Nevertheless, Grimm said he doubts that Europeanising elections alone would solve the legitimacy problem. Grimm outlined several events that have led to this. For one, the shift from unanimity in favour of qualified majority voting in the EU Council helped smoothe political processes, but has meant member states are now subject to laws they may not have approved. But the most far-reaching consequence arose from two European Court of Justice judgements in and , Grimm said.
Judging European law to be directly applicable in the member states, the court paved the way for European law to take precedence over national law — including national constitutional law. Through these mechanisms, member states first transferred powers to the EU and then the EU took powers from the member states, according to Grimm. Constitutions usually regulate how political decisions are produced, but leave those decisions to institutions, which make policies based on electoral preferences.
The only way to change this is to amend the treaties, which is very difficult. But Grimm does not believe this would be a panacea, as the EU would then be even more dependent on its own, internal legitimacy derived from the parliamentary election.
Grimm proffered several solutions to the current crisis. The European Parliament elections must be brought closer to the public through a Europeanisation that would allow national interests to be balanced before the election, rather than after. Communalisation must be limited and there should be a division of powers in the legislative branch according to subject matters, like in every federal polity.
This would require limiting the treaties to provisions on the goals of the EU, the powers of its institutions and their procedures and rights. But focusing on consolidating the current level of integration in Brussels walls the democracy debate off from the citizens of Europe and is the inverse of what democratic choice is about. It is likely to rebound against the EU in the longer term. Europe requires a form of political debate that is both more open-ended and more accommodating of dispersed and varied local-level deliberation.
Democracy must and can be the driving rationale of a looser-fitting model of European integration. Beyond any focus on political union, opportunities exist for thinking more deeply about how to inject new vitality into European democracy. Fourth, even if they have some role to play, the well-worn recipes for repairing European democracy fall short in understanding what democratic revitalization today requires.
It is not mainly a question of strengthening the European Parliament; nor is it a matter of national parliaments being given more powers of scrutiny over EU legislation. A qualitative rethink is overdue about what constitutes democratic legitimacy within the process of European integration.
Deeper debates about remolding democratic quality are to be had, and Europe needs them, more not less urgently. The fundamental dilemma at the root of the eurozone crisis has been the fear that the EU is stranded in a halfway house of partial integration, with national governments working together to make decisions in some areas and EU institutions setting the rules in others.
The crisis seemed to reveal that this sui generis mix of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism was unsustainable. Either national economies needed to cut loose and disentangle themselves from some aspects of integration, or a qualitative jump forward to full economic and political union was required. Understandably, governments balked at the choice. Unwilling to contemplate either option, they chose a strategy of muddling through. Today, there is a general conviction that this may have sufficed to save the euro and set the European economy on the road to recovery.
Yet, the question of political integration has not disappeared altogether. The formal line has been that at least elements of political union will need to follow in the wake of banking, fiscal, and possibly economic union. Many within national governments and parliaments and within EU institutions have promoted political union as the means of injecting democratic legitimacy into the process of European integration.
Debates have advanced over what kind of institutional shape such a union should assume. However, the linkage of economic and political developments now stands in question. While the worst ravages of the eurozone crisis appear to have abated, pessimists still fear that market turmoil will return, that reforms are too shallow to ensure sustainable calm, and that some states will still need to leave the euro.
In contrast, most policymakers feel that the risk of serious fissure in European integration has passed. If this is so, it is clearly of immense relief and testament to skillful crisis management by some European institutions. But even this best-case scenario also presents a problem. As governments judge that they can exit the crisis without far-reaching steps forward in integration, the prospect of political union fades.
And once again, as in previous moments of challenge to European integration, the need for the process of democratic legitimation to meet the pace of development in other areas of policy cooperation is in danger of being forgotten. Governments and EU institutions risk making a huge strategic error in casually relegating the issue of democracy to an unimportant afterthought—something apparently desirable but never a priority of sufficient weight to command summit agendas or to produce tangible policy change.
Suggestions have of course been made of ways to overcome the democratic deficit. A report produced under the auspices of European Council President Herman Van Rompuy at the end of also formally laid out plans for a political union. The suggestions are quite familiar. In this report and in other suggested templates, the main focus for enhancing democratic control has been on bolstering the powers of the European Parliament or adding to it a chamber of national parliamentarians.
Increasingly, politicians and analysts have advocated a combination of European Parliament and national parliament roles. Many analysts have sensibly proposed that national parliaments cooperate more systematically. National parliaments have stepped up their monitoring of member states in the European Council.
This is particularly pertinent to the economic crisis, as funds for bailouts require approval by national parliaments and fall outside the EU budgetary procedures. Yet, a full five years into the crisis there remains more prevarication than tangible action on such modest, practical ideas and no action at all on the more daring approaches. Leaders have given the proposal to synchronize national elections even shorter shrift. Recent Franco-German planning has focused very much on executive-managed intergovernmentalism as the way forward for economic coordination.
The European Parliament elections due in May are now held out as the crucial moment of opportunity to revitalize the health of European democracy. In practice, the polls are unlikely to help restore democratic credibility to European integration any more than they have done in the past. To suggest they can do so is to define democratic quality in extremely narrow terms.
Meanwhile, the level of social protest across Europe seems to have been contained within manageable proportions. Protests continue and are often brutally put down. Populist parties have risen in appeal, with vicious ideologies inimical to all the core tenets of European cosmopolitanism, though only in Hungary has such a party gained untrammeled political power and set about reversing key elements of constitutional liberalism.
Many mass mobilizations are organized around the specifics of national-level political scandals and machinations, as witnessed recently in Spain and Bulgaria. The European Union, German-led economic decisions, and the European Central Bank continue to attract popular ire; and polls register rising levels of Euroskepticism.
Those keen to downplay the political ramifications of the crisis point out that initial predictions of the wholesale collapse of European political systems spurred by grassroots agitation today look highly exaggerated.
Again, this has weakened calls for any major rethinking of the democratic quality of European integration. Indeed, the sanguine view is further nourished by a strand of writing that argues the democracy problem is not that serious.
Some analysts insist the crisis has actually helped narrow the democratic deficit, as it has opened up economic policy to cross-border deliberation more than ever before. They insist that all government decisions made in relation to the crisis have been legitimized through national elections or parliamentary debate.
To improve transparency, the European Central Bank has even promised to release the reasoning behind its decisions. Indeed, doubters aver that there has almost been too much democratic control, which explains why member states have found it so difficult to reach agreement: they are constrained by the domestic democratic imperative far more now than before the crisis.
There is not a new problem of the EU losing legitimacy so much as wider divisions between member states over what to do to dig themselves out of crisis.
Some still believe that the EU can rely on output legitimacy that is, on beneficial substantive decisions, however arrived at or on purely domestic debate to hold leaders to account in intergovernmental negotiations. All these different forms of unconcern rest on the ballast of some heroic assumptions about future economic and sociopolitical trends.
The danger today is of not so much a violent, implosion of democracy but rather a misplaced belief that politics can return to business as usual. The risk is that successful euro-crisis management is accompanied by an almost unspoken confidence that the whole model of integration can revert to the status quo ante, simply with a few ad hoc processes of economic coordination added. But the democracy challenge is serious, is not fleeting, and is not linked only to fluctuations in economic performance.
At the time of writing, governments in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Bulgaria, and Greece are all in precarious positions. Anti-austerity protests unsettled coalition politics even in the Netherlands during the summer of , as European Commission pressure for deficit cuts breathed new life into anti-EU mobilization.
In September , violent protests returned to the streets of Athens, with lethal vengeance. A sobering recent warning is that in the United Kingdom, polling shows that those people supporting more cosmopolitan socially liberal values have also veered toward Euroskepticism. If a new government in one of the weaker member states were to opt for a significantly different route in its economic policy, it is not clear that the mechanism would be deployed. But it was also perhaps ironic, as these two states are seen across Europe as having acted in a way that constricts the openness of genuine policy deliberation.
Momentum has recently gathered behind proposals for an EU mechanism to monitor serious democratic backsliding in member states—a so-called Copenhagen commission. However, while this may provide a useful bulwark in reacting to serious rights abuses, it would not be capable of playing the kind of central role in EU democratic revival that its advocates claim.
Indeed, the idea is not without an apparent edge of irony given that democratic shortcomings at the EU level themselves lie at the root of many national political pathologies today in places like Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Much that is vexing about this union flows from that foundational Faustian bargain. The crisis reveals the inadequacy of output legitimacy: with technical matters it may be possible objectively to determine the best way to maximize output, but when integration touches upon deeper values, this is no longer likely.
In that case, differences exist precisely over what is needed to advance output gains. In fact, it embodies the very attitude of the political class that is so damaging to European integration: the notion that it has access to objectively right policy decisions, to which citizens are a mere encumbrance.
National governments are today beset by the worst of two worlds. Their crisis-related decisionmaking is more opaque and less transparently accountable; but they are also less able to get things done because their de facto power is evaporating as the number of actors involved in modern economic and political choices multiplies.
Input and output legitimacy are not trade-offs; they have diminished in unison. The envisioned templates for institutional reform contain ideas that are valuable and may be part of any future plan to reverse the slide in European democracy. But they are insufficient and too narrow.
In part this stems from a prevalent fear that some irreducible trade-off exists between cooperative economic solutions and democracy. Indeed, in line with this, the approach that most proposals adopt toward democracy revolves in large part around economic-crisis management. They seem set to foreclose meaningful debate about core choices in economic policy, the substance.
The various approaches to political union discussed to date in effect seek to replicate the template of the nation-state at the EU level. They forward a formal, constitutional organization of politics at the European level, in what constitutes a highly republican conception of democracy that has moved beyond the nation-state.
They have focused on rearranging the relative powers of existing EU institutions and strengthening their reporting requirements to the European Parliament and national parliaments. Liberal democracy consists of two parts: rules-based limits on the exercise of power and popular participation.
In much thinking on full or partial political union, far more emphasis has been placed on developing the limits. These approaches are consistent with a view in democratic theory that the sectional interests of the people render popular deliberation for the common good impossible so certain issues need to be taken out of the public realm. This echoes the concept of what political scientist Robert A. Dahl called guardian institutions, which are typically regulatory bodies that operate in a democracy beyond the scope of competitive politics.
Both sides of the austerity-versus-growth debate risk being guilty of an overly instrumental view of how to democratize the EU. The implication is that many politicians and policymakers see in the eurozone crisis a Weberian moment, requiring a larger-scale polity and tighter, more bureaucratized rules, legitimized by common leadership. The debate over how to move forward has been unsatisfactory because people advocate democratic accountability with a particular desired economic policy outcome in mind.
One camp envisions firm market and austerity rules, backed up by means of democratic scrutiny to ensure respect for and buy-in to such rules. Another camp wants to instill democracy with the end goal of limiting austerity and the primacy of markets. Both sides see the issue of democratic legitimacy through the lens of their preferred substantive policy outcomes rather than as something inherently necessary in its own right.
They seem to minimize the importance of vibrant political processes as fundamental to the EU. The German approach to the crisis has been indicative of this tendency. Still, it is not only this much-criticized German position that is guilty of being so highly instrumental. A stream of opinion pieces from southern Europe insists that the EU can only become more democratic through an easing of pressures for austerity—again, apparently conflating democracy with a particular desired substantive outcome.
Just as much as the German policy, this perspective also comes dangerously close to a contradiction: it advocates open-ended civic vibrancy to reimagine polity and economy, but it seems to have already concluded that the urgent need is to replace neoliberalism—this may be a correct call but it is a position on end goals not democratic process.
These templates for closing the democratic deficit focus on the participation of one institution in the meetings of other institutions—or representatives of one institution appearing before those of another institution. But it cannot be a panacea for rebooting European democracy. It may ensure that each institution consults and cooperates with every other institution.
If pursued in this fashion, multilevel governance risks disconnecting the citizen even further from a murky world of opaque and overlapping institutional competences. Much thinking about the European-level political space and identity has similar problems. Deepening legitimacy has most commonly been seen as a matter of empowering supranational institutions so they can engage in deliberative construction of a stronger EU identity.
The assumption is that European-level deliberation is a means of chiseling out a common identity from currently disparate national interests. This again conceives democracy on the basis of collectivist understandings of nationhood more than the cosmopolitan notion of rights facilitation. Too much can be made of the need for a common demos. There may be common debate in Europe, but the problem is that institutions do not respond to those debates because the lines of accountability are very weak.
Vibrant democracy requires competing notions of rights to be argued out, rather than emasculated by an overly heavy focus on consensual collectivism. The climb to broadly agreed European rules of the game must surely be steeper after the antipathies on display during the crisis. Young people in different member states have grown into political maturity with perspectives that are fundamentally different from one another on what the EU means for their own interests.
If anything, most citizen-based initiatives that have sprung up during the crisis are even more firmly rooted within nationally specific debates. So, what is the way forward? The foundation for deeper integration must be diversity, not an imposed standardization of values. There is simply too much variety within Europe to be shoehorned into a single European identity.
Vibrant democratic process is what should bind, not manufactured prescriptions. European integration must clothe itself in a looser fitting garment, not a predesigned tighter straitjacket.
The tendency to let the ends dictate policy proposals must be held in check. The crisis has revealed just how deeply interdependent member states are, which necessitates more effective cooperation and political space to deliberate alternative ways forward for policy coordination.
Member states must not end up doing the equivalent of killing a good relationship through suffocating overkill. Political scientist Sandra Lavenex conceptualizes the way forward well: the intergovernmental camp believes legitimacy lies in national processes; the federalist camp sees it as requiring full political union.
The desirable, third way seeks to make a fluid governance model more democratic. Crucially, this requires a broader revitalization of national democracies not just a spurious engineering of politicized EU-level debate.
What Europe really needs is a culture of consent to underpin deeper integration. Far more pertinent than which bodies have sovereignty over which issues is how to strengthen the spirit of a self-governing Europe.
The gradual nourishing of a more active citizenship must take priority. None of this is to condone febrile, reflexive Euroskepticism or to argue that no deeper, institutional integration is needed; rather, it is to suggest that such institutional change must be the fruit of democratic debate not an economic emergency measure onto which superficial elements of parliamentary scrutiny are disingenuously bolted.
The argument is also not meant to imply that prudent fiscal stabilization is not important over the long term; it is to caution against short-term measures that in their implementation preempt properly democratic debates about economic models. It may be desirable to take a step back and think how fuller democratic debate can be fostered before certain types of economic and social identities are adopted, not simply as a means of locking in such choices after the fact.
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