Ruling the Void (18 page)

Self-interest looms even larger in another version of this answer, in which the attested tendency towards collusion among mainstream political parties, and the wider process by which party systems become increasingly cartelized, is markedly facilitated when policy commitments can be externalized to non-democratic decision-makers (see Blyth and Katz, 2005). Through Europe, as well as through recourse to other non-majoritarian institutions, politicians can gradually divest themselves of responsibility for potentially unpopular policy decisions and so cushion themselves against possible voter discontent. At the same time, they will take every opportunity to claim credit for policies that do win popular favour, even where these originate within the European institutions. However, this self-preservation strategy can work only when the institutions that
take over this role from the cautious politicians are themselves not subject to popular control. Hence the non-democratic shape of Europe today. That said, however, there are other risks that arise in these circumstances, which may not have been foreseen by the politicians. To the extent that policy is externalized, for example, politicians will be seen by their publics to be carrying less and less responsibility, and hence will risk the onset of what might be called the Tocqueville syndrome: that is, an increasing inability to justify their privileges in a context in which they fulfil fewer and fewer important functions.
¹⁴
In other words, if politicians choose to divest themselves of responsibility by pretending that they are only running the branch office, and if they go on to feign helplessness in the face of the Brussels head office, their status in the eyes of their voters will almost certainly diminish. In this sense, cartelization may not be a sure guarantee of success in the longer term.

The third sort of answer is perhaps the most serious, however, and is also probably the most plausible: the EU continues to be developed without traditional forms of democratic legitimacy because these traditional forms of democratic legitimacy no longer work. It is not so much that popular democracy needs to be established in the EU, but rather that the EU – along with various less significant non-majoritarian institutions – is actually a solution to the growing incapacity of popular
democracy. In short, the EU is not conventionally democratic, and can never be conventionally democratic, for the simple reason that it has been constructed to provide an alternative to conventional democracy. To repeat: if the EU were susceptible to conventional democratization, it probably would not be needed in the first place, In some ways this is quite a radical interpretation, but in other respects it is quite familiar. From the perspective of policy-making, for example, we know that the EU exists in order to make and implement decisions that cannot be taken or made sufficiently effective at national level – indeed, this is part of its appeal to many purposeful politicians (e.g., Lafontaine, 2000: 199). It offers both the economies and advantages of scale, and is seen as providing a more effective arena than the nation-state, as well as offering a basis for the ‘rescue’ of the nation-state (Milward, 1992). The Union exists to do things that no longer can be done – that no longer work – at the national level.

But there is obviously more to it than this. Were the EU to be simply a higher-level or larger-scale version of the nation-state, developing its own specific capacities within the context of a clear national – supranational division of labour, then it is likely that the pressure to democratize would become quite acute. If decision-making authority is being passed up the hierarchy, then so too should the conventional modes of accountability. Moreover, democratization in this context would be seen to entail quite normal procedures – that is, democratizing the EU would involve a core role for popular democracy, and would build on the model of familiar parliamentary or presidential institutions. Legitimacy in the EU, in short, would be derived in much the same way as it has been traditionally derived at the level of the European nation-state – through elections, procedures of accountability and, in all likelihood, through
party democracy. This is clearly not what is envisioned, however. Indeed, in almost all contemporary discussions of the EU, as we have seen, it is assumed that ‘normal’ democracy can never be applied at this level, and that the means of deriving legitimacy cannot be modelled on the familiar practice at the level of national political systems (see also Thaa, 2001). Nor is this justified solely by reference to the still-uncertain boundaries of the EU: although the argument about the polity-in-the-making is a strong one (e.g., Bartolini, 1999; 2006), the rejection of conventional forms of democratic legitimacy goes much further than this. If anything, the eschewal of popular democracy and conventional forms of legitimation is the preferred option, and the EU wins favour as a polity precisely because it can sidestep these principles. It is not by chance that Europe was constructed as an alternative to conventional democracy.

For this reason also, however, the EU should not be seen as ‘a special case’ or as an exception. It can be better conceived as an outcome, or as the consequence of a longer developmental trajectory, in which democracy grows and mutates, and in which the mechanisms that allow democracy to function change and adapt. If conventional forms of democracy cannot be applied at the level of the EU, then, as I began by saying, this is not so much exceptional as symptomatic. On the one hand, it is symptomatic of the growing sense that the mechanics of popular democracy are increasingly incompatible with the needs of policy-makers; on the other hand, it is symptomatic of a post–Cold War world in which precisely because democracy is the only game in town, democracy itself – in the form of elections and electoral accountability – no longer needs to be defended, let alone promoted. For Fareed Zakaria (1997), the problem with elections is that they impose too strong a constraint on the capacity of governments to make
decisions for the common good. Moreover, the electoral process can be seen to encourage policy responses that are more suited to the needs of those in power than to those of the society writ large. This problem can be avoided at the European level, however, since the EU is ‘the place where the economic reforms that most of the individual members want, but can’t do politically, are implemented’.
¹⁵
In other words, by this means it is possible to find policy solutions that are perhaps deemed necessary by governments or administrators, but that might prove unacceptable to many of the citizens of the member states and might be rejected by many voters. Besides, the EU and its related organs also offer expertise – something that, again, most politicians lack: ‘Specialized agencies, staffed with neutral experts, can carry out policies with a level of efficiency and effectiveness that politicians cannot’ (Majone, 1996: 4).

These and similar arguments tap into what is now seen as an ever-sharpening dilemma in contemporary political systems: the trade-off between efficiency and popularity (Dahl, 1994). What governments appear to need by way of policies is not necessarily what voters will accept – particularly in the short term; and what makes for a successful strategy in the electoral arena may not offer the best set of options for government policy. In the past (see, for example, Schumpeter, 1947: 288; Brittan, 1975: 136), this familiar problem was manageable thanks to the deference shown to governmental authority and the trust that was placed in political leaders. Voters may not have liked some of the solutions handed down, but they were more willing to accept them. Today, however, with a much more fragmented civil society, with more individualized and particularized preferences, and, above
all, with government under the control of parties and political leaders that no longer seem able to serve as effective representatives and sometimes inspire little trust, other decision-making solutions need to be found. As Fritz Scharpf (1999, 188) has argued, ‘even in constitutional democracies at the national level, input-oriented arguments could never carry the full burden of legitimizing the exercise of governing power.’ Hence the raft of new non-majoritarian institutions, and hence also the growing powers and competences of those institutions that can operate beyond the democratic state – and the European Union in particular.

It is self-evident that European integration has been a problem-solving exercise. The full story is not only about economies of scale, however, for Europe is also problem-solving in the sense that it allows decision-making to evade the control and constraint of popular democracy and accountability. The key supranational institutions in Europe are non-majoritarian by definition, and although the Council of Ministers is at least potentially vulnerable to national democratic sanctions, it also proves evasive in opting to work mainly behind closed doors and in a non-transparent and effectively non-accountable fashion. The same holds true for the extensive system of committees – the so-called comitology – that bridges the Council and the Commission. As Deirdre Curtin (2004: 4) has recently put it, ‘what has been qualified as executive [in EU terms] is on the whole depoliticized in the sense that it occurs outside of any public space of communication, deliberation and debate.’ And the reason for doing this is that it is believed to get the job done.
¹⁶
‘Why is it that European policies which stagnate in the main political arena materialize in other shapes and forms elsewhere [in the
EU system]?’ asks Adrienne Héritier (2001: 57) in her revealing assessment of overt and covert policy-making. In this context the answer is very clear: it is because the room that allows those other shapes and forms to materialize was deliberately created when the EU system was developed, and this, in turn, was because of the a priori assumption that policies were likely to stagnate in the political arena. Politics and efficiency do not necessarily go hand in hand in this complex world, and, as Eriksen and Fossum (2002: 410) put it, ‘extended participation and more publicity … do not help much in reaching correct decisions in cognitively demanding cases.’ But while this process may be built in to the EU architecture, it is nevertheless important to underline that it does not amount to a sort of constitutional equivalent of the policy-based ‘rescue’ of the nation-state. Particular policies may be rescued by transfer to a supranational or intergovernmental level, but democratic procedures are not redeemed in any comparable sense. In fact, by shifting decision-making one level higher, the architects of the European construction have been able to leave democratic procedures behind.

The EU is a solution to the policy problems and issues of credibility that have been confronted by decision-makers and their clients, offering a means of institutionalizing a regulatory system that would not always prove viable were it dependent upon the vagaries of electoral politics. On the other hand, it is a solution to the political problems posed by the failings of traditional modes of representation and party democracy at the national level. While lobby, NGO and interest group access can offer specialized and particularized alternatives to conventional party modes of representation, these often lack the general legitimacy they would need to take the place of partisan and electoral channels in the domestic realm – almost regardless of the standing of
the latter. At the European level, by contrast, where the relevant partisan and electoral channels are notoriously weak, such particularized alternatives can thrive, so much so that, as Beyers and Kerremans (2004) suggest, it is often through such alternatives that European issues become politicized.

One consequence of the downgrading of normal democratic processes has been that within the European Union system itself, as well as in interested scholarly circles, there have been great efforts to redefine legitimacy so that it can accommodate the EU as a form of polity that is not conventionally democratic.
¹⁷
Fritz Scharpf’s (1999) much-cited distinction between output-oriented legitimacy and input-oriented legitimacy can be read as one such effort. Another familiar and confidently theorized effort can be seen in Majone’s insistence that the EU is simply a regulatory ‘state’ and, as such, does not require popular democracy: ‘Redistributive policies can only be legitimated by the will of the majority, while efficient policies are basically legitimated by the results they achieve’ (1996: 11).
¹⁸
Nor are such views exceptional. For Jürgen Neyer (2000: 120), for example, who builds on Majone, the European political system can be seen as ‘a non-majoritarian regulatory apparatus’, and ‘the fact that majoritarian [i.e., popular–democratic] procedures are of utmost importance when justifying democratic governance in the member states does not automatically mean that the EC must also be democratized by means of majoritarian procedures.’ For Thomas Christiansen (1998: 105), any increase in the weight of popular democracy in the EU, whether effected through a strengthening of the European Parliament or through
expanding the role of national parliaments, ‘would enhance the EU’s democratic legitimacy. But it would jeopardize, at the same time, the legitimacy which the system derives from producing effective policy outputs.’ And so on. Indeed, the contemporary scholarly literature is awash with the various current meanings of democracy and the many different nuances of legitimacy, such that almost any system of rule can be found to be acceptable – even that by judges and their equivalents. ‘Expert-based decision-making is not on its own illegitimate and antithetical to democracy’, argue Eriksen and Fossum (2002: 410). ‘It is conducive to democratic legitimacy under certain modern conditions.’ It is not surprising, then, that another, more immediately evident consequence has been the spread of popular discontent and scepticism, and the opening of a space that lends itself readily to exploitation by populist parties of both the right and the left.
¹⁹

The European Union political system is hardly anti-democratic: it is open and accessible to interest representation, it invites participation and engagement
from lobby groups, advocacy coalitions, and the rest, and its parliament is effectively – if not always intentionally – quite representative (Thomassen and Schmitt, 1999). But even if the system is not anti-democratic, it is nevertheless non-democratic, at least in the conventional postwar European sense of the term: there is a lack of democratic accountability, there is little scope for input-oriented legitimacy and decision-makers can only rarely be mandated by voters.
²⁰
In particular, it is clear that the EU misses the third of the great milestones that Robert Dahl identified as marking the path to democratic institutions in the nation-states (1966: xiii). That is, we are afforded a right to participate at the European level, even if we may now choose to avail ourselves of that right less frequently; and we are afforded the right to be represented in Europe, even if it is sometimes difficult to work out when and how this representative link functions; but we are not afforded the right to organize opposition within the European polity. There is no government-opposition nexus at this level. We know that a failure to allow for opposition within the polity is likely to lead either (a) to the elimination of meaningful opposition, and to more or less total submission, or (b) to the mobilisation of an opposition of principle against the polity
²¹
– to anti-European opposition
and to Euroscepticism. And indeed, this development is also reaching down into the domestic sphere, where the growing weight of the EU, and its indirect impact on national politics, also helps to foster domestic democratic deficits, and hence also limits the scope for classical opposition at the national level. Here too, then, we might expect to see either the elimination of opposition or the mobilization of a new – perhaps populist – opposition of principle.