In the popular imagination, liberal democracy is closely (if not exclusively) associated with the counting of numbers, whether they are votes in elections at various levels, or decisions in a multitude of representative bodies or, thanks to the invention of survey research, the repeated publication of the approval ratings of incumbent rulers or their opponents. These events and the uncertainty surrounding their outcomes provide much of the drama that attracts the attention of so many citizens and contributes to the legitimacy of those chosen to rule. No motto better captures its spirit than ‘One man, one vote’ (subsequently and belatedly converted into ‘One man/woman, one vote/opinion’).
This poses a serious problem to any effort to democratise an eventual Euro-polity. The great difference in size of its member states, combined with very long-standing processes of identity formation, makes such a reliance on sheer numbers a hazardous enterprise. It could easily be interpreted as a barely disguised effort to institutionalise a regional empire dominated by one or two of its largest units.
Fortunately, the ‘real-existing’ versions of liberal democracy have long ago invented a much less visible, alternative mechanism for making decisions and capturing the allegiance of citizens: the weighting of intensities.[1] Over the years, they have drafted and ratified constitutions with longer and more detailed bills of rights and inserted into normal legislation a variety of quota systems, ‘qualified’ voting rules, ‘reserved domains’ of policy-making, thresholds for eligibility, territorial and functional autonomies – all intended to protect numerical minorities in their midst who have particularly intense conceptions of their distinctive interests, identities and/or passions.
Political scientists have even invented a label to describe those liberal democracies with an especially rich variety of these discriminatory regulations and informal arrangements. They have been called: ‘consociational democracies’. In each of them exists a multiplicity of ‘pillared’ communities (Vertzuilling in the inimitable and unpronounceable Dutch), whether composed of different languages, religions, social classes or nationalities, each of which possesses its own political parties, interest associations, mass media, schools and patterns of habitation. Their respective elites have formed a sort of cartel at the national level that makes decisions respecting the intensities of their followers by applying obscure but predictable proportional formulas[2] and subsequently taking responsibility for their implementation within each of the respective communities. If there exists a prototype at the national level for the Euro-polity, it is to be found in consociationalism, not federalism.
Whether the weighting of intensities will prove to be as immediately appealing to the citizenry as the counting of their votes is doubtful, but if the experience of those polities in Western Europe that have practiced it for the longest period and most successfully: Switzerland, the Netherlands, Austria and Belgium provides any clue, it will be enough to guarantee political stability until it has resulted in a gradual diminution of the initial differences in ‘pillared’ interests and identities (Ontzuilling is the Dutch term for it).
Although it has never openly admitted it, the existing European Union has been engaging in analogous practices, while more publicly arguing that the counting of votes for election to its parliament constitutes the primary basis of its democratic legitimacy. It now has an approved bill of rights protecting various minorities; it systematically overweights the role of its smaller member-states; it distributes positions in its executive Commission equally among its very unequal member-states;[3] it unequally allocates funds to less-developed internal regions and national states and, most saliently, it allows for ‘differentiated integration’, i.e. for individual states to opt-out of specific treaty commitments (admittedly, with the approval of those who opt-in).
How effective these have been in enhancing the legitimacy of the integration process is difficult to assess. The public fixation on elections between candidates of competing political parties is very well established and almost all of the critical discussion about an eventual Euro-democracy has focused on reforming this ‘input’ dimension. The weighing of intensities primarily rests on ‘output legitimacy’, namely, the likelihood that by recognising, respecting and protecting the rights of minorities, not only will political stability be improved, but also will be the satisfaction of citizens as a whole. The core of the evaluation problem seems to be that, while ‘inputting’ involves active engagement, ‘outputting’ is a passively received experience that soon becomes taken for granted – at least, until some dramatic event like Brexit serves to remind them of the benefits – positive and negative – that they have been receiving.
As we move forward in these Europlitan papers, I intend to be attentive to the viability of this alternative model of how ‘real-existing’ liberal democracy has worked and produced admirable results in contexts that did not seem to be initially promising. It is in strong consonance with the strategic approach I have initially adopted, namely, to focus on relatively unobtrusive objectives (‘petits pas’) that promise to produce eventually changes in interests and identities at the level of the Euro-polity as a whole (‘grands effets‘). The gamble is that, only by settling for less immediately significant inputs and relying on more eventually differed outputs, will the process of regional integration itself generate the conditions for superseding its origins as an economic project and ‘spill-over’ into a more perfect ‘social and political’ union.[4]
Currently, the legitimacy of this effort may not be as difficult to establish as in the past when counting votes seem to be so much more democratic than weighting intensities. There is ample evidence in Western Europe and elsewhere that citizens have become more and more sensitive to how politicians respond, not just to the availability and distribution of material interests, but also to how they recognise, respect and protect the symbolic and emotional aspects of citizen identities – almost all of which are held by numerical minorities. If indeed, ‘identity politics’ has become the new challenge at the national and sub-national levels of aggregation, then it stands to reason that efforts in this domain at the supra-national level will become more acceptable and efficacious.
Philippe Schmitter
Emeritus Professor
European University Institute
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[1] This notion is hardly recent. It is deeply imbedded in republican (if not strictly democratic) thought. No less an authority than Cicero declared “Nei dissensi civili, quando i buoni valgano più dei molti, i cittadini vanno pesati e non contati.” (“When civil disputes occur, and the enlightened are worth more than the many, citizens should be weighted not counted” … my translation).
[2] Which is why an alternative label for this type of democracy is Proporz-Demokratie.
[3] With one Commissioners per country, which has resulted in an absurdly large executive and one destined to get even larger with the further admission of member-states. It has become hard to imagine what formal compétences to give newcomers.
[4] If the experience of previous consociational democracies at the national level is any indicator, in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Austria, the original ‘pillars’ have become more porous and various proportional devices less significant. Outside of Europe, the experience of Lebanon tells a different story. That experiment ended in civil war, although one can discount its lesson on the grounds that a combination of an aggressive neighbour and the perpetual irresolution of the Palestinian issue placed its pillars in an impossible situation.