European democracy is undergoing a metamorphosis, but its new shape is still highly uncertain. It is yet to find a fruitful form, says Niccolò Milanese (European Alternatives).
If it can be argued that democracy is itself as a regime is always changing and being reinvented, democracy in the European Union has been undergoing a distinctive process of change since at least 2008, when the EU was hit by the global financial crisis without a constitutional settlement to enable it to adequately respond. Unable to robustly coordinate policy responses across either the single market or eurozone in a way that would justly and fairly shield European populations from the effects of the crisis, let alone intervene in the global frame to change the dangerous dynamics of financialised capitalism, the EU as a whole, and its member states individually, have been scrambling to find solutions to almost every political issue that has arrived since this period, whether the topic is migrants, technology, military aggression, climate change, terrorism or authoritarianism.
Where the European Union has fuller competence (eg. data privacy) there may have been more success than areas where it has more limited competence (eg. migration, social or foreign policies), and where the most powerful states were able to instrumentalise Europe’s democratic deficit for their own ends it had temporarily some robust if unjust and shortsighted policies (eg. the policy of austerity in favour of German and French banks during the Greek debt crisis). Still, two general assessments are worth emphasising: firstly, the EU as a whole has always been behind the curve, reacting rather than shaping the agenda; but secondly, the problems that have presented themselves during this period are quite obviously at the least ‘European’ in scope and content, such that no-one could seriously maintain that the institutions of the EU are irrelevant actors to deal with them, whether one approves of its individual decisions or not. The EU has become consistently front-page news across the continent, and the inadequacies of its current modes of making decisions, of agenda setting and of 37 coordination are all the more publicly apparent. With the prospect of treaty change endlessly postponed until conditions are more favourable (if that is ever the case), the strategic question therefore became how to approach the radically unfinished nature of the European project.
From the mask of technocracy to incipient politics?
Political parties have their well-established repertoires for providing a vision of the future, and elections are central to them. Going into the European elections in 2019, various visions for the future of the EU could be discerned: the far-right attempt to build a nationalist international that would promote a ‘Europe of Nations’; the liberal Macron-inspired vision of a more deeply integrated Europe, with a strategic sovereignty, in a global marketplace; a green vision of the EU as the level of governance best able to lead on combatting climate change; and the attempts of the EU status quo of the Christian Democrats and Socialists to coopt different elements of these demands, mix them with different degrees of tradition or social policies, and maintain their overall hegemony.
Following the elections, the overall pictures is that no one won in this face-off: the new Parliament is fragmented, with a higher Green, Liberal and far-right contingent than before, and no grand-coalition majority. Is the new European democracy one of unclear majorities risking paralysis, and backroom deals being the only way to get things done? Is it one of European ‘fudge’, which mixes elements of different visions, risking that none of them are well enough defined to move the European Union forward? Does it continue to be one where member states use veto power to wreck agreements for short-term domestic reasons? The process of nominating and ratifying the new European Commission since the elections suggests all of these tendencies are present. None of these futures is appealing, although each of them probably means the end to the technocracy that dominated the previous epoch of European decision-making, and which was enabled by the EPP-PES grand coalition. As a result, European politics is now decidedly political, but the question is if this politics is sterile or productive.
The formalised dimensions of European politics – institutions, elections, summits and so on – are, of course, at best only half of the picture of democracy: the other and much more historically-decisive part involves the customs, habits, cultures, ideas and behaviours of the people. If financialisation, debt, precarity and the weaponisation of new technologies all risk poisoning the democratic culture of Europeans, the collective memory of resistance and invention is still alive. It exists in acts of rebellion and humour, kindness, outrage and welcome that still regularly fill public squares across the continent, in the rich civil society and NGO scene, and in cultural institutions. This living memory appears to be renewing itself across generations. The relationship between this lively civic invention and the formalised procedures of European democracy is yet to find a fruitful form. The bureaucracy of the institutions, like most state actors, tends to render such movements vapid even when it sincerely tries to welcome them, and, at worst, the European Union has ignored and frustrated these movements where most is at stake, in places like Ukraine or North Macedonia. Even what momentum came out of the European elections, with its uptick in turnout and general sense of having held the far-right at bay, has been quickly squandered by the imagination-deficient European political elite.
The lesson that needs to be learnt by the leaders of the EU is the one they are most unlikely to hear: that those who conceive of themselves as masters of the law have a legitimacy problem which they are powerless to solve, and yet in the resolution of which they have their responsibility. A lesson for the rest of us is perhaps as follows: 1968 and 1989 are shorthand for monumental changes in the cultural norms, social practices and geographies of Europe, but they may represent less political transformation than we once believed. Through the current metamorphosis we must act in continuity with these historic movements, but resolutely for a new form of European democracy which can be responsive to transformational energies and ideas coming from the living fabric of the society. We should work and struggle so that Europe’s democracy will continue to metamorphosise, for if we fall asleep now and allow it to take a new monstrous form when we awake, we may find this was the last stage of Europe’s living history and it is too late.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Brexit blog, nor the LSE. “The future of European democracy” series is part of an on-going collaboration between the Visions of Europe project at the London School of Economics and the Europe’s Futures programme at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. Image: Public Domain.
A very interesting article. Thank you!
The eu is a sham democracy; the eu parliament, its only democratic assembly, powerless, exemplified by the impotent 2019 parliamentary resolution carried by a 72% majority calling for Secretary General Selmayr’s resignation; ignored.
There are presently three working alternatives, available for the eu to study, of outsize government: China, India and the U.S.A.
Let us dismiss, immediately, the egregious Chinese model, a brutal authoritarian dictatorship now responsible for bringing the entire global economy to a halt through its manifest incompetence.
Let us also dismiss India, still one of the most corrupt political systems on the face of the earth.
That leaves the United States. If European nations are unwilling to contemplate a U.S. style federation, in quick time, and they are manifestly not prepared so to do, witness the migration crisis, Covid 19, responses, then it is clear that there is no real appetite for political union; if not now, when? That throws into doubt the utility and practicality of the Euro.
So the real question must surely be:
If European democracy will never find a fruitful form, and it most certainly will not, then, given the previous success, and continent wide popularity, of the EEC, what is the point of the eu?
Politics in the West, especially in the EU and UK, is that of the kindergarten. The essay here is a good summing up, but apart from patience combined with common sense observation, there is not much to be done except to let the energies and forces unleashed by the inexorable developments in Europe, and the world at large, do their work. Of course there are shortcuts, but that is a matter for the demo, as the perceptions and the mindset of the people making up the peoples in Europe, notably EU members and the UK, need to come into the presence of the here and now.
Though there is growing opposition to the EU federalisation project, this opposition is diverse and, more to the point, much of this opposition is in fact informed, funded and sustained by the diverse interests working for and on behalf of the one world order globalisation cabal of which the EU project is an irrevocable major element. If Europe cannot be turned into a coagulation of fiefdoms as a fully owned and franked franchise of the one world order effort than the rest of the world will never fail to be infected and re-infected with the European democracy virus.
If history teaches anything, other than that we never learn our lessons, it shows the cyclical nature and the constant flux of events. The semi-comatose benign paternalistic consumerist welfare statist state of affairs which evolved in the free part of Europe in various ways was never going to last without the peoples making the effort to become consciously self-sovereign.
All in all, there is a tension between opposing forces, one of which is the active powers in total politics and the other of which is the latent powers of the electorates. Without struggle, nothing happens. Nothing happening is no option in this world, except if we attain the inner peace and equipoise of the supreme meditator. We know the outcome. Totalitarian rule, dictatorship, oppressive regimes, slavery, feudalism and so on all have a use by date after which they collapse and the struggle starts anew. Europe is at a crossroads. The logical and only choice is to take the development of participatory democracy to the next level or sink to the level of natural regression, a kind of Mad Max situation in which local mafias enforce law and order for a competing number of overlordships. In fact, this is what we have now, but the people still feel bound to follow the rules and submit to the laws and regulations made and interpreted by the current concoction of elites.