Dossier
Europe’s democratic deficit
The European Union is facing the darkest crisis in its history. At the heart of the problem lies a lack of support from its citizens. Most analysts consider this lack of support to be an expression of a "democratic deficit” that needs to be resolved. But what does this actually mean? And how can we work to rebuild such support?
In 2019/11 Volume 3
1 The European Union is facing the darkest crisis in its history. At the heart of the problem lies a lack of support from its citizens. Most analysts consider this lack of support to be an expression of a “democratic deficit” that needs to be resolved. But what does this actually mean? And how can we work to rebuild such support? Opinions differ on the answer to these two questions, and this dossier will attempt to illustrate the complexity of these differences.
2 For Marie-Françoise Bechtel, jurist and former member of parliament, the deficit illustrates the fact that the EU is not a democracy: there is no “European people” capable of toppling a European government and the European authorities govern “beyond the reach of citizens.” She believes that the EU needs to contract around a “hard core” of a few countries and revisit the rules of the single market.
3 In an article originally written in English and then reproduced in French in the journal Cités, the French-speaking American specialist Vivien A. Schmidt writes at length on the subject. For her, the democratic deficit exists first and foremost at national level, with EU countries left like the audience in an empty theater while most of the important decisions are taken in Brussels. Against the idea of creating a “hard core,” she advocates a “soft core,” with clusters of nations that partially overlap.
4 Meanwhile, the historian Bernard Bruneteau considers it wrong to speak of a democratic deficit because Europe was conceived in order to protect the people from themselves.
5 For the German political expert Ulrike Guérot, to whom we give carte blanche, the democratic deficit stems from the fact that when Europe was created its regions were neglected even though their institutions were closest to the people and those that best embody traditions of identity. These regions could form the basis of a “European Republic” yet to be devised.
6 The Belgian sociologist Olivier Arifon highlights the distance that lobbying has created between the European Commission in Brussels and citizens, while the Polish-born academic Joanna Nowicki emphasizes the serious problem of the communication failure between citizens of Western Europe and those from Eastern Europe.
8 Our selection:
9 Marie-Françoise Bechtel, Vivien A. Schmidt, Bernard Bruneteau.
10 And also: Olivier Arifon, Joanna Nowicki.
11 Carte blanche given to Ulrike Guérot.
The European Union is not a democracy
12 Under what conditions could Europe become a power capable of defending to the full its economic and strategic interests? Given the developments of recent years, this would, at the very least, require finding a way of strengthening the support of the people who make up the European Union. Because this support is what it lacks, according to jurist and former member of parliament Marie-Françoise Bechtel in the journal Politique étrangère. The root problem, she and others say, is the “democratic deficit.”
13 She believes that this deficit’s origins go far back, to 1963, when a ruling by the then-named Court of Justice of the European Communities “established law decided by the Community authorities as a ‘sovereign legal order imposed on member states.’” This was, in her view, a “power grab beyond the letter and spirit of the Treaty of Rome.” Yet “this approach ultimately succeeded in the context of inattentiveness and carelessness on the part of the member states.”
14 Today “the transposition of directives has now become a matter of simply copying and pasting into domestic law extremely dense texts that are usually dictated by non-representative bodies.” Indeed, the Commission has become “a parallel source of uncontrolled legislative initiative.” In her view, judicial authority is “beyond the reach of citizens.” Moreover, as the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany stressed in 2009, there is no such thing as a “European people” capable of toppling a hypothetical European government. Therefore, one cannot consider the European Union to be a democracy. However, might it be possible to plug this democratic deficit, at least in part? asks the jurist. She notes the weakness of suggestions from various quarters regarding the matter and considers a number of ideas.
15 In her eyes, the most “reasonable” route would be to reconstitute a “hard core” of states who were members before the Eastern enlargement. But this alone would not be enough. One would have to revisit the actual rules of the single market, because “it is often these rules [. . .] that play a major role in citizens’ disaffection with Europe.”
17 Marie-Françoise Bechtel, a jurist and former member of parliament and the French Council of State, was director of the École nationale d’administration between 2000 and 2002. She is currently vice-president of the Fondation Res Publica think tank, and sits on the governing board of the Institut français des relations internationales (French Institute for International Relations) (Ifri).
The case for a Europe with a “soft core”
20 The European Union has divided over the refugee crisis and the security crisis (terrorism, Ukraine). It sought to strengthen itself financially in the wake of the euro crisis but the consequences have been problematic to say the least, with the EU today being torn apart by populist victories in various countries, as well as by Brexit. Its future clearly hangs in the balance, according to the American political expert Vivien A. Schmidt, who believes that “the specter of EU disintegration” is looming. In a long article originally published in English and then reproduced in French for the journal Cités, the French-speaking author of a book on democracy in France and another on democracy in Europe lays out her diagnosis of the reasons behind a situation that has no obvious solution, as well as offering her recommendations for reviving a positive dynamic.
21 Her main point is that the EU is facing a crisis of legitimacy, due in large part to the dysfunctional nature of its decision-making processes and their lack of transparency. Schmidt offers as evidence a worrying fact: even the experts themselves can’t agree on who exactly commands the decision-making powers on the big issues: Is it the Council of the European Union, the Commission, the Central Bank, or the Court of Justice? Does supreme power lie in the hands of the politicians or the technocrats? As a result, “sorting out the exact linkages between EU governance and the failure to solve the crises is not easy.” All the more so as the European Parliament, despite so often seeming to be weak and powerless, is seeing its role strengthening. This is reflected in the fact that it was the one to choose the president of the Commission following the 2014 elections.
22 Schmidt notes that “most scholars now see a significant democratic deficit” which translates into “citizen disaffection.” The fundamental problem is that “national democracies [. . .] have increasingly become the domain of ‘politics without policy,’ as decision-making has moved up to the EU level in policy area after policy area while the political debates [. . .] remain confined to the national arena. The EU level instead is characterized largely by ‘policy without politics.’”
23 Therefore, the crucial question is how to “reinvigorate national democracy across Europe while rebalancing the EU’s ‘democracy.’” Some recommend a return to a “hard core” formed around Germany and France and a strengthened eurozone. Schmidt considers this option unrealistic, given how these two countries differ so obviously in their approaches to economic policy. She advocates what she calls a “soft core” of “overlapping clusters of member states in which any duo or trio of member states would take leadership.” This assumes doing away with the unanimity rule that blocks many decisions, as well as strengthening solidarity mechanisms and allowing each state more room for maneuver in directing their own economic policy.
25 Vivien A. Schmidt is Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration at Boston University. She is the author of the book Democracy in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Her latest work, due to be published in 2019, focuses on the crisis of legitimacy in the European Union.
Carte blanche given to Ulrike Guérot
“Relaunching Europe from the regions”
28 In 1957 Pierre Mendès-France warned that we risk “abdicating democracy [...] through the delegation of powers to an external authority, which will in fact exert political power but in the guise of technical expertise.” Is this not precisely what we have done?
29 Mendès-France was actually very perceptive for his time. One imagines that he had the nuclear bomb in mind when he came up with this phrase. Raymond Aron’s famous book Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations dates back to around the same time and analyzes humankind’s ability to devise and direct politics in the nuclear age. Ever since, the international community has discussed “peaceful” and “militaristic” uses of the bomb because, like anything, every technological development brings with it both the means and the potential for its abuse.
30 But Mendès-France knew nothing of the internet and digitalization, which today confront humanity with the same question. Digitalization has huge potential: for the first time in the history of international relations one can create connections that are “people to people,” as opposed to “state to state,” and so pave the way for perpetual peace as suggested by Immanuel Kant, with a global republic and parliamentarization on a global scale instead of a system of nation states who pursue their own interests and neglect the global public good. Technology could therefore pave the way for a whole new dimension in international politics.
31 Unless the complete opposite happens: politics, independence and political decision-making are all abandoned to a technology that pushes and expressly promotes surveillance of all aspects of daily life. If, as Hannah Arendt said, the goal of politics is the maintenance of freedom, then abandoning freedom amounts to the same as abandoning politics. The jury is still out as far as digitalization is concerned. Unlike the bomb, the internet is accessible to everyone, is harder to control, and has far greater appeal due to its practicality, therefore making the possibility for its abuse much greater.
33 The political expert Vivien A. Schmidt proposes radical reform of European institutions, based around what she calls a “soft core.” What do you think of this idea?
34 I know Vivien Schmidt very well; she is one of the best-informed political experts and scientists when it comes to the workings of European institutions. Vivien is right to say the EU needs radical reform. However, I am not totally convinced by the idea of a “soft core.” It is heading in the right direction but, in my opinion, does not go far enough. Neither is it a new idea. A core pushing for further European integration has been on the table since 1994 and the famous “Schäuble-Lamers paper” (both of whom were members of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union [CDU] party) which envisaged political integration of the eurozone at the time. Additionally, current treaties already make it possible to form a core. However, when it comes to making progress on this, European countries sadly lack the political will to do so. It has always been difficult to determine who would make up such a core. Above all, and this is my sharpest criticism of such a concept, the idea of a core is still based on nation states being the main actors of the union which itself retains sovereignty. Whereas, if one looks at the European debate, one sees citizens who have found renewed vigor and—as the real sovereign power—they must have a say in the decisions and power structures of the European political system. This inevitably requires a complete parliamentarization of the EU system, a division of powers (to replace the existing “trilogy” of three institutions), and something that is central to each political entity: all citizens should be equal before the law. Citizens do not currently enjoy this equality, especially when it comes to the three basic foundations mentioned by Pierre Rosanvallon in Le Sacre du citoyen [The Sacred Citizen]: the vote, social issues, and tax.¹ This thorn in the side of the current EU system, which renders it “legal but not legitimate” and underlines the EU’s aforementioned “democratic deficit,” will not be removed by having a soft core.
36 You yourself have suggested putting the regions at the heart of a democratic Europe of the future. Can you explain what you mean?
37 My idea —which is gradually taking shape—of imagining Europe as a republic is essentially based on two elements: first, as outlined above, the principle of all European citizens being equal before the law, which they are currently not due to the many socio-economic problems within the EU; and second, my thoughts on the composition of a second chamber. Assuming that all European citizens have an equal vote (“one person, one vote”), which would profoundly change European parliamentary government, the big question is how to select the second chamber to make it democratically more representative. Does it need to be made up from nation states like France, Germany, Italy, and Poland in their present-day form? Or could one imagine a Europe that takes into account old lands and territories, in other words, the regions, which themselves are the true bearers of identity, and elevate their status so as to give them political currency in Europe? Brittany and Corsica aren’t culturally the same, nor Aquitaine and Alsace. And the same goes for Flanders and Wallonia or Bohemia and Tyrol, or indeed Catalonia, which is much discussed at the moment. Look at, for example, the old medieval maps of Europe and one can identify about fifteen regions that today are home to some five to eight million citizens. The idea would be for these regions to form the constituent parts of a European Republic. No-one would lose their cultural identity but everyone in Europe would have European citizenship. Europe would be led politically and constitutionally by strong regions and Europe would at last achieve what it has always wanted: unity in diversity. Unity can’t simply be prescriptive since no-one wants a centralized European state or a “one-size-fits-all” approach. A European Republic would tap into Europe’s need to be politically more legitimate, efficient, and parliamentary, enabling it to guarantee better political representation and the participation of its citizens as equals, and finally to safeguard the identity and richness of its different cultures.
38 Ulrike Guérot is founder and director of the European Democracy Lab. Her publications include Why Europe Should Become a Republic!: A Political Utopia (Bonn: Dietz, 2019). She is head of the Department of European Politics at Danube University Krems in Austria.
The notion of democratic deficit is dangerous
39 Some observers believe that the democratic deficit, far from being an unintended consequence, was wanted all along by the “founding fathers” of Europe in 1950. This idea is harbored by the novelist and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger and again by the lawyer Anne-Marie Le Pourhiet. According to this Machiavellian vision, the aim was to create an institution that limited the power of the people, whom it distrusted. The sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, a former European Commissioner, acknowledged at the start of the new millennium that the European project was intrinsically undemocratic, writes the historian Bernard Bruneteau in an extract of his book Combattre l’Europe. De Lénine à Marine Le Pen (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2018) that was published in the journal Commentaire. He believes that this suspicion is not justified, because, he explains, many people do not understand that the EU exemplifies a different type of democracy from the kind we have become accustomed to in our own political systems.
40 The EU developed, he writes, “in a spirit of ‘pluralist’ democracy founded on groups interacting in a process of competitive deliberation.” For Bruneteau, lobbying by interest groups in Brussels is a central plank of this pluralist democracy and was actively encouraged by the Delors Commission: the idea being “to institutionalize dialogue with civil society in a clearly democratic perspective.” It is therefore “institutional practice that establishes the demos, and not the pre-existence of this demos that makes democracy possible.” We entertain the myth that democracy only exists through universal suffrage.
41 As the political expert Yves Mény wrote in 1998, “all our democratic systems are mixed systems.” In the case in point, the founding fathers, scarred by the crisis experienced by European democracies during the inter-war years, intended to erect a parapet to protect the people from themselves. A “distance from the demos” was deemed necessary. The notion of democratic deficit is therefore dangerous as it opens the door to simplistic populists on the right and the left.
43 Bernard Bruneteau is a historian and professor at the Institut d'études politiques (Institute of Political Studies) in Rennes. His notable publications include L’Age totalitaire: Idées reçues sur le totalitarisme (Paris: Le Cavalier bleu, 2011).
Further reading on Cairn.info
Lobbying in Brussels distances the citizen
46 As official documents show, lobbying is a practice that is accepted and deemed necessary by both the European Parliament and Commission officials. While there is no such thing as a public European space in the true meaning of the term, lobbying represents a non-public European space, writes Olivier Arifon, professor of political communication at the Université libre de Bruxelles, in the journal Hermès (in French on Cairn.info).
47 It is hard to say how many lobbyists are operating in Brussels: reports suggest between 15,000 and 30,000. But in 2011 a transparency register was created, which Arifon sees as a “clear and public way of identifying those involved in lobbying.” The register contains more than 10,000 names. The most powerful lobbyists, according to Arifon, are professional organizations. Thanks to the complexity of European legislation, which is further accentuated by the clauses of the Lisbon Treaty and the increasingly technical nature of standards and regulations, particularly in the health, energy, chemical, and transport sectors, professional organizations have adopted “cunning” strategies.
48 For the Belgian academic, these strategies boil down to “playing for time by conducting excessive studies and sowing doubt in the minds of researchers, politicians, and citizens.” All in all, he says, “these organizations’ actions serve to discredit the efficiency of the European system and to distance citizens from a structure that is seen as remote.”
49 Reviving cultural identity
50 Europe’s problems are not only institutional and economic; they are also by nature profoundly cultural, explains the Polish-born academic Joanna Nowicki. In the journal Hermès (in French on cairn.info), she explains the causes and effects of several kinds of “communication failure” that increase tension and lack of understanding, particularly between West and East. She cites as an example the notion of national identity.
51 Whereas in Western Europe, national identity is viewed with suspicion because of Nazism and has become over time “a subject that is absent from public debate and almost taboo,” in the part of Europe that was formerly under the control of the Soviet Union it is, by contrast, “constantly championed in democratic, pro-European opposition circles.” A Western concept of “citizenship alone, accompanied by a rationalized patriotism that [. . .] discredits all traditional ties” in this way opposes the “close bonds” of a “living tradition, [founded] on membership of a community of internalized values.” So much so that today “any suggestion of specific cultural identity” is associated with “xenophobic, nationalist, backward-looking extreme right-wing movements.”
52 Nowicki also touches on fundamental differences relating to language usage, with Western Europeans far less sensitive than their Eastern counterparts to what Vaclav Havel termed in 1989 “the newspeak of the modern world,” that of relativism and ideologies. Nowicki deplores a crumbling of “European consciousness” and its virtual absence from the education system when, in fact, school should be “its vehicle.” She points out that, with the exception of the Erasmus program, the education sector is compartmentalized into national silos and has remained untouched by Europe.
