One element of the poly-crisis cuts across and through all the different policy areas in which the EU has struggled to find unity and effective solutions. This is the EU’s democracy problem. This warrants special attention as it sits at the heart of all others aspects of the crisis. Finding a way to overcome this problem will need to be the central pillar of an alternative Europe.
It has become increasingly clear that the EU suffers from major deficiencies in democratic accountability. Analysts have been writing about the EU’s so-called democratic deficit for many years, alluding to the fact that as policies are centralised to the EU level, national democratic controls are lost without being replaced by effective European-level democracy. While the problem is not new, however, the EU’s democratic shortcomings have now come to have a more tangible impact, contributing in a major way to citizen revolts and political upheavals within member states. In 2004, the number of Europeans who believed that their voice counted in the EU was 39 per cent; by 2014 it had dropped to a worryingly low 29 per cent. Over the same period those who felt ‘disempowered’ by the Union increased from 52 to 66 per cent.1
This chapter unpacks the EU’s democracy problem – and in doing so shows that this is not quite as straightforward a phenomenon as often assumed. While much attention has focused on the opaqueness of EU institutions and the standard notion of the Union’s democratic deficit, Europe’s democracy problem also arises from trends at the national level. The chapter also points to governments’ increasing tendency to prioritise ‘practical results’ over democratic improvements in European integration. After dissecting the different levels of the democracy problem, I question the widespread assumption that solving this issue is primarily about boosting the role of the European Parliament and national parliaments.
The first component of the democracy problem flows from the way in which the crisis has been managed at the EU level. Several important areas of decision-making have been centralised at the European level without strong accompanying democratic oversight. The EU is a microcosm of particularly acute tensions between cross-border markets and democratic politics. The harsh effects and disciplines of economic crisis have done much to limit effective democracy across Europe. This is the part of the democracy problem that is best known and to which writers most routinely allude.
Even before the crisis erupted, experts were warning that EU policies would inevitably become more controversial and politicised, as the Union began to engage in issues that affect the distribution of economic and other benefits.2 In the aftershocks of the euro crisis, the dearth of democratic legitimacy behind EU policies has become more evident and more extensive. The crisis has aggravated the political economy of Europe’s democratic deficit. It has sharpened the tensions between liberal economics and a liberal politics that seeks to operate on a transnational, pan-European basis. Colin Crouch influentially defined this situation as ‘post-democracy’: policy responses to the financial crisis have reinforced the embedded power of economic elites and further eviscerated popular accountability.3 The EU’s long-present distortion of running ‘policies without politics’ has become increasingly serious and problematic.4
Increased supranational powers of oversight and intervention have transferred more powers to the EU’s centre with little effective democratic control – indeed, in some cases after national governments have expressly restricted debate and scrutiny. The Fiscal Compact treaty obliges member states to introduce constitutional provisions to limit deficits and to submit budgets for scrutiny to the EU institutions ahead of any debate in national assemblies. The ceding of more powers to the EU level has been done without treaty change that would have required the consent of all member states.
France won more time to reduce its deficit on condition it pushed through labour reforms, which the government did using special powers that circumvented opposition in parliament. When Greek voters chose an anti-austerity Syriza government, Jean-Claude Juncker bizarrely warned them that ‘there can be no democratic choice against the European Union treaties’. German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble helpfully quipped, ‘Elections change nothing.’5 When Angela Merkel talked about ‘market-conforming democracy’, this sounded to many across Europe like a notion that would restrict free democratic choices, not enable them.
The European Central Bank has become the most powerful actor in deciding the fate of the euro without any efforts to introduce democratic accountability over its decisions. Moves towards a limited form of banking union merely increase the degree of opaque decision-making by unaccountable bodies, increasing the powers of the bank. The banking union is often presented as the key to reassembling an effective post-crisis EU. But its rationale – single supervisory processes for European banks – is hardly a rallying cry to enthuse citizens in the stirring nobility of the European project.
National politicians have borrowed from the fragile legitimacy of the Union in order to implement difficult austerity measures. This has tainted the EU. In the eyes of many citizens, the EU has become akin to the adjustment-imposing IMF, rather than a project of solidarity. In the middle of Spain’s tense elections in 2015 and 2016, Commission statements about the risk of the country reversing labour reforms and falling behind on deficit reductions met with an angry response from Spanish party leaders – who saw the EU as upsetting delicate talks to form a government.
The poly-crisis has changed the structure of the integration model. It has not just changed a few EU-level competences, but has redrawn the very type of polity that the EU operates. During the crisis, the EU moved beyond being a primarily ‘regulatory state’, limited to correcting market externalities through regulations. And as this has happened, profound uncertainties and imbalances have come to dominate policy-making challenges. EU-level decisions have created a range of surveillance mechanisms that have consequences for fiscal and macroeconomic policies. Such integration by stealth raises uncomfortable questions for the sustainability of future European cooperation.6
Moreover, such consciously surreptitious centralisation has extended beyond economic measures. The Commission proposed centralising federal powers over asylum to circumvent national opposition. Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary all complained at the lack of accountability over the EU plan to relocate refugees. New measures to channel humanitarian aid within the EU for the first time were structured to avoid democratic control by the European Parliament. A new mechanism for funding Turkey likewise sought to neuter concerns over Turkey’s deteriorating human-rights situation. Civil society groups protest that EU decision-making is now more opaque and subject to closed-doors dealing than ever before: in 2016 not a single piece of legislation received a second reading in the European Parliament, effectively short-circuiting established democratic procedures in every policy sector.7
In short, across a number of policy areas, new European-level crisis-management bodies have become autonomous from governments in de facto terms, undercutting national accountability.8 Some theorists worry that these moves have upset the delicate balance between national-level accountability and European-level processes.9 Christopher Bickerton conceptualises the current EU as a ‘union of member states’: states’ most basic authority is inseparable from their EU membership in a way that has dragged authority away from local forms of popular legitimacy. The poly-crisis is not due just to one or two policy challenges but to a change in the whole essence of European nation states.10
Growing criticism of the EU pulls Europhiles into a siege mentality that militates against prioritising democracy. A vicious circle has formed: to circumvent the dangers of national democratic processes impeding EU business, EU elites have resorted to low-visibility ways of adding to the acquis communautaire, which merely fuels further popular mistrust, and in turns pushes elites into even more opaque avenues of decision-making.11 Europhiles are increasingly tempted to band together to combat newly empowered Euroscepticism in ways that cut across democratic legitimacy. Governments are increasingly enticed by measures of ‘covert integration’ that are clearly incompatible with their own rhetoric about the need for stronger democratic accountability.12
As the democratic deficit at the EU level has worsened, the problem has been effectively left to fester as governments increasingly invest their hopes in reviving ‘output legitimacy’ – the idea that a few good policy successes are far more important than new ideas to boost democratic accountability. Behind their talk of wholesale political union, leaders are in practice now focused on select policy changes – that is, on centralising cooperation in familiar terms in a few choice areas that can deliver quick, tangible results.
Many argue that the poly-crisis requires governments and EU elites to push ahead with deeper integration to get the management of financial interdependence right – and expressly not to be held back by a constant series of national democratic elections that now give space to Eurosceptic parties.13 Some prominent experts reject suggestions that the crisis reveals any deep democracy problem at all and insist that the EU should stick to delivering better output.14
After Brexit and Donald Trump’s election, many European politicians, advisors, journalists and thinkers muttered even more forebodingly about the risks of letting the people have their say – and the need instead to ‘get practical’. In recent policy proposals and meetings, the tendency has been towards a so-called ‘practical union’. This reflects the reality that many member states now look at the EU in terms of careful cost–benefit analysis, not as an all-encompassing political project whose value transcends immediate, tangible gain.15
Since the shock outcome of the UK referendum, pro-Europeans have routinely asserted that direct democracy is a bad idea and that EU policy-makers need to focus on sensible suggestions for modest policy changes. Matteo Renzi’s referendum defeat and resignation heightened these concerns over the effects of consulting society. According to one insider, the December 2016 Council summit principally took the form of leaders ‘venting their frustration at referenda’.16 Such democratic doubts have increasingly been expressed on both the left and the right, with a new wave of calls for strong leadership to push the EU forward against errant popular concerns if necessary – a trend evoking Robespierre’s now-voguish, sinister rumination: ‘The people: are they good enough?’17
European leaders increasingly seek tangible progress on deliverable changes in a small number of policies rather than a genuine rethink of EU integration’s fundamental tenets. Their assessment is that Brexit and other elements of the crisis call for focused action on borders, shared defence procurement and infrastructure investments rather than for any restructuring of the basic EU model. The desired end state of political integration is left unmodified, while in the short term leaders focus pragmatically on a few areas of deeper integration they believe capable of delivering concrete benefits.
Many new proposals now swing decisively back to a hunt for output legitimacy. This is true of a battery of recent ideas and proposals, including for a digital union, a clampdown on corporate taxes, an enhanced EU social-rights pillar and further increases to infrastructure spending. A ‘social summit’ is planned for the autumn of 2017. By May 2017, the European Strategic Investment Plan had spent 180 billion euros on economic projects and EU officials proclaim its expansion as central to reviving the Union’s fortunes. The Commission and several member states have pushed to boost EU trade defence instruments, while in September 2017 Juncker proposed measures that would undercut national and regional parliaments’ say in new trade deals. Italy and others are calling for a huge boost in the Erasmus budget. Some recent suggestions have a populist tinge to them, like the European Parliament’s proposal that young people be given a free Interrail ticket to explore Europe and also the idea of creating ‘ambassador schools’ in which to cultivate the notion of European citizenship – ironic when elites are busy excoriating populists for peddling ‘simplistic solutions’.
One set of interviews revealed that policy-makers have come to see a ‘flexible union’ overwhelmingly in terms of using existing treaty clauses for ‘quick-win’ results and very expressly not as part of any far-reaching set of reforms.18 Seeking to rejoin the ‘inner core’ of large member states in the run-up to the Rome summit, the Spanish government highlighted that it saw a number of big projects in areas like transport, energy and defence cooperation as the way to revive the EU’s fortunes.19 The Commission’s March 2017 White Paper on the Future of Europe contained no mention of democratising the EU, focusing instead on policy delivery.20
The tilt towards output legitimacy is also evident in governments’ accelerated move towards a ‘Security Union’. As part of these plans the Commission has moved to set up a new research programme for defence issues. This plan triggered a 60,000-strong petition by people concerned about millions of euros being diverted from other parts of the budget and about the broader lack of public oversight over new defence-related funding. In some senses, these proposals are the very antithesis of citizens’ pleas for an EU more responsive to everyday concerns over jobs and economic conditions.21
As conditions improve, elites bring forward these kinds of new proposals for more cooperation, while their erstwhile promises to reboot citizen-oriented democratic participation are once again disappearing from view. The conclusions of the European Council summit in June 2017, for example, ran through a long list of policy areas where new activity is afoot, but made no mention at all of the democracy challenge.22 Governments, elites and policy-makers recoil from what democratising integration might entail and clutch for the certainties of ‘an EU that delivers results’. This is an entirely familiar historical pattern. When times are good, EU leaders see little need to address the democracy shortfall; when times are bad, they want immediate results and insist they have no scope to focus on the democracy problem. Despite many years of experts and policy-makers agreeing that the EU cannot rely on output legitimacy, policy responses do exactly this.
The EU’s growing democracy problem is not just the result of EU institutions’ disconnection from democratic oversight. It also flows from the way that national governments function within EU debates and the way they have responded to the poly-crisis. An important component of this is that national governments – separately and collectively through the European Council – have assumed more prominent roles in a way that makes decision-making more opaque. This trend makes it more difficult for citizens to exert accountability over both EU institutions and national governments’ decisions related to European coordination.
The democracy problem is not just a matter of the economic crisis or of markets restricting citizens’ choices. It reflects a broader approach to EU policy-making that is increasingly top-down in nature, within as well as beyond the national sphere. Indeed, in some ways it reflects the growing role of national governments in such decision-making dynamics, not their eclipse or the creeping power of supranational Brussels institutions. National administrations have lost legitimacy just as much as EU institutions for being associated with decisions responsible for the poly-crisis.
For over two decades now, since the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, many advances in European cooperation have occurred on an intergovernmental basis. The EU has resorted increasingly to informal procedures of cooperation – whereby governments agree to coordinate through setting targets and exerting peer pressure, rather than giving powers to supranational EU bodies. To help implement cooperation, governments have created new bodies – like the External Action Service, the European Stability Mechanism and Frontex – over which they retain leverage.23
As a result, popular frustration is not simply a reaction against distant and opaque EU bodies like the Commission, the European Parliament and the European Court of Justice. It also reflects disconnects between national governments and their own citizens. The point is that in some areas governments have already responded to the lack of enthusiasm for centralised EU bodies. And clearly, the way they have done this has not succeeded in mitigating citizens’ feelings of disenfranchisement. The implication is important: solutions to the democracy problem will not be found by simply restoring sovereignty or returning powers back to national governments.
The crisis has in some areas pushed national governments into the driving seat of EU affairs. Many theorists say the period since 2009 has been one dominated by hard bargaining between national governments, in which the influence of both shared ideals and standards of democratic legitimacy has diminished.24 Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker has interpreted his ‘political’ mandate in terms of a need to centralise power to push forward certain government-backed policy dossiers. If anything, this approach amplifies concerns over accountability and means that the Commission’s new powers have gone hand in hand with – rather than being eclipsed by – ascendant intergovernmentalism.25 It is generally agreed that this trend has deepened even further in the wake of the Brexit vote, as nervous governments seek a tighter grip on the EU’s political direction at this potentially watershed moment.
All this is in turn linked to the much-commented-on turn towards nationalism in many European states. The relationship between democracy and nationalism is complicated and varied. The deepening of democracy has often depended on the emergence of national identity. However, when nationalism extends too far, it can undermine democracy. This debate is complicated further in the EU by the need to understand what democracy means in a context of shared sovereignty. This context means that what analysts and journalists now habitually describe as a turn towards nationalism in Europe does not involve the same kind of bellicose and expansionary ‘nationalism’ that has blighted previous periods of European history. Rather, it seems more defensively tied to a perceived loss of democratic inclusiveness.
This has less to do with formal national powers or national identity per se than with the real practices of day-to-day politics. The Lisbon Treaty formally made the EU confederal, legally enshrining a state’s rights of sovereignty and of withdrawal. But this was about legally fixing nation states’ role, not about freeing up national-level democratic participation in the day-to-day functioning of EU policy-making. In practice, legitimacy shortfalls have deepened at the national level as many decisions have been given over either to technical bodies or to markets outside the sphere of political debate. Polling shows that citizens’ trust in national institutions has declined almost in parallel with declining trust in EU institutions.26
Few parliaments have ex ante scrutiny powers over national decisions that relate to EU matters – Denmark’s legislature is the main exception, as it must approve the government’s negotiating mandate prior to each summit. Citizens do not feel that national parliaments are that much more responsive to their interests and concerns than is the European Parliament. Decision-making on many issues like trade is just as opaque and technical within national governments and parliaments as it is at the EU level. Indeed, it is instructive that those member states where parliaments are most active on EU affairs – the UK, Denmark and the Netherlands – are those with high levels of Euroscepticism. This suggests that national legislative scrutiny over EU matters is hardly a catch-all antidote to discontent with the EU.27 The so-called yellow- and orange-card procedures introduced by the Lisbon Treaty – which parliaments can raise against Commission legislative proposals – remain virtually unused as a means of influencing EU decisions.
The core message is that both European- and national-level democracy is suffering a worrying depletion – a harsh duality that contrasts with the tendency to see these two levels of democracy as zero-sum trade-offs against each other. One of the most important analytical developments of recent years is the concept of demoicracy (government by ‘peoples’ – demoi – as opposed to government by ‘the people’ – demos): some analysts believe that prior to the poly-crisis the EU had begun to develop a sui generis mix of national- and European-level democracy.28 Experts talk about the EU becoming a unique ‘compound union’, combining democratic channels at the EU level with those at the national level. The concept of demoicracy has gained currency to express the idea that citizens participate both in the national democracies of their countries and in the common democracy of the EU. The optimistic reading is that the EU was moving towards being ‘a Union of citizens and member states’ with a unique model of transnational governance consisting of a ‘common democracy’.29
However, the poly-crisis appears to have left these notions on the defensive. Richard Bellamy worries that the EU’s ‘republican intergovernmentalism’ – its identity as an ‘international association of democratic states’ – has been undermined. This is most clearly due to creditor domination over debtors, but also to other developments such as cases in the European Court of Justice that begin to confer rights of European citizenship, and the instrumental engineering of pan-European political networks.30 EU demoicracy is premised on the idea that citizens can retain national identities and enjoy democratic accountability at the national level while also expressing empathy with other member states. The crisis has undercut the role of parliaments at the national level, while weakening empathy and effective engagement of citizens at the European level. Both parts – the national and the European – of the EU’s incipient demoicracy have been put under strain simultaneously.31
The European democracy problem has a potentially even more serious dimension. Since the poly-crisis began, some governments have taken a further step towards illiberal politics – of a kind that represents a more direct and profound threat to the quality of European democracy. In several member states, governments have diluted checks and balances and democratic quality has suffered. The EU now struggles to deal with its own budding autocrats. National-level democracy is experiencing serious problems in many parts of Europe.
The most dramatic and well-known case is that of Hungary, where Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government has repealed many democratic checks and balances, seized control of the judicial process through constitutional change and tightened control over the media and civil society. In summer 2017, Orbán passed legislation severely restricting non-governmental organisations. The government even moved to close down one of Hungary’s most prestigious, independent universities, the Central European University. This case unleashed a storm of international media attention, but is only one part of a far broader assault on civic freedoms in Hungary.
In Poland, the government led by the Law and Justice party (PiS) is now following suit with several similar measures – even though the illiberal turn in Poland is for now tamer and narrower than that in Hungary. The PiS has progressively tightened its control over a number of senior judicial and media appointments. In 2016, it introduced a new security and anti-terror law that further short-circuits democratic checks and boosts state surveillance powers. Notwithstanding their differences, Fidesz and PiS openly challenge political, social and economic liberalism.
Even mainstream pro-EU parties in central and Eastern Europe often show ambivalent commitment to core liberal norms of tolerance and the rule of law. Governments in most of these countries have pushed towards more majoritarian forms of democracy, weakening checks and balances and the rule of law. They may still be formally democratic, but increasingly combine ethnic nationalism, social illiberalism and clientelistic, personalised and somewhat predatory politics – a style taken up by both centre-left and centre-right mainstream parties. In the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2016, central and Eastern Europe recorded the most dramatic democratic regression of any region at any time since the index began in 2006. For 2016, the region suffered more country regressions than any other region. The index does not now rank a single central or Eastern European state as a full democracy.32
If Poland and Hungary talk of leading a wider ‘cultural counter-revolution’ to challenge the liberal tenets of EU integration, Czech president Miloš Zeman has pursued several illiberal policies from a social-democratic angle. He has been vehemently hostile to Muslim migrants and advocates a major thinning out of EU laws. The Croatian Democratic Union’s victory in Croatia has brought several liberal rights commitments into question. All this suggests that central and Eastern European and Baltic states’ democratic transitions were always rather shallow, as they sought formally to align themselves with EU conditionalities but did so without deeply internalising liberal norms.33 Mass protests in Romania in early 2017 forced the social-democratic government to withdraw a law that would have freed politicians accused of corruption from legal sanction – an inspiring testament to civic power but also a reminder of just how far dysfunctional governance has spread within the EU. In May 2017, similar corruption-related protests erupted in Slovakia.
In 2014, the Commission felt obliged to a draw up a new Framework to Strengthen the Rule of Law because of these worrying trends.34 To date, this is essentially a mechanism for dialogue on concerns about the rule of law and has brought forward no new concrete means of dealing with illiberal populism. Since the Commission activated the framework against Poland in January 2016, PiS attacks on judicial independence have merely worsened. The Commission issued its first opinion under this framework in June 2016, criticising the PiS for undermining the judiciary’s independence. In the autumn, the Commission moved to a second stage of the process by listing the specific reforms it expected the PiS government to introduce. On both occasions, the Polish government angrily rebuffed the Commission’s intervention. Member states have not given strong backing to the Commission’s moves against the Polish government; indeed, France, Spain and the UK have on occasion questioned whether the framework really lies within the Commission’s competences. At a council meeting in May 2017, a majority of member states for the first time called for firmer action against the PiS government. Yet far from being cowed by the EU, in July 2017 the PiS government passed laws constricting judicial independence even further; the state of these laws was left uncertain when Polish president Andrzej Duda vetoed some of them. The Commission drew up a third opinion under the rule-of-law framework and also at this stage threatened legal action against the Polish government.
The EU has had to fend off PiS accusations of double standards. Previous, more overtly pro-EU governments in Poland also sought to control judicial and media appointments, albeit in more subtle ways. As the EU did not react at all on these occasions, many in Poland feel the Commission is not impartial, and this has stirred further resentment against the Union. The PiS argued that the changes to personnel on the constitutional court were needed to reverse the moves made by the previous Civic Platform government to load the tribunal in its favour shortly before the 2015 elections. The Polish government also complains that the EU is leaning far harder on PiS measures when it did virtually nothing in response to the far wider range of democracy-limiting measures adopted in Hungary.
The mood is brittle: any intrusive EU pressure may stoke the fires of incipient nationalism and Euroscepticism in Poland. A movement called the Committee for the Defence of Democracy has organised large-scale protests against the PiS government – protests that regularly gather more than 100,000 participants and have rumbled on into 2017. When the PiS government introduced rules restricting certain public demonstrations and bypassed parliament to push through its budget plans, the protests managed to get some measures diluted. But Poland’s illiberal turn is still getting worse.
The EU has not yet designed effective policy tools to get to grips with the illiberal turn seen within national politics. In May 2017, pressure from the European Parliament seemed to chasten Viktor Orbán and the Commission drew up legal proceedings to challenge the Hungarian government’s new civil society laws. While the Hungarian government did react by slightly softening its proposed NGO law, it did so through relatively cosmetic changes. With both Poland and Hungary now subject to Commission legal action, Germany has raised the prospect of reducing EU funds to governments in breach of fundamental democratic norms, but this possibility would only kick in under the new EU budget after 2020 and the idea would still need to gain the support of other member states.
In general, there have been few instances of meaningful leverage. The Agency for Fundamental Rights simply monitors member states’ application of EU laws and cannot intervene to limit a general deterioration of democratic quality. The Commission framework is limited to rule-of-law questions and so far seen as relevant only to the current cases of Poland and Hungary. In late 2016, the European Parliament proposed a new mechanism to defend democracy and rights in the Union because of the ineffectiveness of the Commission framework and the Council’s rule-of-law dialogues.35 In March 2017, the Commission and Council rejected this proposal. At the same time, several member states got the Commission to drop a report looking critically into rising corruption across Europe.36 Some experts argue that the EU’s most serious democratic deficit today is the way that political parties in the European Parliament have accepted authoritarian dynamics for partisan reasons – especially in the case of Hungary, given Fidesz’s contribution to the European People’s Party majority in the Brussels chamber.37
Illiberal trends are not limited to central and Eastern Europe. Spain and other states have forced through restrictions on protests and freedom of assembly. The Council of Europe has criticised the creeping political control exerted over the judiciary in Spain.38 The UK and other governments have given themselves extensive new surveillance powers. France and others have brought in restrictions on minority rights, especially with respect to Roma people. The space for civic activism is narrowing across Europe, in the face of both government restrictions and the rise of intolerant social values. While politicians and EU leaders deliver endless speeches about the need to bring society into a more inclusive process of integration, governments’ own actions have in practice begun to make life more difficult for civil society organisations.39
The trend now extends well beyond one or two parties with particularly high-profile leaders. A YouGov poll in October 2016 found that around half the people surveyed across 12 member states espoused somewhat illiberal opinions – a combination of anti-immigration sentiments, nationalism, hawkish views on international policy and opposition to human-rights laws, EU institutions and European integration policies.40 Shocking data from the 2016 World Values Survey suggests that over a third of young voters in Europe believe military rule could be legitimate. These data show declining support among younger voters for a whole series of core liberal-democratic values – among the well educated and rich just as much as those ‘left out’ of the benefits of EU integration. (It should be pointed out that some experts question these data.)41 Over the last decade, EU member states are the group of countries whose democratic quality scores have fallen furthest within the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, and the regression is not due only to central and Eastern Europe: between 2006 and 2016 democracy scores in 13 out of 21 Western European countries worsened.42
Illiberal populists recoil angrily against the EU and liberal values, but their response is to undercut political liberalism at home, not to forward a constructive or innovative vision for European integration. These parties may accurately capture some of the popular frustration with the EU, but they do not embody any kind of reform programme that is compatible with their own narrative of ‘letting the ordinary people speak’. To the extent that they menace the quality of liberal democracy in their own national contexts, they cannot be convincing as putative architects of a European-level democratic transformation.
Much current debate centres on ways of enhancing the influence of both the European and national parliaments. Many politicians and analysts see such options as the principal means of boosting democratic legitimacy at the European and national levels. Yet these formal, institutional routes have shown limited potential to deepen the democratic component of European integration – in some ways they even amplify aspects of the EU democracy shortfall.
In most official templates, the main focus for enhancing democratic control has been on boosting the powers of the European Parliament. The 2015 Five Presidents’ Report proposes more powers for this institution as the means of legitimising the onward march to fully centralised economic and political union.43 Ideas that are frequently debated include authorising the parliament to select a combined post of Council and Commission president and selecting commissioners from among its own members.44 Another standard call is for European Parliament elections to be based on Europe-wide constituencies.45 In September 2017 a campaign has gathered steam to use transnational party lists to fill the seats vacated by British MEPs.
Enhanced powers for the European Parliament might be desirable on some specific issues, but cannot be the main pillar of a solution to the EU’s democracy problem. Debates in the parliament still take place around a division between pro-EU and anti-EU camps, not around different models and ideologies of integration. Most members act as lobbyists for deeper integration, showing little appetite for critically exploring alternative ways of organising integration. In consequence, the argument that the European Parliament is not the solution to the democratic deficit has been prominent for many years. Yet the institution has gained incrementally in power, while other forms of democratic accountability and participation in the EU have not been supported.
As the parliament has gained power in each successive new EU treaty, its legitimacy with citizens has decreased. Thus its weakness today is hardly its lack of formal powers. It has long stood as the purveyor of a particular type of formal, centralised integration rather than as a chamber promoting new and exciting ideas on how to reinvent the EU. The parliament’s stake in the existing institutional system is greater than its commitment to finding more effective ways to legitimise the European project. Europhiles point to a tightening Commission–parliament nexus as evidence of stronger democratic accountability. To member states and citizens this nexus looks like Brussels insiders colluding constantly to push more integration – a new form of opaqueness, not democratic openness. Alternatively put: while the European Parliament’s democratic role has strengthened upwards, in relation to the Commission, it has weakened downwards, in relation to citizens.
The parliamentary elections in 2014 offered voters an effective choice and leverage as parties agreed that the winning party would select the Commission president; far from enticing voters, the turnout dipped to a record low. Many politicians and experts still argue that the European Parliament’s greater powers are helping to generate a common demos.46 However, polls have found that European public opinion is not favourable towards the idea of a directly elected EU president or to the idea of the European Parliament being the main forum for democratic accountability.47
The second standard proposal is for national parliaments to be granted a stronger role in providing the EU with democratic legitimacy. Such calls have grown notably in the wake of the crisis. There is a growing recognition that national democratic processes should be part of the solution for EU democracy, not something to be usurped by purely European-level institutions. It will certainly be essential to design ways for all national parliaments to be better plugged in to EU decisions that affect their countries directly or indirectly. One extensive survey of debates in national legislatures concludes that the crisis has made governments realise that ‘the era of de-parliamentarisation’ has to end.48 In the 2017 French election campaign, Socialist candidate Benoît Hamon proposed – unsuccessfully, of course – a treaty for democratising the EU though transferring significant powers from the European Parliament down to national parliaments.
Better national-level democracy is not a zero-sum alternative to European cooperation, but is likely to give firmer grounding and legitimacy for measures agreed at the European level. EU-level legitimacy cannot be achieved by leapfrogging national democracy, but must be built on bettering it. Empowering national parliaments in EU affairs will be vital to reinstalling a kind of republican democracy between member states – where governments treat each other as equals and are also fully accountable to citizens.49 Yet more is needed than simply having national backstops to vet EU powers. And simply calling for more powers to be given to national parliaments does not help determine what is to be done when no agreement can be found between these parliaments.
While there is widespread agreement on the principle of national parliaments playing a greater role in monitoring EU affairs, in practice doubts and hesitancy persist. A sizeable number of member states rejected David Cameron’s bid to increase national parliaments’ powers of scrutiny over EU affairs as part of the 2016 UK renegotiation package. The so-called COSAC (Conference of Parliamentary Committees for Union Affairs) is still very opaque. It was created in 1989 but has made little impact. It provides a forum for national MPs and MEPs to share views twice a year but does not allow national parliaments a proactive lead. The public knows nothing about COSAC so it does not serve as a way to bring EU affairs closer to the people – rather it is simply another invisible Brussels committee.50 The yellow and orange cards will never be a significant means of democratic control because national parliamentarians are unlikely to move explicitly against their own governments to stop new laws.
Intensified consultations between and within national parliaments on EU issues may be useful, but will not suffice to bring about the Union’s democratic regeneration, given how disconnected citizens are from mainstream political parties – not only on the European level, but also on the national level. A simple reallocation of European powers down to the national level alone will not restore democratic accountability. A few additional scrutiny committees would hardly be enough to rescue the European dream. A forum of national parliaments is unlikely to solve the challenge of fragmentation and diversity.51
As already indicated, it is certainly the case that the nation-state political arena will be one important component of a reformulated EU. But this national-level input cannot be reduced either to an antiquated notion of formal sovereignty or to beefed-up parliamentary scrutiny powers. Rather, it will need to be expressed through many aspects of more active civic participation, organised and articulated at the national level – as explained in the following chapters.
These difficulties reflect a general and crucial point: resolving the EU’s credibility shortfall is not just about slightly reshuffling formal competences between different institutions. There is no institutional magic bullet to address the current political malaise in the EU. Focusing on formal processes of democratic control and representation will not be enough to recast the EU as a democratic project. The EU needs to shift from an ethos of legal constitutionalism to one of political participation. The need for democracy is not so much about committees simply blocking laws but about citizens being able to engage more positively and suggest new lines of cooperation.
The EU’s complex web of institutions already has multiple points of accountability built into it – indeed, so many as to gridlock decision-making very often. It is not these formal checks and balances that are lacking so much as participative forums that connect citizens to the EU project. The different EU institutions now communicate with each other much more to reach compromise solutions in order to unblock new policies; while this is broadly welcome, it makes decisions even more dependent on bargaining between institutions that have almost taken on a life and identity of their own, beyond any regular citizen guidance.52
All politicians and political elites say they support ideas to democratise the EU. Such an aim has long been part of the official rhetoric. Yet in practice, the concern with democracy never seems to be deemed important enough to catalyse concrete change. More urgent policy imperatives always appear, crowding the democracy question from the EU agenda. Innovative analytical frameworks have presented the EU as a dual-level democracy, with representation and identities being safeguarded at the national and EU levels. The sobering point is that the crisis has weakened both these dimensions of democracy at the same time.
The aim of injecting the EU with greater democracy is often assumed to be a kind of secondary add-on to effective substantive policy coordination. That is, governments and EU institutions endeavour to find agreement on the ‘right’ policies, and then search for means of legitimising the pro-integration measures they have adopted. Conversely, Eurosceptics disingenuously claim that more democracy necessarily entails less integration. On both sides of the debate, current proposals foreclose discussion over fundamentally different policy choices and fail to provide for the kind of proactive citizen involvement in fundamental political choices that the Union so evidently lacks.
Democracy has not yet become part of the DNA of how the EU seeks to manage contemporary interdependence. The EU must become a democratic project as its very core rationale. It has reached the limit of what it can do without far more meaningful and proactive democratic engagement. European Central Bank governor Mario Draghi was credited with effectively saving the euro when he declared that the bank would do ‘whatever it takes’ to prop up the currency. The EU needs an equivalent ‘whatever-it-takes’ in the realm of democracy: a commitment to do whatever is necessary to give citizens a participative stake in the project in order to stem its haemorrhaging support and legitimacy. Donald Tusk issued a forceful reminder at the Rome anniversary summit: ‘The unity of Europe is not a bureaucratic model. It is a set of common values and democratic standards.’ Policy proposals that do full justice to his emotive call are long overdue.