Democracy in the European Union

Towards the Emergence of a Public Sphere

Liana Giorgi, Ingmar von Homeyer, Wayne Parsons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780415369091
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134224319
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An invaluable exploration of the concern that transfers of power to European Union institutions are producing a worrying new form of democratic deficit.

While ongoing reforms of these institutions promise to render decision processes at European level more transparent and accountable, these expert authors examine whether there is a European public sphere for citizens and their representatives to discuss, deliberate and evaluate issues of public relevance. They show how the process of European integration has given rise to a new object of study – European society, and why key questions concerning identity, citizenship, democracy, government and institutions are being raised anew and are major political concerns at European and Member State level.

With six case studies of EU policy-making and representative institutions, they analyze the intensity of participatory practices in four dimensions: mobilization of societal actors, public contestation and debate, openness of decision-making, and responsiveness of policy makers.

This book will be of strong interest to students and researchers of the European Union, European politics, European studies as well as those concerned with more theoretical aspects of governance and the public sphere.

1 Introduction The political sociology of the European public sphere

John Crowley and Liana Giorgi

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the European Union finds itself at the crossroads. On the one hand, the ambitious European project of ever closer collaboration has significantly advanced through the Eastern enlargement and the ever growing scope of economic integration. On the other hand, institutional and implementation deficits place serious barriers to further integration and raise, more urgently than before, the question of political integration – including its desirability and feasibility. The rejection of the Constitutional Treaty by the French and Dutch publics in 2005, as well as the ongoing budgetary crisis, testify to a serious legitimacy crisis. How can this crisis be overcome and where is or should the European Union be moving towards?

There are three distinct narratives – responses to this question. The first considers further efficient and effective integration to be possible only once a political integration framework has been agreed upon and put into place. ‘Institutional reform’ is a term used to refer to these considerations, yet ultimately this is also a discussion about the EU political multi-level governance system, a possible Constitution and, for some, a state model. The second narrative with regard to the EU legitimacy crisis emphasizes the absence of a symbolically unifying European identity or ‘Europeanness’ among EU citizens and sees the legitimacy deficit closely linked to an identity deficit. According to the proponents of this narrative, as long as EU citizens are first and foremost ‘nationals’, pledging their solidarity to those ‘like them’ within their national territorial boundaries and identifying their national territory as the only legitimate sphere for politics, the EU as a polity will remain deficient. For this reason, it might be more sensible to concentrate any institutional reform efforts to rendering the EU an efficient expert-led international cooperation framework for making policy rather than politics. The third narrative links the legitimacy crisis to a democratic deficit: the reason why the European Union and the European integration project is not genuinely recognized as both lawful and justifiable has to do with the fact that it is non-transparent and unaccountable vis-a`-vis its citizens, hence undemocratic. Overcoming the legitimacy deficit thus requires overcoming the democratic deficit.

These three narratives are not exclusive of each other. However, in the present official and academic discourse they tend to represent distinct views about what to emphasize or prioritize in either policy or research about European integration in the near- to mid-term future. This discourse fragmentation is to blame – at least in part – for the emerging impasse in European studies faced with increasing disciplinary and thematic overspecialization. It is also a barrier with regard to envisioning futures for European integration.

This book tries to break with this tradition. The starting point of our analysis has been that there is indeed an organic link between the European Union’s legitimacy and democratic deficit, but that this is not the problem alone of any specific institution, a set of institutional rules or any single level of analysis. We need to scrutinize political institutions and rules (or the lack thereof) as much as policy processes, citizens’ concerns or patterns of participation (or the lack thereof). Such an approach requires a robust theoretical and normative framework in order to avoid that it spirals into a naiïve discourse of the ‘a bit of everything’ (and ultimately nothing) type. For us this is provided by the ‘model’ of a strong democracy as delineated by the notion of the public sphere. The objective of this introductory chapter is to outline this model and relate it to the individual chapters of the book.

Models of democracy and key considerations

The idea that it is helpful to approach the theory of democracy from the perspective of a range of competing models is a familiar one. In a widely quoted book, David Held (1996) proposes a series of distinctions between ten generic models.

• The Greek idea of citizenship: democracy is defined as the direct political participation of (a very low number) of citizens.
• Republicanism and self-government: individual liberty is defined in political terms – the ‘active citizen’, after being replaced by the ‘religious man’, appears again in political theory.
• Liberal democracy: individual liberty is not political but private and economical; the intervention of the state must be limited in the economy and in private lives.
• Direct (Marxist) democracy threatens the concept of modern politics and presupposes in its canonical form the ‘withering away’ of the state.
• The technocratic and administrative conception of democracy emphasizes the importance of experts and centralized power. Elites are far from citizens who do not take part in political decisions; deliberation and parliaments are under the domination of party competition. Social and political conflicts are weaker, although freedom of opinions is high.
• Pluralism is characterized by the balance of powers and respect of minorities as well as different opinions; moreover, the political system is composed of various political parties and is based on the separation of powers.
• Legal democracy underscores the role of the constitution and the separation of powers; it favours minimal state intervention in private life and in the economy as well as a strong civil society; it seeks to restrict the role of interest groups and supports weak collectivism.
• Participatory democracy seeks the promotion of individual liberty, of self-development and of a collective awareness of common issues through the direct citizen participation in the regulation of the key institutions of society.
• Democratic autonomy: equal rights and duties for individuals: they are considered as free and equal provided they do not threaten the freedom of others.
• Cosmopolitan democracy is characterized by the reform of national and international governing institutions and the evolution of governance; similar processes of ‘globalization’ characterize the economy and the civil society.

The details of the above classification might be discussed at length, but its purpose is to provide a conceptual mapping rather than a catalogue. We cannot, of course, ‘choose’ the model that best suits us or any particular political situation; but we can sharpen our approach to practical or theoretical political problems by taking account of its contrasts. Each of the ten models summarizes some salient features of a real political system and also gives an account of the language in which its citizens have sought to make sense of it. Furthermore, identifying the models, even if they are regarded merely as ideal-types, points to the tensions between them and to the practical and theoretical issues that may be at stake in adopting or emphasizing one or the other. To describe democracy in terms of competitive elitism (as did Schumpeter, for instance) is to reject competing descriptions (in Schumpeter’s case, mainly in participatory terms) as unrealistic, and thus to circumscribe the range or scope of real-world democracy. Even if polemical considerations did not intervene, in other words, analytical options would carry normative baggage; in addition, ‘democracy’ has been a persistently contested notion since its modern re-emergence as a possible real-world model in the eighteenth century. Mapping ‘models of democracy’ thus helps to clarify what is actually at stake in analytical and normative quarrels about democracy.

Using Held’s own approach, a series of issues appear to have particular significance in driving competing interpretations of the superficially straightforward idea of democracy as the ‘rule of the people’:

• The place of the state within the overall conception of democracy and politics, which can be generalized as the significance given to deliberate ordering (via authoritative command) as distinct from more or less spontaneous self-ordering (via the unintended consequences of interaction) as a template for collective existence. The importance given to ‘civil society’ (however named) in democratic theory is a converse criterion.
• The scale of political action, which relates closely to its nature and purpose. If politics is conceived in terms of the collective reflexive life of a people, then the scale of politics will naturally tend to be thought of as unitary and uniform (e.g. in the modern context, by reference to the nation-state). Conversely, if politics is envisaged primarily in terms of problem-solving, there are likely to be as many scales or arenas of political authority and action as there are problems: politics will therefore be neither unitary nor uniform, and the nation-state – as indeed the strong normative idea of the people – will tend to be regarded as a rather arbitrary historical inheritance rather than a necessary political template.
• The processes that make up ‘politics’: a wide range of perspectives exist, from an emphasis on struggles and power relations to a privileging of dialogue and deliberation, with bargaining or negotiation models occupying a notional intermediate position.
• The subject matter or scope of politics. To say that the people should rule is not to specify over what they should rule (simply that no one else should rule, strictly speaking, over anything); even to say that politics is about solving problems is not to prejudge which problems are ‘political’. In the contemporary context, this issue points in three crucial directions, all of which remain profoundly controversial. First, what should be the link between the economy and politics? Second, are human rights a political issue, or an intangible framework within which politics must operate? Third, is there a conceptual limit (e.g. the limits of the human body, however defined) beyond which democratic politics cannot go without self-destructing? Needless to say, none of these questions is in fact dichotomous, and all sophisticated positions occupy some kind of middle ground. But the polar opposites are, nonetheless, the structuring factors of public debate.
• The nature of the people: whom does ‘the people’ include, and whom does it exclude? On what is membership of the people conditional? What sense are we to make of the suspicion about ‘the people’ that underlies traditional rejections of democracy as a viable template for government? Needless to say, these questions intersect with considerations about the territorial scale of political authority: patterns of inclusion and exclusion appear very differently if politics is circumscribed a priori by territoriality or merely contingently related to it, in the sense that many (but not all) issues that political systems need to deal with are themselves inherently territorial. Also of crucial significance in this respect are such institutional questions as rules for decision making and the existence of a status, possibly including specific rights and capacities, for minorities.
• The nature of political judgement. Again, this overlaps to a considerable extent with consideration of the nature of the people, but is nonetheless a distinct question. To regard political capacity as an aspect of common sense, a skill that can be learned in principle by everyone, an aspect of ‘character’ that itself may or may not be universally accessible, a gift that is likely to be rare and to flourish unpredictably, or a correlate of some kind of hierarchically ordered ‘wisdom’, is to offer vastly different interpretations of what membership of a political community entails. Undoubtedly, the democratic temper tended to confine the debate to a fairly limited contrast between political judgement as common sense and citizenship as popular education, but it would be misleading to view the other historically attested positions as having solely antiquarian significance. Current debates about the role of (especially scientific) expertise within democratic polities clearly show the survival of traditional issues and categories.

What is important about these issues is that none can plausibly be regarded as foreclosed by common sense or theoretical logic. Arguably, all possible answers to all of them capture something of empirical significance about observable political systems, as well as something of normative significance about the fundamental idea of democracy. It is, in that sense, not simply an accident of the history of political thought that the various competing generic models have emerged and survived through centuries of debate. Allowing for the vagaries of intellectual fashion, they sketch the conceptual universe of democratic thinking.

Strong democracy and the concept of the public sphere

Central to our understanding of a strong democracy is the notion of a public sphere. In discussions on democracy, and drawing in particular from the civic republican tradition, the term ‘public sphere’ or ‘public space’ is used to refer to the scope of citizen interaction found in democratic societies. It is, to use Habermas’ (1989) terminology, the ‘publicly relevant private sphere’ of interaction: here, individuals relate to one another not in terms of market transactions, nor in terms of power relations, but rather as politically equal citizens (subjects) of a polity.

A public sphere delineates that space in which citizens come together to discuss and debate issues of common or public concern. The public space thus defined is easy to imagine and also realize in the ancient city republic or the local level of contemporary societies. It is much more difficult to bring about in metropolitan areas or the trans-national multi-lingual context. It is for this reason perhaps that contemporary discussion on the public space in general, and the European public space in particular, is very communication-centred, concerned with the role of the media in modern democracies and the potential of new communication technologies, like the internet, to provide virtual public spaces that can effectively replace real (physical) public spaces. Our approach in this book has been to focus on the public sphere as a guiding principle in democratic polities making necessary the establishment and maintenance of public spaces, rather than a single public space. Our overall aim has been to judge the links between these multiple public spaces across different territorial levels of government, and especially across member states, and how these impact on each other and on the European level of governance.

A democratic polity centred on the public sphere has the following characteristics with reference to the six key questions identified in the previous section as central to democratic theory, i.e. the role of the state, the scale of political action, the processes that make up politics, the scope of politics, the nature of ‘the people’ and the nature of political judgement:

• A democratic polity centred on the public sphere relates to an idea of government as authoritative command and emphasizes transparency of rule understood democratically as self-rule. Whether the state is a necessary framework in this respect is a matter of vigorous debate, but it is at least clear that in so far as the traditional territorial state is regarded as obsolete, the solution is to be sought in a hierarchically ordered scheme of territorial scales, i.e. in some form of federalism.
• Politics expresses the collective reflexive life of a people. It is engaged in problem-solving only (albeit necessarily) to the extent that such collective life brings the people up against ‘problems’, which become so only within the democratic process itself.
• Deliberation is the fundamental democratic process. Bargaining and power struggles are acceptable only to the extent that they are normatively subordinate to deliberation and, ideally, set within an institutional framework where they can be regulated by deliberation.
• The subject matter of politics is indeterminate. However, a properly ordered democracy will be such that, at any time, the limits of political competence will be quite sharply drawn. In Habermas’ (1999) well known phrase, sovereignty and human rights are ‘co-originary’.
• The people includes, in principle, all those affected by the decisions taken in the course of the democratic process. The absolute minimum principle of inclusion is, of course, that all those who are subject to laws enacted democratically should participate equally in the process of deliberation and enactment.
• Political judgement is a skill that can be learned by anyone, and is indeed universally acquired in the context of socialization and education. Undoubtedly, some people may be less effectively taught; and, possibly, some may prove inherently more skilful. But neither of these distinctions offers any ground for distinguishing either in principle or in practice between those endowed with and devoid of political capacity.

While such a model is fairly determinate in the context of democratic thinking and is in particular clearly and sharply opposed to other influential democratic modes of thinking, such as Schumpeterian elitist pluralism or Hayekian liberalism, it still offers considerable scope for variation. If publicity- oriented democracy has a generic name in contemporary political theory it is ‘republicanism’, and in order to clarify how this analysis can contribute to a sharper conceptualization of the idea of a ‘public sphere’ in the specifically European context, it is useful to specify some of the distinctions between varieties of republicanism. These refer ultimately to four main titular figures: Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau and Kant. It would be mistake, however, to conclude that there are four distinct varieties of republicanism: on the one hand it is possible, to a certain extent, to combine several of the above influences (notably, of course, Rousseau and Kant); and on the other hand, important recent figures (most notably Arendt) have contributed to a redistribution of some of the classic issues. A survey of republicanism would be quite beyond the scope of this introductory chapter, and the suggestions offered here, along with the theorists chosen, are mainly illustrative.

Strong democracy structured by institutions

Benjamin Barber, drawing inspiration primarily from Rousseau and to a lesser extent from Aristotle, offers a theory (and a prescription) of ‘strong democracy’ as a way of life structured by institutions (Barber 1984, 1988). The current crisis of democracy, for example, is analysed by Barber in terms of the erosion of democratic institutions, including education, the public media and the state generally, particularly under the pernicious influence of contemporary modes of globalization (Barber 1995). Neither liberalism nor tribalism can be faithful solutions because the notions of individuals and of communities are not solutions in themselves. It is not old-fashioned to believe in politics, including in concrete and pragmatic politics rather than ideal politics. This is why both the idea and especially the structures of democracy should be improved: the representative institutions on which Europe depends have drifted away from citizens. Liberty, in Barber’s characteristically republican view, is distinctively political: it involves essentially the capacity to act together, and only in a subsidiary sense the capacity to protect ‘myself’ from the encroachments of others. The existence of liberty as a tangible and situated good depends on the stability of national political institutions and on our capacity to modernize them and help them to play their role. Education – the key to what Barber, in a striking phrase, idealizes as ‘the aristocracy of everyone’ (Barber 1992) – but also nationalism and religion are means of making this goal attainable. Politics does not mean trying to find absolute truth or justice but making everyday choices taking reality into account: there are no a priori solutions. Political liberty thus entails being a responsive and responsible politician or citizen. This is why the state is not inherently ‘far’ from citizens, or to be feared as liberals and conservatives tend to: state and citizens can work together to change the world in the name of common political participation.

Undoubtedly, the common will of citizens, that is to say their collective feeling of membership, based on a common participation in the building of political society, a feeling of sovereignty, should be taken into account. As Aristotle wrote, men are ‘political animals’. Although each country has its own political culture and traditions, the remarks above can – a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Routledge Advances in European Politics
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1: introduction: The political sociology of the European Public Sphere
• 2: Democratization and the European Union
• 3: Participatory Governance in the European Union
• 4: The Emergence of a European Political Class
• 5: The Anti-Globalization Movement and the European Agenda
• 6: The European Union As a Community of Values
• 7: EU Accession and the Public Sphere in New Member States: The Case of the Czech Republic
• 8: Conclusion: What Future for European Integration and Democracy?
• Bibliography