The Transformation of Democracy and the Future of Europe
The utility of Europe in an ever more globalized economy and an increasingly unstable world is self-evident but problematic. In reality, Europe is a project that has yet to find a political form adequate to its ambitions and to the expectations of the citizens of its various member states. For this reason, it has become commonplace, in the last ten years, to denounce the deficit in legitimacy that is supposed to characterize the functioning of European institutions and to call for their “democratization.” Hesitation and impatience have combined, in this atmosphere, to increase the number of skeptics at precisely the moment that the extraordinary revolution involved in the institution of a common currency took place.
One cannot simply brush aside these fears, anxieties, and objections of the skeptics, as if an imperious historical necessity allowed one to save oneself the trouble of introspection and reflection. But at the same time, one must understand that the fear and impatience characterize a more general stage in the life of our societies. The feeling of powerlessness among citizens and ever more difficulty in believing that the world is intentionally governed—that is, apprehension before a decline of the political—are not simply features of the project of European construction. They are part of much larger mutations relating both to the process of globalization beyond Europe and to transformations internal to each individual society. The same observation applies to the fears, so often expressed, that the increasing power of the media is progressively falsifying democracy and that the growing presence of legal and market forces, along with the multiplication at all levels of unelected regulatory authorities, has insidiously undermined the sovereignty of the people.
1. The Four Mutations of Modern Democracies
The so-called democratic deficit in Europe is, in fact, only one symptom among others of an inner transformation in the history of democracy. Independent of European construction, the life and forms of democracy are being revolutionized. One can even say that, in large part, the notion of a “democratic deficit” in Europe is the consequence of the phenomenon rather than its cause. The problem is posed in just the same way when facing the disruptions following from the globalization of the economy. Economists have usefully advanced our understanding of the question by emphasizing that the difficulties attributed to globalization have been primarily due to a third industrial revolution, that the problems are caused by the emergence of a new mode of production rather than by a simple geographical extension of the old system. Similarly, European construction does not simply raise the question of the extension of democracy to the European level. Rather, it implicates the future of the very life of modern democracy. I therefore consider the potential forms of Europe in the making by clarifying the terms in which the contemporary transformation of democracy may be understood. These contemporary mutations of democracy are taking place at four levels. The first of these is a differentiation of the political; the second, a “pluralization” of the agents of the political; the third, a dissemination of the political; the fourth, finally, an increasing secularization of the political.
The Two Functions of the Political
The differentiation of the political, first of all, is occurring thanks to the growing distinction between two essential functions: institution and regulation. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s language, one would say that the two great functions are sovereignty and government; in the older language of the seventeenth century, politics and justice. In the modern nation-state, these two functions of institution and regulation have been superimposed on one another. Today, regulation has largely overflowed the field of the nation-state, whether one considers the growing role of law, the new prominence of the market, or the more important place taken up by supra- or inter-state authorities (the World Trade Organization is an obvious example).
In the meantime, the function of social institution, which remains the heart of democratic life, has been weakened by the crisis in the welfare state (for democracy does not simply consist in establishing a community of sentiment but also constitutes a community of redistribution). Today, the growing differentiation of the functions of the political is a result of the fact that the two functions no longer overlap, and that, at the very moment of this uncoupling, democratic life, essentially linked to the work of institution, suddenly finds itself atrophied. Furthermore, this differentiation between the regulatory and the institutional functions occurs very largely at the level of agents, where it is identical with the difference between civil society and the nation. Civil society is the space of regulation, while the nation is the space of institution. So it is also the emancipation and rising power of civil society that produces the current feeling of a decline in the political. These remarks, as a matter of fact, point to the continued importance of the debate about the relationship between “the liberty of the ancients” and the “liberty of the moderns” that has been repeated again and again over two centuries.1 But the differentiation of the political does not just push these two great functions further apart. It also affects the transformation of the way in which democratic sovereignty is exercised.
Historically, democratic sovereignty was built up around the electoral procedure as the central mechanism of legitimation and control. But at the same time history makes clear that the life of democracy has never been reducible to the electoral moment alone. Albert Hirschman has explained very cogently that it is necessary to view the relationship to institutions in the larger framework of a complex economy of forms of adhesion or suspicion, and suggests a distinction between the three modalities of social expression: exit, voice, and loyalty.2 Analyzed within this framework, the classical democratic moment could be considered as the moment of loyalty. The introduction of universal suffrage, for a period, led democracies to identify citizen intervention with this procedure of legitimation. But voice—protest, critique, the expression of opinions—or exit—that is to say, defection—are also modalities of participation. And they play an ever greater role in a society that is doubly opened up by the expansion of the public sphere and of new possibilities of interaction. The differentiation of the political today, then, follows from the fact that more and more modes of representation, types of supervision, procedures of monitoring, and manners of the expression of preferences are becoming available and distinguishing themselves from one another. Paradoxically, democracy thus seems to be diluted precisely because the possibilities of relating to institutions and one another are multiplying.
The juridification of politics has to be analyzed in this way, too. The possible mechanisms for guaranteeing political responsibility have been extended. People now demand in the courtroom what they could not always get through the ballot box. There is a modification of the terms in which what one might call a “democracy of allegation” elaborates its forms and its institutions. None of this is really new. In France, since the time of the Revolution, men like Jacques-Pierre Brissot or the Marquis de Condorcet have conceptualized the exercise of sovereignty not simply as the exercise of suffrage but also as popular monitoring or control by opinion. Today, however, a moment has been reached at which the double differentiation of the functions and forms of the exercise of sovereignty implies an alteration of the institutions themselves. Up to now, this difference in functions and procedures in the exercise of sovereignty could accommodate itself to existing institutions. But no longer.
From the Particular to the General
The second great transformation through which our democracies are living can be characterized as the “pluralization” of the agents of the political. The classic agent of the political is the citizen. The citizen is the person who represents the general interest of society. The man of needs is the man of particularity, unlike the citizen representing generality. This vision of the citizen lies at the heart of the classic definitions as forged by Rousseau as well as the Abbé Sieyès. Generality can lead to a representation of society as a unified will because it is based on the possibility of abstracting from particular men.
One of the most important transformations in our societies resides in the fact that the “mode of production” of generality has been transformed. Traditional regimes of generality were conceived in a unitary and aggregative sense, compatible with Rousseau’s thought, while present-day generality more often has to be understood as rooted in the partial parallelism of singularities. The narrative identities of today, for example, differ from the classical social identities of “position,” and allow at best only a rapprochement of trajectories. Contemporary generality proceeds by means of successive approximations and can no longer derive from a unified view of society. From now on, generality means that the category “people” cannot exist immediately in its universality as a globally representable phenomenon, but is intelligible only as the result of the aggregation and the overlapping of particularities. What makes it most possible to approach generality, Sieyès said, is to distinguish more and more what separates the abstract citizen from the concrete man of needs. Today, then, one might say that what allows for generality is not separating and taking distance from the man of needs, but the survey of all the ways his needs might overlap with those of other men. It is in this direction, or so it seems, that one can grasp the deep meaning of multiculturalism in today’s society. It does not merely stem from some denial of generality simply in order to further particularity; it also corresponds to an unprecedented recomposition of particularities and, thus, the kind of generality that they permit.
This new connection between particularity and generality means that nobody owns the people: the people is simply a function of its different figurations over time, the succession of its inevitably partial representations. The people are at once a function of time and of experience. This formulation is markedly different, quite obviously, from the one Rousseau could give of the people and the general will. This transformation of the availability of generality in different societies likewise corresponds to a differentiation of the forms of representation. Alongside a basically procedural representation (that is to say, representation through the electoral mechanisms), there are new forms of representation developing today. Some of these could be called functional (arising, for example, in procedures of expertise, since representation is a process of knowledge and not just a mechanism of delegation). Others could even be called moral (as when charities are considered representative of a problem, or a population is imagined in a similar way thanks to the very fact of their concern with it). This diffraction of representation has the consequence of multiplying the agents of the political and changing our vision of the separation between civil and political society. Civil society, in its multiplicity, becomes one of the possible faces of political society; it is not simply the site of private life or the locus of particularity. Large consequences follow, in fact, for the demands of this civil society on the political order, as well as at the level of a certain number of European institutions.
Which Emancipation?
The third development characterizing present-day democracies is the dissemination of the political; emancipatory purposes are becoming more undifferentiated. What is the definition of emancipation in the modern world? It is a twofold one: emancipation can mean individual autonomy or it can mean collective power. John Locke gave the definition of emancipation as autonomy. The purpose of emancipation in this perspective is the construction of an individual ever more independent of others. But the other, Rousseauean, vision of emancipation is to make everyone stronger through their participation in the collective. The history of modernity has unfolded as a process of competition and permanent conflict between these two approaches. The tension between emancipation as individual autonomy and emancipation as collective power is equivalent quite simply to the breach between liberalism and democracy (the one representing the moment of personal autonomy, the other expressing the moment of group empowerment). It is redoubled in the distinction between law and politics (with law the key vector of emancipation interpreted as the assurance of autonomy, and politics the key vector of emancipation understood as the empowerment of society). Today, however, a unification of the registers of emancipation is taking place. Individual and collective emancipation, autonomy and social power, increasingly overlap, one might say. There is now one sole register of mastery that runs from personal self-respect through the sovereignty of the people. A porous language and porous practices of mastery in the world are united, so that neither individual nor social empowerment is thinkable apart from the other.
At the same time, however, as the dissemination of the political implies a growing lack of differentiation between the tools of personal and social emancipation, domestic and foreign policy also increasingly overlap without distinction. Today, the very term “foreign policy” no longer carries the meaning it had just two decades ago, in the untroubled possibility it allowed for contrast with national politics. It once presupposed the specificity of forms, purposes, and methods as well as of a difference in field. In each of these aspects, the differentiation between national and foreign is less perceptible. There is a general economy of sovereignty that features a continuum in areas like protection, integrity, and identity. Security problems, for example, are more and more inextricably domestic and foreign (while Hobbes’s entire theoretical problematic was founded on this latter distinction). But the contrast between domestic and foreign politics did not simply depend on a difference of purposes between the two realms; it also involved one of method. While national politics could be understood as a space of publicity and deliberation, foreign politics was defined by the reign of secrecy and decisionism. The national and foreign worlds were also very strongly dissociated from one another, too, in the ways that they constructed authority, allowed intervention, and countenanced debate. But now these differences and boundaries have vanished.
The Meaning of Political Will
The fourth great transformation perceptible in our democracies is the growing secularization of the political, reflecting that fact that we are living through the end of a democracy based on the will. The superseded democracy of the will presupposed that social life could be acted out and transformed from a central point. The very history of political theory has followed, in a sense, the transformations of the perception of this “theater of the will.” Political theory, for example, has recently begun to emphasize the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary politics, making clear that if the first sometimes seemed to be relegated to everyday housekeeping, the theatrical dimension of the will could sometimes return in the heat of exceptional circumstances.3 Whether such extraordinary times were those of foundings or refoundings, or whether they were full-fledged revolutions, they were once perceived as essential moments of reinvigoration that allowed politics to be relived as a theater of the will. The felt decline of politics, from this perspective, has to be placed in the perspective of such “cycles.” But it also corresponds, more profoundly, to a “disenchantment of the will.”
The very belief that there exists a “general will,” the veritable deus ex machina of democracy, is cast into doubt today, and more and more people accept the reality, more modest and actually more coherent, of the interior dynamics of society. It is better understood that the general will cannot be seen as a “generality” that would be imposed on the life of individuals, and that it could have a real sense only if redefined as the “truth” of social interactions. Such is the lesson of the social sciences, one spread to such an extent that it has forced the retreat of “magical” visions of the political. The social sciences, in fact, make clear that the reality of the general will is to be found not in the attempt to declare or stage it, but rather as the product of compromises, choices made among rival options, and preferences of a complex civil society. (The role of politics in this perspective is to clarify them, to render them more explicit so that they can be modified).
It is impossible, then, to understand the contemporary world if one contents oneself with deploring the existence of a “deficit” of the will that simply continues to mount. Put otherwise, the growth of the self-organizing capacity of civil society stands out as the truly remarkable phenomenon. A complex system of interests and wills has substituted for the former ideal type of the political will, a model that presupposed a unified agent. What results is a much more disseminated and differentiated type of economic and social regulation. The regulation has not disappeared, but it has lost its comprehensive scope and, above all, its legibility.
2. Europe and the Nations: A Poorly Constructed Debate
If I evoke these different aspects of the contemporary transformation of democracy, however rapidly, it is because they allow an understanding of the direction in which and conditions under which one can reasonably expect the construction of democracy in Europe to occur. One must note at the outset that it is not to be imagined as a kind of restoration, or as a transposition or a recombination of traditional forms of democracy.
It cannot occur, first, in the direction of a restoration: it is impossible to hope for the reconstruction, at the level of Europe as a whole, the forms of the will that seem to have deserted each of its member states. The former French prime minister Lionel Jospin remarked, not long before his 2002 defeat: “To be a socialist is to be a voluntarist.” But does the impossibility of reanimating the theater of the will in each of the nations make plausible its restoration at another, European level? I am most skeptical on this point. The challenge, in fact, is to pass from a conception of the will as production of volition to a notion more like the production of legibility. The point is not to restore the old utopia (always an illusion) in a new framework. One must avoid, therefore, the hope for impossible restorations: there is no way to find anew at the European level the forms of sovereignty that have been painfully lost nearby. It is a matter, rather, in both realms, of substituting for a “metaphysical” with an instrumental conception of sovereignty.
If it is past time to reason about Europe from within a framework of “democratic restoration,” however, it is equally impossible to think of Europe as the forum of “transposition.” This is precisely the limitation of the notion of cosmopolitan democracy, whose champions propose to reproduce the forms of the nation-state and representative democracy at a higher level—even, for example, at the global level. This vision of a cosmopolitan democracy that has nourished a whole sector of the discussion in political thought for a decade, around works like those of Jürgen Habermas or David Held, commit the capital mistake, in my opinion, of implicitly believing that the “dysfunction” of contemporary representative democracy is the fault simply of the framework of its exercise, and not of its very forms.4
Finally, what one could call “improbable recombinations” also seem to me to be blind alleys. I mean by this phrase all those who bet on the development of a new type of civil society that could finally substitute for the world of politics. On this front one finds the naïve representatives of NGOs—leftists who have reinvented themselves as humanitarians—and the executives of multinational corporations, all of whom commune together today in a touching defense of an international civil society. The utopias of the ones, alas, are hardly different from the hypocrisies of the others. And so there is to be found today a whole dubious apology of “governance,” as the new name of a government that would suffice for everything, that could replace politics by widely disseminated techniques of management, leaving room for one sole actor on the scene: international society, uniting under the same banner the champions of the market and the prophets of law.
If the descriptions of the transformations of contemporary democracy that I offered as well as these words of caution about the contending supranational visions are of any use, it is because they lead to reflection on Europe in terms that will avoid the errors of simple transposition. A British historian, Larry Siedentop, recently published an interesting work entitled Democracy in Europe. One of his chapters is entitled: “Where Are Our Madisons?”5 And it is true that Europe has no Madison, and no Sieyès either. But the problem is that this author presupposed that Europe is today in the same situation American democracy faced two centuries ago. Yet it is not in such terms, in my opinion, that one should think. The term of federalism is illuminating in this regard. Different federalized experiences have all been particular, and (unlike the state) there is no single “model” of federalism that political science could describe and that is simply waiting to be applied. The common call for a federalist perspective is therefore misleading, and says nothing precise: it simply indicates the existence of a problem to which no one yet possesses the solution.
The question to consider today is the extent to which Europe could play a role between nation and globalization. For the desiderata today are a restored nation and a regulated globalization. What can Europe accomplish in this regard? One must begin by observing that European construction is inseparable from a refoundation of nations and from a construction of international regulation. Europe cannot be the substitute for the undoing of nations and the impotence of globalization. In this sense, Europe is not a sort of “middle term” between these two defeats, paradoxically enacting their simultaneous resolution. Why not?
The first reason is that there is no European demos in the offing. What defines the nation is a community of redistribution, based on a “solidarity of citizenship.” That solidarity differs greatly from a simple “solidarity of humanity,” one aimed not at limiting inequality, but rather at guaranteeing that the peoples of the world are not made victims of hunger, war, or genocide. The latter involves a comparatively minimal debt. It is not the creation of a life in common, but simply the defense of life as such. If one places the solidarity of humanity and the solidarity of citizenship on a continuum, where, one might ask, do European institutions fall between them? In quantitative terms, the response is simple. Social redistribution by European institutions represents 1.27 percent of the gross European income. The implication is that the whole of the European machinery does not generate a solidarity of standards of living. Undoubtedly, it puts in place undeniable mechanisms of redistribution (notably in the agricultural realm). But they remain limited and are reduced rather than expanded by the dynamics of enlargement, as the perspective of the reform of agricultural policy illustrates very well. For this reason, the construction of Europe cannot substitute for the refoundation of nations. For the central question of the refoundation of nations is precisely that of the consolidation of the world’s welfare states. Where the welfare state wanes, the nation itself vacillates. And one sees today that secessionist movements, where they are taking place in Europe, are very often grounded in the refusal to share a common welfare state. The most classical example is that of the tension between the Flemish and the Walloons, who no longer want a common social security plan. The refusal leads expectably to the destruction of the nation. It is for this same reason that there is no European demos. European construction does not allow Europe, then, to save itself the trouble of refounding its nations. At the same time, Europe cannot do without a more effective regulation of the international economy.
If one acknowledges that the double task today is the refoundation of nations and the organization of a better international economic regulation, what is the place that Europe could take up in the enterprise? It is one both simple and decisive. It amounts to the creation of a new space in which a limited but important experiment with universality can take form. Consider a debatable but potentially illuminating analogy. What was the supreme concept at the time that the horizon of empire, at the end of the Middle Ages, began to disappear? It was to create spaces that permitted limited experiments with the universal. It could no longer practically be lived out within Christianity, nor within the empire. It thus had to be “incarnated” in the then unprecedented and unique space of the nation-state.
The experience of the nation-state is that of a universal in miniature. It does not correspond simply to a sharing by the similar in the optic of “identity.” I believe that in its own manner, the construction of Europe today must once again attempt to realize a certain form of universality in miniature, a universality of legal and economic regulation that global regulation cannot attain. This means, then, that if one takes seriously the differentiation of the functions of the political that I indicated before, European construction ought to be considered solely from the point of view of regulation and not from the point of view of the institution of the social. The question of institution remains that of nations (so long, in any case, as there is no European demos). In return, however, there is an essential historical task that such an exclusively regulatory project must face. Confronted with the constitution of new empires that demand a regression to archaic forms of domination or impoverished forms of cultural homogeneity, Europe’s role could be to put into practice an alternative modality of new, if limited, universality.
The great question posed from this perspective is whether there will be other equivalents of Europe, understood in the sense just outlined, in tomorrow’s world. European construction cannot be developed further without posing this question. The answer is decisive for contemplating European enlargement. It makes no sense, in a way, to pursue this course without first inquiring into the existence of other Europeanizing projects at work in the world. Indeed, the future of the whole world might turn out be the choice between Europe and empire! It is necessary, then, to theorize the possible multiplication of Europe—and if one does not do so, then one has not theorized Europe itself.
A Constitution or a Charter for Europe?
The last question to examine is whether Europe should have a constitution or a charter. I would like to show why the notion of a charter is different from that of a constitution, and to say why, in my opinion, a charter is the document that could provide the right framework for the continent.
A constitution’s goal is to organize a demos in a closed space on the basis of a well-defined architecture of public powers. A charter, in contrast, aims at organizing diversity in an open space by affirming regulatory principles and envisaging regulatory institutions. The differences between them, then, are of two orders. The first is that the logic of a constitution involves the erection of institutions, while the logic of a charter is the expression of regulatory principles. What organizes a charter is law; what a constitution puts in place are public powers. But there is a second great difference, very palpable in the European case: a constitution defines a restricted space, a full space, while a charter can embrace an open field. For this reason, when the United Nations outlined its principles, it did so in the form of a charter and not a constitution. For similar reasons, there can be no constitution on the world level: it would be a contradiction in terms.
It is impossible to reflect on the forms of a future Europe without posing the question of its frontiers. I have tried to suggest as much already in imagining a multiplicity of such entities in the world. Nevertheless, the enlargement of its frontiers is evidently Europe’s most immediate problem. It can happen only within the framework of a charter. Europe must become a political form under the guidance of an open charter and not through the imposition of a closed constitution. What consequences could such a choice have on the forms of life of the European democracies? For it is no simple matter to pass from an interrelation of governments to democratic institutions. The criticisms leveled at Europe today are, at bottom, criticisms that attack Europe’s democratic deficit as a result of the intergovernmental nature of its procedures and institutions. Europe, it is charged, floats between the technocratic and the democratic. The destructive equivocation, it is often insisted, has to be left behind by “parliamentarizing” it (that is to say, by erecting a legislature chosen on a European basis, election of an executive figure, and so forth).
But it seems to me that things have to be approached differently, beginning from the functions and forms of sovereignty today, and not from institutions, if Europe’s future is to be correctly defined. Europe has no chance of living up to the expectations of its citizens unless it becomes one of the laboratories of contemporary democracy—allowing itself to give new forms to deliberation, to representation, to regulation, to authority, to publicity. Rather than considering the development of “European representative government,” it is necessary to ask how original forms of deliberation, representation, regulation, accountability, and publicity might develop in the European space.
Take the case of deliberation, for example. Is the problem simply that of how to modify the enumerated powers of the European Parliament? I do not think so. In any case, it is not the sole problem; there is also the need to find a kind of deliberation that can bring the societies themselves together. It is, in this regard, closely related to the development of a common European public realm. The effort Europe must undertake is to become a living public arena, and not to rationalize a conventional parliamentary space. In the same way, the questions of representation today imply the search for modalities for the intervention of civil society in the political process. And one should not forget that, for twenty years, the United Nations has organized the participation of NGOs at their large conferences (as is well known, a resolution of the Economic and Social Council institutionalized such participation).
If one wished to consider matters in Europe in this way today, an essential objective would be to transform the nature and function of the European Economic and Social Committee sited in Brussels (which, for the moment, is restricted to a consultative role). The EESC could become a space of representation and of the intervention of organized civil society. In the same fashion, if one looks at the modalities of the division of functions, is the goal that the European Commission will simply become more and more like an executive authority, in the classical sense of the term, or is it rather for it to become an agent of applying, coordinating, and arbitrating a whole ensemble of regulatory procedures? If one considers for example the agencies of the regulation of telecommunications, or else the role played by commissioners charged with international commercial negotiations, they ought to be understood—and to act—more as strong agencies of regulations rather than as parts of a weak government. Similarly, one of the great challenges for modern democracies is to remedy the weakness of publicity, to put an end to the rule of secrecy. Europe, in this domain too, could make itself a space of experimentation.
It is for all of these reasons that we must learn to think of European construction as the development of a new age of democracy and not simply the project reproducing, on a different scale, the inherited democracy whose sails have lost their wind, and left everyone today, wherever they are in the world, with the same problem.