Citizens in Europe

Essays on Democracy, Constitutionalism and European Integration

Claus Offe, Ulrich Preuß

• Publisher: ECPR Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785521744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Civismo y ciudadanía

This interdisciplinary collection of essays by a constitutionalist and a political sociologist examines how fragmented societies can be held together by appropriate and effective constitutional arrangements providing for bonds of democratic citizenship. Exploring the political order dilemmas of capitalist democracies, the authors address moral and institutional prerequisites on which the deepening of European integration depends. The desirability of such deepening is currently contested, with the membership of some states (and their compliance with the spirit of the Union's treaties) at stake. The authors do not consider the 'renationalisation' of Europe to be a feasible (and even less so a desirable) way out of Europe's current malaise. Yet whatever the way out, charting it calls not just for the vision and imagination of political elites but also for the intellectual efforts of social scientists. With this book, Preuß and Offe contribute to those efforts.

Chapter One

The Union’s Course: Between a Supranational Welfare State and Creeping Decay

Claus Offe and Ulrich K. Preuβ

The politics of European integration and the management of its various crises is currently (fall of 2015) in an unusually hectic mode. The difficulties of the Eurozone produce front page news in all major media where highly consequential last minute decisions (and the contested authority of EU institutions to make them) are being reported and commented upon. From the Euro crisis to monetary policy, to the crisis in Ukraine, to the issues of refugee migration, policy makers adopt bold and untested measures to sail uncharted seas, fully aware of heightened risks and dangers.

In such a context it may seem slightly frivolous to prepare the publication of a volume, many of the contributions to which revisit the basic institutional features and normative principles of the European Union, elaborating on key concepts such as citizenship, constitutionalism and democracy. Aren’t there, given the culmination and interaction of various crises, more urgent intellectual challenges to address and policy proposals to submit? In response to such doubts, we would like to insist at the outset that the crisis may be exactly the right time to reconsider some of the basics, such as they are indicated by the three concepts in the subtitle of the present volume. That, at least, was also the view of colleagues, most prominently Dario Castiglione, who are familiar with the work that either of the two authors (and occasionally also both of us jointly) have written. These colleagues have encouraged us to put together this collection of essays which were written over a period of more than 30 years. The hope, to be either fulfilled or frustrated by the judgement of critical readers, is that the normative and analytical arguments presented in our earlier work may still throw light on the issues that the EU and its citizens must come to terms with if the current turbulences of the European integration process are at all to be coped with. Hectic emergency pragmatics, in other words, are not enough.

What is the problem the EU and its citizens are facing? It consists in the coincidence of dilemmas, processes, contradictions, events and conflicting demands which, taken together, pose an extraordinary challenge to the EU’s political capabilities, arguably even its survival. The most important components of this challenge are, briefly, the following:

• the ‘Euro crisis’ – aptly named that way because of a dual reference: a crisis caused by the ill-considered introduction of a common currency in an area that was not adequately prepared for it in economic and institutional terms and a crisis affecting, as a consequence of these deficiencies, the very viability of the currency area itself. Another aspect of the ‘Euro crisis’ is that the currency has driven a wedge into the EU which is now divided by its common currency and the winners and losers it has created;
• the economic crisis with deflationary tendencies and economic stagnation prevailing in many EU Member States, causing high rates of unemployment, in particular amongst young people, and also causing, together with extreme monetary policies adopted by the ECB and austerity-obsessed fiscal policies, a forceful onslaught on European welfare states and the, by now largely obsolete, ‘European Social Model’;
• ‘mass immigration’ into the EU and failure of the latter to cope with the rising tide of refugees and asylum-seekers in ways which minimally conform with Europe’s declared humanitarian standards; in addition, even the Treaty-based freedom of mobility within the EU has come to be challenged by several Member States;
• within many Member States, we see an escalating erosion of party systems (which is at best marginally compensated for by the halting emergence of a transnational European party system). While centre-left and centre-right parties are losing electoral support (as well as the capacity to defend lost ground in terms of their hegemonic capacities as they have largely become indistinguishable administrators of political and economic realities to which, they claim, ‘there is no alternative’), all countries on the ‘winner’ side of the Euro-divide have seen the rise of rightist populist parties, making, together with the rise of leftist protest parties in some of the ‘loser’ countries, for an unprecedented political destabilisation of Member States and, by implication, the EU polity as a whole;
• the Ukraine conflict and the confrontation with Russia which is critical not just because of its threatening military implications but also because it epitomises the failure of the EU’s Eastern Neighborhood Policy (ENP) as well as the ambiguities involved in the accession of Serbia and the other aspiring Member States of the Western Balkans;
• the EU’s helplessness and virtual strategic irrelevance in the face of the armed conflicts in its Middle East and North African (MENA) neighborhood, including the precarious geopolitical situation of Israel and its failure to settle the conflict with the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

With the (partial) exception of the latter crisis, all the others are to a large extent ‘European’ by origin – endogenous and home-made by Europeans and their political elites. They have been caused by deficiencies inside the institutional system of the EU – be it by inadequacies of its institutional structure itself, be it by the absence of political leaders with the requisite far-sightedness and the failure to adopt adequate precautionary policies. This shorthand list of current crises affecting the EU serves us just to highlight the discrepancy between these events and developments, on the one hand, and the basic normative commitments of the EU to principles of citizenship, constitutionalism, and democracy. To simplify: if these principles had been more vigorously adhered to and implemented, the impact of those cumulative crises could either have been prevented from emerging in the first place or more effectively coped with after it has manifested itself. The resulting problem can be summarised in the question: Which principles and which institutional embodiments of them are called for in order to strengthen the EU’s capacity to cope with those crises and prevent their perseverance or repetition? Unless that key question can be answered, the EU is not just caught in a context of crises, it is itself the core and ongoing generator of crises, and eventually likely to become its victim.

The crisis of the EU: two cases

Let us briefly look at two instances where the political realities of the EU stand in blatant contradiction to its core normative principles, thus entangling it in a profound crisis of consistency and credibility. First, the Greek debt crisis. In January 2015 the Greek people elected a new political force into government which credibly vowed to end the decades-old system of clientelism, nepotism, corruption, excessive defence spending and tax evasion which eventually had driven the country to the verge of state bankruptcy and ungovernability. The previous government had not only seen itself forced to accept harsh restrictions of its fiscal policies imposed by its private and public creditors which saved Greece from insolvency, but also to subject its government to a strict regime of monitoring and control of its economic and social policies which large parts of the Greek population – and beyond in the European Union – considered as humiliating and as being contrary to any semblance of democratic self-rule. To end this external control imposed by the ‘Troika’ on the Greek government, which amounted to a veritable political expropriation of its constituency, has been the main promise in the victorious campaign of Syriza. The new government, sworn in on January 26, 2015, entered into negotiations with the finance ministers of the Eurozone with the objective of modifying the ‘reform program’ which the previous government had been forced to adopt by Greece’s international lenders (ECB, IMF, EU Commission [representing the lending states of the Eurozone]). While the economic effects of that programme of ‘austerity’, ‘structural reforms’ and privatisation of state held assets were to a large extent plainly counterproductive by increasing rather than reducing the debt/GDP ratio, the social suffering it produced has been positively disastrous as the ‘reforms’ resulted in unprecedented levels of unemployment as well as the ‘internal devaluation’ of wages, pensions, and public services. Yet the Eurozone finance ministers insisted upon the legal bindingness of the obligations which Greece had incurred. In the name of pacta sunt servanda and under the self-righteous (if evidently mistaken) presumption of supranational paternalism (‘we know better what is good for you than you do yourself’), Greeks were administered a poisonous medicine to the further taking of which the majority of the electorate expressed its clear refusal.

This election result indicated the desperate attempt to replace an old regime of two entrenched and corrupt centrist parties with a fresh political force. This old regime was, after all, one that had collaborated in producing the economic and fiscal disaster of Greece and had run the country down to virtually the status of a third-world country. Yet this democratic change of government was in no way respected and appreciated as such within the EU: it did not give rise to an EU-wide reconsideration of the appropriateness and viability of the conditions which have produced the misery of large parts of the Greek population. To the contrary, the unmistakably expressed will of the people was dismissed as unworthy of respect, giving rise to the bitter comment of one of the Greek ministers ‘If we cannot change economic policy through elections, then elections are irrelevant’¹. While in the realm of international politics this democratic argument is normally overruled by the cold logic of creditor-debtor relations, the democratic nature of an electoral outcome should provide a compelling argument in the framework of the EU which proclaims ‘democracy’ as one of its core values. Is not the EU’s commitment to democracy, more than anything else, an essential element of its political identity? Instead, since the beginning of the Euro crisis in 2008/2009, there is a growing tendency among EU Member States towards mutual distrust and nationalist-chauvinist quarrel which politicised their economic and cultural diversity and heterogeneity to an extent which is on the verge of undermining the entire European integration project. The idea of a supranational, i.e., heterogeneous democracy, while deeply underlying the philosophical idea and the institutional setup of the EU, is largely absent in the conduct of its policies.

The events of Greece’s turbulent summer of 2015 provide compelling evidence of how the European ‘institutions’ have used their power to overrule the results of a democratic political process in one of the EU member states. Here is a brief recapitulation of the time line.² On June 25th, the ‘Troika’ (a supervisory body consisting of representatives of the ECB, the IMF and the European Commission installed after the adoption of the first Greek bailout program of 2010) specified its harsh austerity conditions for a renewed (third) Greek bailout programme. In mid-2015, the country had arrived at a truly dismal economic situation, unparalleled in any advanced country during peace time: GDP was down 25 per cent since 2010, unemployment averaged at 26 per cent (with a large part of the unemployed receiving no social insurance benefits whatsoever), wages went down by 38 per cent and pensions by 45 per cent. 32 per cent of the population live below the poverty line and the critical ratio of sovereign debt to GDP was approaching 180 per cent. The solvency of Greek banks is threatened by huge amounts of non-performing loans extended to both the public and the private sector.³

On June 27th, Prime Minister Tsipras called a referendum on the bailout conditions, which was held on July 5th. 62 per cent of voters rejected those conditions. On July 8th, Tsipras applied for an emergency loan of the European Stability Fund. Contrary to the vote of more than three fifths of voters, Tsipras had to accept the terms of a third bailout package during the decisive negotiations that took place in the Euro group in the night of July 12th in Brussels. This package provided for conditions which are even considerably harsher than those rejected by Greeks in the referendum. They stipulated further spending cuts (among other things concerning pensions), tax rises designed to achieve a primary budget surplus of 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2018, large scale privatisation of state-owned assets as well as a detailed schedule specifying which legislation must pass the Greek parliament within days or weeks, respectively.⁴ Moreover, the Greek government ‘commits to consult and agree with the European Commission’ on every step of this legislative agenda, practically handing over Greek law-making powers to a non-elected body in Brussels. Jürgen Habermas rightly speaks of this exercise of raw power as the ‘de facto relegation of a member state to the status of a protectorate [that] openly contradicts the democratic principles of the European Union’.⁵ The two components of this blackmail were (a) the Commission dictating the legislative agenda and decisions of the Greek parliament (which was given two days to pass required legislation, which it did on July 15th) by (b) forcing Prime Minister Tsipras to perform a plain ...