We have unpacked the different elements of Europe’s democracy dilemmas and explained why existing, formal routes to a democratic EU are part of the problem as much as a solution. What then is the remedy? In this chapter I lay the groundwork for approaching the democracy problem from a less familiar angle. This entails exploring new ideas for accountability and participation that have already begun to take root in many emerging democratic processes. The framework I offer here lays the foundation for a series of more concrete policy recommendations that follow in later chapters.
While many articles and books make standard pleas for democratising the EU, they draw from concepts that are very specific to the rarefied world of EU integration and its very distinctive theories and terminology. As we saw in the previous chapters, this reinforces the tendency for specialists to think about future options in terms of existing integration concepts and for EU debates to become unhealthily self-contained. I believe it is necessary to tackle the democracy debate in a less self-referential way and not purely in terms of the standard EU conceptual lexicon.
Standard proposals still see a more democratic and participative EU coming about through formal governmental and supranational institutions. In contrast, I contend that the most pertinent avenue of research is to explore whether newly energised civic impulses can also take place around these formal, top-down institutions. This is not to deny the importance of top-down decision-making dynamics or the need for robust institutional powers, but rather to examine how civic processes can better feed new ideas into formal institutional reform debates from a vantage point of more proactive autonomy. The many idealistic visions for EU reform fail to explain exactly how we are supposed to get from the current stalemate to a better version of European cooperation. My conceptual approach is different from the many others written on the EU’s crisis in focusing on the real-life political processes from which an alternative Europe must emerge.
In essence, I am concerned to search for avenues and processes of political change that are more grounded in actually occurring social processes – and therefore more likely to deliver new forms of European integration in practice. In this sense, I explain why there is potential for an alternative Europe to work with the grain of bottom-up processes of civic empowerment. But the chapter also points out how much more needs to be done to maximise such citizen-based potential – and indeed to overcome its limitations and contain its downsides.
The shortcomings inherent in existing approaches to the democracy problem strengthen the case for a more bottom-up and open-ended model of European integration. The EU needs an understanding of political change that highlights the role of citizen agency as opposed to enlightened elite paternalism. It needs to bring its approach to democracy into line with the fluidity of civic activism, new social movements and the changing nature of electorates. The EU’s democratic legitimacy will hinge less on controlling or limiting what comes out of Brussels, and more positively on empowering citizens. The insufficient empowerment of citizens is the crux of Europe’s current legitimacy malaise, and this goes well beyond the specific configuration of EU institutional procedures. European integration must be run in a way that is more citizen-centred. The new EU must be a project that fosters and allows active citizenship – not one that curtails the exercise of citizenship in the name of a predetermined notion of the greater pro-European good.
With hopes pinned once again on output legitimacy, a common line now widely heard is that the EU must reflect the concerns of ‘integration’s losers’ or ‘globalisation’s malcontents’. This is too easy a refrain. It gives the impression that a few policy adjustments can solve an issue that is actually far more deeply rooted and behoves us to rethink the structural relationship between citizen and state. It ignores the fact that polls and research show populism to be driven by a complex mix of economic concerns and deep-seated shifts in identity. The populist surge is not the result of temporarily bad economic conditions but a more structural change in identities – of a kind that poses a profound challenge to European integration.
Demand is certainly high for such an approach. In one survey citizens ranked direct public participation as the element of European democracy that is currently most absent from the Union.1 Asked which actors should gain most influence in EU decision-making, 70 per cent of respondents to one poll said citizens, far above support for any other actor gaining power.2
The case for a novel and citizen-oriented concept of EU democratic legitimacy has strong analytical grounding. Theorists concur that injecting more meaningful democracy into the Union will require deviation from the institutional forms of the nation state and must harness looser, cosmopolitan networks of participation.3 For a project that prides itself on having rethought the whole nature of interstate relations, the EU is disappointingly slow and reluctant to accept novel thinking on democracy and elite–citizen relations. In some ways, the Union is fiercely post-modern; in other ways, it is almost a throwback to nineteenth-century elitism.4
Simply replicating national-level politics a notch higher at the European level is not the right metric for an EU democracy. A prominent strand of new theoretical work suggests that democracy gains meaning not so much through its formal rules and rights as by being ‘performed’ in practice. Democracy is shaped by many continuous acts undertaken by a variety of different actors. This is relevant to the EU since such thinking questions the need for a single ‘people’ to be defined before democratic politics can function satisfactorily. A political community comes into being by ‘performing’ democracy in a regular and meaningful way.5 Calls for a Republican Europe are not fully on target because Europe needs more focus on a liberal as well as republican concept of citizenship – that is, rather than the republican emphasis on formal entitlements and identities, what is also required is a liberal concern with active, played-out citizenship.
With citizens recoiling from representative politics at the national level, fixing the EU democratic deficit cannot be simply a matter of granting national parliaments extra powers of scrutiny. Rather than a few additional parliamentary committees, the EU needs a whole new social contract that remoulds the relationship between citizens and the public sphere. Today’s populist surge is in essence about citizens’ desire to push back the boundaries of the prevailing status quo and encourage elites to explore hitherto uncontemplated and undefined changes.6 Contrary to much commentary, Brexit was not driven simply by the poor working class or a major rebellion against globalism as such, but was about non-metropolitan areas clamouring for a voice – with a similar trend seen in other member states.
Governments need to reconstitute the Union’s grand bargain, this time from the bottom up. The EU requires better ongoing and continually invoked mechanisms of accountability – to hold decision-makers to account on a regular basis, away from party and electoral politics. Accountability needs to be extended to a broader range of stakeholders and civic organisations beyond the formal vote, while being linked more specifically to the management of interdependence across borders. Trans-governmentalism must be accompanied and bolstered by trans-citizenism.
An often-quoted refrain says that ‘the EU must be big on the big things, small on the small things’. Many political leaders and policy documents – including the Rome declaration agreed at the March 2017 anniversary summit – have used this phrase in recent years, and the maxim is now widely accepted as a guideline for future integration. Yet it does not answer the crucial question of what precisely the ‘big things’ and ‘small things’ actually are in European integration. Politicians and officials sometimes use this expression in a way that suggests that power should be centralised to the EU level for important matters, and exercised at the local level for less important, almost residual, questions. However, there are many vital questions that need to be close to locally participative and vibrant decision-making. Surely, some of the things that ‘really matter’ are those that need to be kept open to local, popular accountability.
When many analysts call for more democratic debate and participation they betray their real intent by then suggesting that this debate should inexorably lead to support for deeper integration or conversely for less integration – democracy becomes a mere means to a predetermined end.7 For example, some say it is necessary to deepen economic union, and that securing this through a referendum in all states would give it the requisite legitimacy.8 Rather than any set of less standard forms of cooperation emerging organically, the end is preordained and then opened for verification.
More open-ended democratic regeneration must allow for the fact that deeper citizen engagement might not always bolster elites’ particular policy preferences. This is liberalism’s standard test: to restore credibility to the EU it will be necessary to offer more space to its doubters, malcontents and ambivalent hesitaters. Decentralisation, reimagined forms of representation and civic empowerment should not be seen as an anti-EU agenda. Quite the opposite: they offer a more oblique way of saving the integration project from itself – by ensuring that different populations still buy into a form of risk-sharing and solidarity, even after a crisis that has revealed a new multiplicity of varied perspectives.
The bottom-up route is vital because the EU is stalled by divergence on so many issues, but also because of underlying social and organisational shifts. The lingering elitism in federalist visions rubs uneasily against the sociological dispersal of power.9 The rise of individualism in social and political action makes activism more disruptive and citizens’ trust in big collectivities weaker. More fragmented social activism and political identities reinforce the case for a less monolithic institutional form of EU integration. The EU model has failed to keep pace with these underlying social and political changes. This helps explain why standard visions for deeper integration today seem to be plucked out of thin air, rather than being rooted in a theory of political change that is attuned to social realities.
Some theorists talk of a whole paradigm shift as loosely organised, grass-roots citizen movements have come to be the primary drivers of political, economic and societal change.10 These new forms of change and agency require us to revisit models of democracy beyond heavily institutional templates.11 Thicker participation and consensual deliberation lie at the heart of the much-cited notion of ‘liquid democracy’ – a concept that many believe captures the wave of active, participative initiatives seen across Europe in recent years.12 A whole body of literature has come to focus on and celebrate these kinds of incipient moves towards ‘post-representative politics’.13
Analytically, the focus has switched from the strict understanding of liberal democracy protecting individual rights to citizens gaining the capacity and effective independence to exert influence and hold decision-makers accountable.14 Some theorists argue that moves to relegitimise democracy must be built around these very loose forms of deliberation and localism, cutting across the traditional container of the nation state but also in resistance to centralised institutionalisation.15 Change, it is suggested, is most likely to be sustained through civic monitoring processes rather than through formal representational avenues on their own.16
In line with this, it must be acknowledged that the EU’s democracy problem is not just the sign of a temporary surge in Euroscepticism; it is also the result of a profound mismatch between new social mobilisation and citizens’ disengagement from standard representative channels. Without a balanced reconciliation of participative and representative dynamics, piecemeal moves towards deeper union risk simply solidifying the elitism that lies at the root of the EU crisis and that has gradually sapped democracy’s emancipatory spirit in the member states themselves. Thus, a reimagining of forms of representation within the process of integration is not only essential for legitimising transnational interdependence; it is a prerequisite for regenerating democracy per se. The need is actively to engage citizens and national governments through a combination of local participation and national democracy to influence the way that interdependence between nations is managed.
The local perspective is so necessary because it is rooted in actual economic and social trends. A powerful ethos of localism is emerging, and this is radically different from previous conceptions of local politics – it is not based on the old federalist-inspired ‘Europe of the regions’, but a grass-roots contestation of hierarchical forms of governance. This kind of localism today outstrips any sign of uniform Europeanisation. The EU has not grown into a single, homogeneously integrated market so much as into a cluster of interconnected islands surrounded by largely unlinked economic spaces. The picture is one of variegated interdependence, dominated by integration between metropolitan nuclei resembling city states. These clusters often have more links with similar communities on the other side of the continent than with small towns nearby in their own country. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that Europeans have increasingly sought a rootedness among local family and community connections.17
Crucially, these dynamics shed light on the appropriate concept of citizenship that is needed to underpin a reformed model of integration. Democratic citizenship across Europe needs to flow from what citizens actually do and how they act in trying to advance their interests, rather than – as at present – from formal citizenship rights included in EU treaties or new institutional arrangements that seem to have little tangible effect on people’s daily lives. What matters is whether citizens are beginning to organise and mobilise in a way that enacts a common democracy in practice, not whether the EU is more intergovernmental or federal at a macro-institutional level.
Initiatives and processes are needed to give concrete expression to a more dynamic form of multilevel citizenship. Debates about citizenship have tended to focus on the formal division of rights between the national and European levels, and the question of which level should have primacy. But the more urgent challenge is to make all levels of citizenship practically more active in the way that options for future integration are debated. The aim must be to ensure that the local, national and European levels of citizenship are better linked to each other, without any one prevailing over the others. EU reform should be based on getting democratic participation at the local level to inform debates at the European level, rather than beginning with an idealised notion of European citizenship that then sits uneasily with local concerns. To the extent that an alternative Europe will also need to rest on more active national-level participative forums, this would help ensure that patterns of European cooperation emerge out of active national citizenship, rather than subjugating it. The practical arrangements suggested in the next chapter attempt to embody these citizenship principles.
More broadly, electorates today are far more fluid than they were a generation ago. Individuals’ identities are not so rigidly determined by class, professional or corporatist groupings. Democracy is no longer based on or rooted in mass-membership bodies or firmly categorised labour sectors. The original European project was predicated on a core assumption about the way organised interests operate: very specific economic and social sectors would band together across borders and cooperate in pushing for integration because they saw common benefit in doing so. This was the social basis of the so-called neo-functionalist pattern of self-sustaining integration.
But national democracy works very differently today. Opinions are more disparate and the very specifically organised forms of interest-representation less dominant. The notion of a cohesive collective will has given way to a more disaggregated form of civic politics. Beyond all the different policy dimensions of the poly-crisis, the underlying structural predicament is this: the EU rests on a corporatist understanding of political development, in an era marked by the individualisation and atomisation of social organisation. The current model of EU integration is heavily predicated on a functional logic that no longer corresponds to the structure of social interests – and because of this, it no longer offers a realistic theory of political change. The search for ‘non-mediated’ politics should be an EU strength – as the Union lacks the standard channels of representative democracy – and yet has become its Achilles heel.
Notions of citizen-led change are also in tune with the times to the extent that they flow out of the growing influence of digital activism. Of course, it is well known that digital technology has begun to change the basic nature of political activity, as it offers multiple tools for online campaigning, petitioning and voting. While the changes injected by these forms of digital activism have been exhaustively analysed, however, they remain somewhat separate from mainstream debates about the EU. Today, digital tools or ‘civic tech’ give citizens vastly better organisational capacities and broaden the scope of participation. They allow more people to get involved in decision-making and to hold elites to account, while raising citizens’ expectations of how their politicians should be responding to popular demands. Such tools herald such far-reaching change to political activity that their influence clearly needs to be better incorporated into theories and models of European integration.
None of this is naively to posit that citizens can generate political change on their own. As in any process of political restructuring, EU reform will happen only if bottom-up and top-down efforts eventually interlock effectively. The need to combine direct and representative democracy is now well established; the key is to harness both these avenues to foster better-quality deliberation that goes beyond narrow self-regard. The disconnect between direct and representative democracy is a general problem, but is especially acute in the case of EU debates – within both national- and European-level political processes.
My point here is not that formal, national and EU institutional dynamics are unimportant, but that an autonomous impulse towards defining the reform agenda must also come from the civic sphere – instead of the civic sphere having to mould itself to parameters of change that are predefined at a higher, political level. The aim should categorically not be to supplant elite-level routes to reform, but rather to add a civic component better to complement the standard focus on summits, intergovernmental deals, legal changes, conventions, and the like. Participation is in no way a substitute for solid institutional powers, but rather a way of setting these on a firmer footing. The challenge is to get the conditions right for a benign use of participative and direct democracy, aligned with more open and responsive formal pathways to EU reform. Whatever flaws the use of direct democracy may have had to date – seen especially in ill-conceived referendums – this concept needs to be perfected, not surrendered and suffocated.
The grass-roots level cannot work miracles – and there is a risk today that some analysts and activists may be overly romanticising hyper-localism, seduced by the notion that harsh policy trade-offs can somehow be avoided. Yet it can and should play a primary and generative, not secondary and merely validating role in debates over the EU’s reinvention. The next chapter takes up the question of how the vital interlocking between the civic and political spheres might be facilitated.
One other point in parenthesis: while this book is concerned with the future of the EU, the basic spirit of such reflections could also be applied to post-exit Britain. It would hardly fulfil Leavers’ supposed mandate of having UK citizens ‘take back control’ if powers were simply transferred from one opaque, unresponsive power centre in Brussels to another in London – from one underperforming system of democracy to another. If the UK is serious about harnessing Brexit to revive democratic accountability and participation, then innovation will be needed in the way national democracy works in Britain. In the absence of such change, Brexit will hardly usher in a stronger UK democratic identity – indeed, it will simply empower national elites to the detriment of British citizens. This is for now a separate question from democratising the EU, of course, but it might be that in the future ways can be found to interlock democratic innovation in the ‘EU 27’ with similar reform in the UK.
An alternative Europe can and should harness today’s spirit of intense localism – not to replace, but to accompany and nourish other levels of political dynamics. Most of the interesting innovations and dynamism in democratic forms are currently occurring within local communities. Debates among democracy, human-rights and civil society experts and practitioners today invariably dwell on the paralysis of multilateral institutions and the consequent need to ‘go local’ in mapping out practical solutions.
The range of novel initiatives fostering citizen participation at a local level across Europe is impressive, embracing the wider use of referendums on community and neighbourhood matters; informal tools of consultation to help decide such issues; new forms of local voting; the spread of neighbourhood councils; and civic complaint mechanisms. The number of cooperatives and other initiatives based on the principle of mutualism has increased many times over during the last five years. Community shops, time-banking organisations, skill-swapping forums and other kinds of initiative involve increasingly dense collective networks mobilised around a spirit of solidarity-based civic participation and have expanded particularly in the Netherlands, Spain and the UK, as well as in other European states.18
A large number of participative initiatives have gained momentum at the level of city governance. Initiatives in places like Barcelona, Bologna, Helsinki, Paris and Madrid have made a discernible difference in germinating public involvement in very concrete day-to-day matters outside the channels of mainstream politics. Municipal participatory budgeting is also spreading dramatically. In Paris in 2016, the allocation of 100 million euros was decided by citizens, with 158,000 residents voting on the budget. Portugal is now offering such a mechanism on a national scale with the novel provision for citizens to vote through cashpoint machines.19 The Barcelona city council crowdsourced a whole collaborative economy plan in 2016. In March 2017, the G1000 initiative in Madrid gave 1,000 randomly selected citizens the chance to debate and advise on spending priorities for the city administration. Another initiative in Spain, ‘Municipalismo, Autogobierno y Kontrapoder’ (MAK2), aims to get local communities to hold town authorities to account and bolster ‘cross-border municipalism’ through Europe.
An especially thick network of civic associations has taken root in Denmark and other Nordic states, and this has deepened at a local level in recent years. The Dutch and Belgian parliaments are building several city-level participatory processes. In early 2017, the Civic Innovation Network and CitizenLab ran an online platform called ‘Openwall’ for people living in Brussels to vote on ways to improve the quality of life in the city. A Eurocities initiative and a Network of European Municipalities have both gained traction and momentum. Solidarity Cities is a network focused specifically on the issue of refugees.
Fundamental social and ideational changes drive these initiatives: the idea of a big, central state has lost legitimacy, but so has the belief in the free market. And many citizens say they are looking for solutions in localism, in citizen-led initiatives based around the notion of the ‘civic commons’ – initiatives that involve people sharing resources and mutual assistance outside formal policy-making structures, often even using informal means of bartering to move outside the currency turmoil of the euro crisis.20 The rise of at least some populist parties is part of this trend and should be interpreted as a call for more ‘contact democracy’, reflecting citizens’ desire to build on the already-incipient use of citizens’ juries, citizens’ assemblies and the like in countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Ireland.21
All this incipient localism comes with a striking silence, however. It offers great potential for political renewal; and yet it is for now largely disconnected from EU-level debates. The local initiatives and debates that have taken shape in the cauldron of the poly-crisis do not speak strongly to Europe-wide democratic regeneration – at least not yet. While not directly about the EU crisis, they are implicitly concerned with European developments to the extent that they have emerged to deal with the consequences of that crisis. But concerted efforts will be needed if local networks are to play a full role in a reset Europe.
Attend events like the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy to hear about all this exciting new action and one is struck by the contrast with the downbeat gatherings of EU experts these days – and also by the fact that those experts are completely absent from these forums, which are designed to inform attendees about local-level participation. This is the great paradox of the crisis: there is both a hollowing out of democracy at the EU and national levels and more intense civic empowerment at a local level – and yet the latter gets no look-in when leaders gather to discuss ‘the future of the EU’.
The activists and what some term ‘party-movements’ engaged at the local level have not yet signalled any strong interest in contributing new ideas on European integration. There are clear tensions between their municipal-level aims and existing EU structures and norms. Most municipal activism is an implied way of circumventing the failings of the EU model. Local activists and officials are generally pro-EU, and yet their whole narrative is about reclaiming powers for the local level from higher levels of authority. As yet, there are few effective connections between such localism and the democratic management of transnational interdependence. Some critics worry that a growing phenomenon of populist localism is inward-looking and unlikely to contribute to a healthy regeneration of European democracy.22
Social movements’ concerns have been very different from each other and invariably quite parochially focused on local economic problems and corruption scandals; the protests and broader movements that took shape in the wake of the economic crisis have reinforced the centrality of national-level political processes, rather than transcending these in the name of pan-European notions of democracy.23 Most citizen-based initiatives that have sprung up during the crisis are firmly rooted in specifically local debates. Crisis-induced social movements have often berated the EU as a problem rather than as a creative space for reimagining common European democracy.24 In Naples, a mayor closely linked to social-movement activists took power and resisted EU economic rules very directly.
While the trends in local participation and collective action are important, they can sometimes be overhyped. They are generally limited in scale and still far from having the dramatic, structural impact on macro-level economic and political systems that their supporters claim. While a rich set of participatory processes has spread in recent years – something that is often dubbed ‘the participative turn’ – it has had fairly small-scale impacts. Many citizen initiatives have gradually become diluted from the originally emancipatory concept of participative democracy. In their very recent forms they can involve much co-option, as people have input without much guarantee of having an effect on decision outputs.25 Radicals lament that local empowerment has so far been about individuals defending their own entitlements and not a genuinely progressive internationalism.26 Some initiatives overseen by committed activists have suffered from infighting and run up against opposition from the broader citizenry.
Much work remains to be done in fine-tuning democratic localism. Citizens’ assemblies have so far been used for single issues, for specified periods of time – one example being their role on abortion laws in Ireland. They need to be broadened so as to expose citizens to the need to contemplate trade-offs between different policy aims – the complex nub and essence of democratic politics. As one local democracy innovator in Barcelona admits, many participative mechanisms have been introduced across Europe, but citizens still need the capacity and awareness to take advantage fully of these within EU-related debates. The talk is now of an emerging phase of localism in which citizens are involved more proactively in setting political agendas rather than simply and somewhat passively being asked to vote or engage online on set questions relating to predetermined issues. The focus is also on ensuring that local votes are framed and used in such a way as to foster debate on common community goals rather than narrow individual interests.
There are pan-European networks and initiatives that link together formal city- and local-authority representatives. These tend to gather together people from big cities that are already internationalised and cosmopolitan, rather than involving the smaller towns and villages across Europe where the harder questions are being asked of the current EU model. One Eurocities representative admits that a link has not yet been made between city-level concerns and the future direction of European integration. And a Commission representative admits that EU officials have not yet sought to borrow from local-level participation techniques to enliven the Union’s decision-making processes.27
In sum, while trends in localism and the participative management of the ‘civic commons’ offer great potential for citizen empowerment, they still need to be plugged into debates about the future model of EU integration – through both nation-state and European-level processes. Nascent local-level initiatives must be harnessed to cascade upwards into a revitalised debate about the EU’s future. Civil society leaders now talk of the need to create a new ‘translocalism’ that would scale up links between highly localised forums. This translocalism must not be seen simply as a source of pro-EU support for existing integration policies, but will also need to reflect the more critical edge that has emerged in many localities across the continent.
The trend towards local citizen engagement and empowerment is a powerful one. For all the limitations of the community forums that have taken shape so far across Europe, something is changing at the local level and in the way society is organised. It is a serious omission that articles and think pieces on EU reform invariably fail to engage with or even show any awareness of these trends. Such democratic localism often appears to be unfolding in a parallel universe to debates about the future of European integration. The result is that there is much potential for democratic renewal being wasted.
Two counterarguments are now routinely made against this focus on citizen participation. While these raise valid warnings, neither makes a fully convincing case against a more democratic integration model.
Nativism. The first is that opening Europe to greater popular participation would amplify the influence of illiberal, Eurosceptic populists and risk killing off the whole EU ideal. There are rising concerns that the call to ‘bring the people back in’ is simply the disingenuous talk of destructive populism. Many in the EU today fear that more meaningful democratic responsiveness will simply open the doors to anti-European voices – and they suspect that many of those calling for a more democratic EU have this very aim in mind.
It is true that some recent trends shake one’s faith in democracy. European citizens either turn inwards with chauvinistic meanness of spirit or they watch passively while political and economic elites grasp even more greedily at the sinews of power. Recent years have seen a re-emergence of an old line of reasoning that defending liberalism – in its economic, political, social and international forms – requires that democracy be held at bay.
However, this does not mean that the liberal principles of the European project can be rescued by denying more meaningful democratic participation. While fears over what popular participation might produce are well grounded, they are based on an overly static understanding of democracy. Anti-EU populism has its very roots in the lack of citizen voice. It is in large measure because policy debates happen ‘elsewhere’ and beyond citizens’ influence that nativist identity politics fills the gap. Populism at least opens up the opportunity to politicise the EU.
We should not be so idealistic to suppose that an effective citizens’ democracy would magically turn every voter into an ardent liberal cosmopolitan. But neither should we forget that participative democracy is a process that moulds and remoulds citizens’ preferences and world views. Local democratic dynamics would certainly not dissolve all the tensions of the poly-crisis, and in some ways might raise additional challenges, but it is difficult to envisage a successful way forward today that does not cultivate a better sense of popular ownership over European integration – in the sense of both what it can achieve and where its limits lie.
There are well-grounded concerns that populists are antagonistic to pluralism and democratic compromise.28 More broadly, populists have in general eschewed any radically new thinking on European integration. Many populists in fact follow fairly mainstream positions on EU integration, beyond their two or three red-flag issues. They do not seem to make a connection between their domestic radicalism and the need for a concrete redesign of the integration model. European populist parties nominally hold a range of views on participative and direct democracy.29 Leftists now preach localism and conservatives support the Catholic-inspired doctrine of subsidiarity. They both still need to work through these community-centred principles to embellish more original ideas for Europe’s future.
While feckless populist leaders may enflame and stir opinion, citizens’ concerns are genuine – and not merely the result of misinformation or beguiling, charismatic leadership. Parties should not be dismissed as radical or extreme simply because they are critical of the EU. Some populist parties are exclusionary and feel empowered enough to resist cooperation with mainstream parties, while others impact politics mainly through entering into coalitions and through their organic links in civic networks; some are influential mainly through municipal politics rather than through any wholesale subversion of ‘the system’.30 Populists’ policy prescriptions might be simplistic and unachievable, but then surely so are many of those proposed by mainstream parties.
Referendums have certainly been misused and have delivered bruising shocks to the European project. Yet there is an important distinction between direct-democracy mechanisms that are generated by citizens and those deployed for self-serving purposes by elites. Encouragingly, today’s active citizenship is leading to more of the former. In this sense, there is incipient potential to deploy bottom-up direct democracy more productively. It can be used to enrich representative democracy and it can help set the direction for future political options in a way that makes it harder for special-interest groups to hijack decision-making.31
Some degree of balance is required. Reform must chart a course between populism and the self-assured rightness of the existing EU narrative. The challenge is to ensure that the democracy-enhancing potential that drives citizens’ turn against elites wins out over populists’ illiberalism. It will be to cultivate non-mediated participation without this leading to unbridled majoritarianism. Deeper citizen participation would not be populism’s victory but its antithesis: while populists lay claim to one single vision that supposedly represents the will of the true people, an alternative Europe needs to be based on a multiplicity of visions – precisely because it is fanciful to think that one notion of the European general will exists or can be concocted.
Market constraints. The second critique relates to political economy. Ceding more systematic democratic input would not remove the constraints on policy options that come with market and financial interdependence. Doubters insist that all the talk of citizen participation is largely window dressing insofar as the very structure of market-led globalism militates against any meaningful democratic choice and accountability. They assert that effective democratic control and market-financial integration cannot go hand in hand – and that an alternative Europe must clearly prioritise one of these to the detriment of the other.
It is certainly the case that a more democratic process of integration would not remove the constraints of interdependence or magic away the very difficult choices that governments and citizens face in wanting the benefits of both cooperation and control. Yet scope surely exists for citizens to have a greater say in setting the aims towards which markets are channelled. In some areas, they may wish to see markets tamed, while in others they may deem deeper economic interdependence beneficial. They may put the onus on other, non-economic areas of policy as the leading edge of pan-European cooperation. An alternative EU may need a different balance between open markets and local democracy.
The dilemma is not simply one of absolute trade-offs between democracy and the market. It is also a question of democratic ownership building a firmer support base for whatever forms and degrees of economic and financial integration come to be adopted. Citizens will still have to grapple with balancing the malign and the benign of transnational interdependencies. But if they are to take difficult choices to accept globalism and market disciplines they should at least feel some kind of ownership over these decisions; and conversely, if and when they prefer to curtail markets radically, theirs should be the responsibility of managing the consequences of this option. Democratic participation should not be about conjuring up unfeasible, false panaceas that ignore the harsh realities of Europe’s challenges, but about giving citizens more meaningful say in the way the EU deals with constraints, trade-offs and power imbalances.
It is often pointed out that the root of the EU’s malaise lies in Europe’s increasingly oligarchic set of social and economic structures. An alternative EU needs to address this imbalance above all else if it is to demonstrate that citizens’ voices matter; and that is why structural change to its proto-polity is needed and not merely a bit more fiscal leeway, more cross-border infrastructure spending or EU-branded job-creation schemes. Some may indeed think that the basic spirit of the European project can only be honoured by a pushback against market-led globalism. But, alongside this, the democratically crucial ingredient is that citizens are able more proactively to shape the mix of pro- and anti-market policies and that this mix is no longer presented to them as a predetermined given.
Defining the dilemma in these terms helps us to frame a particularly important aspect of the EU’s democracy problem – and to identify the criteria for a successful, democratic integration process. Today’s rising popular frustration does not result simply from a few institutional imperfections or policy inadequacies, but is a product of citizens’ rootless particularism and modernity’s thinning of recognisable collectivities. The challenge is to reconstruct community without illiberal excesses, through a kind of interdependent self-government or localist cosmopolitanism.
Democracy in today’s deeply interdependent economic and political spaces requires citizens to take into account the impact of their choices on citizens in other localities and states. Those affected by one state’s decisions should have some voice in that state’s democratic processes. Self-determination requires us to make ourselves heard in the decision-making processes of other states that affect our interests. This is what would constitute transnational self-determination. There needs to be strong national-level democratic legitimation; but national political processes themselves need to reflect the interests of EU citizens from other states that are affected by ‘our’ national decisions. This is what is required to reduce the sensation that European integration now consists of others controlling us, not of us having influence over our own choices or indeed those of others.32
Part of this must be about further developing the concept of demoicracy – the most influential and helpful adjustment to democratic ideas over the last decade. Demoicracy rightly focuses on the need to combine the formal democratic channels of national and European democracy in tandem with each other. Some of the concept’s foremost proponents have begun to focus on the need for a more concerted development of demoicracy’s bottom-up dynamics in the wake of the poly-crisis.33 If European solidarity is to be rebuilt it must be regenerated on the basis of citizens’ own voluntary will; pan-European solidarity must feel more genuinely desired and less imposed through opaque formalised rules and requirements. Mutual solidarity must be by choice. It needs to be the basis of a more flexible social contract among European citizens of many different nationalities and social identities.
But is such cross-border empathy really possible? Of course, sceptics would insist that, given the distrust and divergence that is now so pervasive, the idea of citizen-driven solidarity is simply an over-idealised contradiction in terms. The poly-crisis has undoubtedly sapped the ‘Europeanness’ of democratic debates and procedures. It has undercut the idea that citizens from different member states should have a reciprocal voice in each other’s affairs. A 2012 survey found that, in a long list of features describing the desired qualities of democracy, EU citizens put ‘responsiveness to other EU governments’ in last place.34 And a more recent project shows that in nearly all member states citizens express far less willingness to extend solidarity across borders than they did a decade ago. Citizens want ‘more Europe’ in the sense of expecting the EU to recognise and address their particular problems, but they are now less inclined to make concessions to reach common positions or make sacrifices in the name of citizens elsewhere in Europe.35
Given this, many proposals do indeed have an air of fantasy. Clearly, it is unrealistic to think that citizens will suddenly cease to think in terms of their own interests and express their democratic preferences in the name of some imagined collective European will. The poly-crisis casts doubt on the many writings claiming that voters already have a strongly embedded and unshakeable European conscience and outlook. Indeed, constructing an alternative EU should very much not be about simply stepping up highly instrumental attempts to engineer a model European citizen or a single European public space – ideas that have been on the policy agenda for many years, to little avail in terms of their practical resonance in the depths of the poly-crisis. The existing juridical principle of the European ‘citizen’ was supposed to be the foundation of a new transnational and distinctive form of democracy. It clearly has not worked.
However, the relevant aim and measure of democratic success is not that of an idealised European citizenship. Rather, it is for citizens to gain a better appreciation of how their own interests are affected by European-level externalities. The need is for a spirit of mutual recognition of communities’ different preferences and interests – not for diverse interests to be shoehorned into a common set of prescriptions. This might be expressed as a spirit of euro-civismo, a more flexible and open notion than that of engineering a supposedly common European identity. This could be defined as a general inclination to take the broader set of European contexts and challenges into account beyond one’s own narrow interests.
Integral to euro-civismo is the idea that citizens need the ability directly to debate what duties they are willing to bear as quid pro quos for EU citizenship rights – the lack of any such popular deliberation on this crucial balance between duties and rights is a startling lacuna after 60 years of integration, when it is such a fundamental premise for any well-worked notion of citizenship. None of this would imply the need to engineer any single ‘general will’, but rather denote a much thinner and democratically rooted version of Rousseau’s famous concept. Concrete reform options should be targeted towards this aim – a more realistic and achievable objective than breezy talk of pan-European identity and identikit citizenship.
A key concept here is that of externalities: the need to recognise that citizens’ choices have an impact on the interests of citizens from other member states, and that the interests of these citizens in turn are important to one’s own interests. Democratic input needs to be informed by such externalities. The key is to devise ways to encourage this kind of pragmatically rooted other-regarding behaviour. If they were given greater participation and the opportunity to put forward their opinions, citizens might be likely to take more rounded views than those that now underpin Europe’s ascendant populists. While the EU’s democratic legitimacy must be rooted in national and local political processes, the poly-crisis makes clear that these can themselves only be effective when they acknowledge the myriad connections that condition today’s European space.36
To an extent, some citizens may have begun to do this. Many Germans have realised that helping Greece is a way of protecting Germany’s own interests. Many Spaniards voted for a government that accepted austerity requirements as they realised that a stable Europe was vital for their own interests. It is not clear that citizens are really frustrated because they want an old sense of the nation state to regain control; rather, they more concretely despair at their lack of say and sway over EU affairs as individual citizens – citizens with very specific and local concerns not related to the abstract questions of a supposed ideal-type national identity.
This suggests that some – albeit shallow – foundations are in place upon which European societies can develop this fragile but crucial ingredient of mutual empathy. Member states could agree to any number of democratic reforms, but if these fail to foster greater empathy between citizens from very different parts of the continent, they will not get to the core of the EU’s current malaise. This is the key standard by which more democratic forums must be judged. Do they increase the likelihood that citizens will better understand and appreciate the positions of those elsewhere in Europe? This is not a question of citizens coming to agree on every aspect of EU policies, but of them at least beginning to empathise beyond their own national context. This is an exacting standard of measurement – but not beyond the realms of what is achievable within real-life acts of citizen engagement.
Vibrant social and political change is taking shape at the level of cities and local communities across Europe. These trends point towards a theory of EU change that flows with the current of contemporary social concerns, agency, organisational forms and power shifts – quite unlike the heavily idealised calls for elite-led deeper European integration. Yet it is important not to romanticise such civic initiatives. Successful processes of change will depend on the local, national and European levels linking together more tightly than they have to date. Bottom-up change should not be seen as a substitute for national-level democratic influence, good European leadership and formal institution-driven reform; rather, it must serve as a complement to elite-level rethinking and needs an effective interface with the latter.
Moreover, reformers will need to fashion forms of engagement that temper the risk of citizen influence generating disintegration, as opposed to a new integration. A healthy, alternative EU will need to build links between cosmopolitan and nativist factions, as neither of these will win out exclusively. It will need democratic ways to bridge the divide that currently dominates European politics: cosmopolitans deride localists as parochial and chauvinistic; localists deride cosmopolitans as elitist and out of touch. An alternative Europe needs to mediate this divide.
This must certainly not be about idealising citizens, especially at a moment when they seem to be making some surprising and disturbing choices. Indeed, quite the contrary: a deep-rooted democratisation of the EU is necessary precisely because differences and uncertainties are so profound today. At present, the formal EU vision of ‘increasing democratic consultation’ is shallow: it assumes that the EU gifts civic consultation to the people, and that citizens will then readily agree on new cooperation in line with the standard notion of centralised integration. In contrast, today participative processes are needed to manage ongoing difference and divergence, and in a way that gives fair hearing to fundamentally revised understandings of integration.
In this sense, the EU’s broadest challenge is to cultivate democratic accountability and legitimacy at several different levels: within national political processes; through local, citizen-centred democratic vibrancy; but also in the transnational management of interdependence between member states. No single level of democratic improvement will be enough on its own. The challenging question is whether these levels can be combined through an ethos of mutual empathy or euro-civismo. The next chapter suggests how these broad principles and conceptual yardsticks for a process of EU reform might be put into action.