrograde just at the time when the process of European integration was entering a phase that would prove their relevance.

To be blunt, my answers are no, no and no. First, legitimation through procedures might work in normal times, but Europe has had very little normality over the last three decades. Second, I contest the view that a liberal order could ‘sustain itself through purely economic means’. What the recent European developments have shown instead are the limitations of ‘polity-building by stealth’. Attempts to overcome political conflicts via ‘neutralisation’ did not help European democracies, which leads me to my third ‘no’ regarding ‘pooled sovereignty’—a conceptual tool that tends to obscure power, unwittingly exacerbating the problem of democratic accountability. As Yack put it, sovereign control is exclusive—‘if one community possesses it, another cannot’. In other words, the sovereign is the one who has the final say on any given territory. Thus, sovereignty that is pooled or joint ‘is either a metaphor or a contradiction in terms’ (Yack 2003: 43).

However impractical The Social Contract might appear today, Rousseau already understood that his blueprint could only work on a relatively small scale. How to apply the same logic to the relationship between sovereigns was far trickier. On the surface, it seems obvious that cooperation would be in their mutual rational interests. This assumption underpins a number of ambitious designs for lasting peace. As early as 1712, Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658–1743) advanced a project ‘to render Peace perpetual in Europe’, proposing ‘a Treaty to establish a perpetual European Union’ (cited in Heuser 2019: 132–3). Rousseau considered its underlying logic compelling, writing that it would be enough to ‘realize this commonwealth of Europe for a single day’ to make it last forever; ‘so fully would experience convince men that their own gain is to be found in the good of all’ (Rousseau [1756] 1991: 88–9). Yet however logical this scheme was, Rousseau was profoundly sceptical about its realisability. He anticipated Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s criticism of contractual theories applied to international relations. The rights of nations, Hegel argued in the Philosophy of Right (PR), ‘have reality not in a general will, which is constituted as a superior power, but in their particular wills’ (cited in Glendinning 2014; compare Hegel [1821] 1989: 499–500, §333). Along similar lines, Rousseau criticised Saint-Pierre’s ‘perpetual European Union’, describing his plan ‘as ineffectual for founding it and unnecessary for maintaining it’. Foreshadowing the problems of EU democratic legitimacy that cannot rely simply on ‘delivering the goods’, Rousseau observed that