The generic ‘liberal’ formula for democratizing a large-scale polity is well-known. Whether it will be successfully applied in the case of the European Union is anything but well-known … yet.
(1) Assume that if one increases the population size and/or territorial scope of a decision-making unit, so will the variety of interests and passions held by individual citizens and expressed by their collective organizations within it increase;
(2) Take advantage of this greater diversity by acknowledging or even multiplying them, rather than trying to eliminate or unify them;
(3) Insert a multiplicity of levels of aggregation for policy-making and policy-implementation, each with some distinctive competencies;
(4) Distribute the decision-making process at each of these levels across a multiplicity of institutions, composed of different constituencies and recruited according to different rules;
(5) Promote the circulation of diverse sources of information throughout the enlarged polity so that individual citizens and their collective organizations enter into contact with each other more frequently and regularly;
(6) Hope that the emerging multiplicity of differences will be cross-cutting, not cumulative, across population groups and their political sub-units;
(7) Also, hope that the ensuing diversity of interests and passions will be more-or-less distributed normally, i.e. that most citizens will prefer some intermediate solution.
Accomplish this and the new polity will be authentically “pluralist” in nature, as well as democratic, and can be expected to endure.
The European Union, so far, has done well with the first five presumptions. The difficulty resides in Items (6) and (7). As presently constituted, it suffers from two apparent “birth defects.” First, seen from the perspective of member-states, groups of actors representing national governments have tended to form distinctive “blocs” that regard themselves as systematically and collectively disfavoured or discriminated against by existing EU rules and policies. Second, the citizens within these member-states have more recently tended to form “camps” following party or movement lines that distribute their preferences with regard to European integration in a bi-polar fashion, with fewer and fewer citizens occupying intermediate or centrist positions.
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The first defect is largely a product of what has often been celebrated as one of the EU’s greatest successes, namely, its Eastern enlargement to include so many of the former member-states of the Soviet Communist bloc. The previous Northern and Southern enlargements included mostly states that had already been practicing a similar form of capitalism for some time, had relatively well-established party systems and independent legal institutions, competent public bureaucracies, and economies at more-or less the same level of development and per capita income.[1] In the East, these convergences had to be built ex novo and in a compressed period of time. Moreover, while the accession process itself proved to be very demanding for the candidates, the EU authorities made no prior special arrangements for monitoring or censoring the subsequent behavior of the new member-states. They simply assumed pacta sunt servanta, namely, that the respective national authorities would keep their promises and obey the treaty provisions that they had consented to. This has not always been the case.
One comforting presumption is that this particular pattern of East-West cumulative cleavages will disappear of its own accord as the new member-states settle domestically into the routinized channels and expectations of liberal democracy, but this may be overly optimistic. Moreover, the process of Eastern (and, especially, South-Eastern) enlargement may not yet be finished.
Fortunately, the EU has already invented a number of potential instruments for responding to non-compliance with its directives and treaty norms, ranging from excluding defendants from voting to blocking the transfer of funds to them. With the recent major expansion in its tasks and financial resources, due first to the Euro Crisis, then to the COVID Pandemic and now to the war in Ukraine, the latter threat has become much more convincing. Nevertheless, if it is to develop into a functioning polity, the EU will have create even more credible “retaliatory mechanisms” in order to deal with its extraordinary diversity of interests and passions.
Also, in its collective wisdom, the EU has already designed, incorporated within a formal treaty, and recently applied the option of unilaterally invoked “exit.” This is legalistically convenient since it seems to formally guarantee the ultimate “sovereignty” of each of the individual member-states. The experience of BREXIT has also demonstrated that the process can be complex and prolonged if the exiting member desires to retain some of the advantages it previously enjoyed as a member, but it also demonstrated a surprising degree of solidarity during the negotiations among those who chose to remain. Moreover, contrary to initial fears, the British example has not been followed by any single effort (or even serious threat) of exit by another member-state.
What the Euro-polity needs in order to cope with the increase in non-compliance in response to its widened agenda of policy-making is the inverse mechanism, namely, a formula for collectively excluding delinquent member-states. Without doubt, any potential decision-making arrangement for doing this — either by a qualified majority vote or by the “compound majority” formula proposed in EP No.10 — would require an unanimously approved new treaty, something that is not even remotely likely in the near future. One can imagine more subtle and gradual measures for “blaming and shaming” persistently delinquent behaviour by a member-state. For example, the Commission could recommend to the Parliament (or the Parliament could take up on its own) a motion to censure publicly a given member-state for faulty compliance or outright defiance of EU norms, giving it a specific period of time to comply, before applying retaliatory mechanisms. If the accused member failed to comply, it could be simply banned from further participation in EU institutions or from receiving specified EU funds. Presumably, if applied persistently and publicly, this would provide a sufficient incentive for the delinquent member to request exit unilaterally according to already established rules.
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The second defect presents a more serious challenge to the formation of an eventual Euro-polity. It is both more generic in origin and deeply rooted in the institutions of domestic – both national and sub-national – politics. In the previous challenge of bloc-formation, the cumulative cleavages tend to produce a broad consensus across social groups at the national or sub-national level and the obvious solution is either voluntary or induced exit from the supra-national regional process. When the emergent cleavage pattern leads to the formation of polarized camps within the political domain of member-states with fewer and fewer citizens preferring compromises around median responses, no such obvious a solution suggests itself. Even if the principal sources of dissatisfaction are more likely to be initially rooted in domestic conflicts, they will virtually inevitably affect citizen and group attitudes toward the European Union, despite the fact that they usually focus on matters that it has little or no pre-established competence to resolve. Nevertheless, at both ends of the wider and more separated spectrum of citizen dissent, the EU offers a convenient ‘foreign’ scapegoat to blame.
In the contemporary context, the principal label that has been attached to this situation is “populism” – a strategy adopted by aspiring politicians who claim to represent “the people” in opposition to “the elite,” i.e. the misguided or corrupt politicians already in power and sub-servient to foreign interests. Since these established actors have a pre-existing track- record of supporting European integration, blaming it for a variety of nefarious outcomes is especially tempting for aspiring populists … although relatively few of them have consistently advocated outright withdrawal from the EU.
It is dubious that any liberal democracy can survive a protracted period of partisan polarization. They have all historically depended upon centripetal voting patterns by mass publics oriented to the so-called “median voter,” and upon “split-the-difference” policy compromises backed by shifting coalitions of centrist leaders. Given that the EU contains an exaggerated version of the usual diversity of interests and passions (and, even more so, if passions prevail since they typically exclude median positions), it is bound to be even more vulnerable to the prevalence of such a distribution.
Fortunately, however, the European Union has (so far) remained relatively immune from this “populist temptation.” Candidates experimenting with such an appeal have not done well in elections to its Parliament; relatively few member governments have been governed by populist parties or coalitions for protracted periods (and when they have, they have tended to be circumspect in their resistance to conforming to EU directives and regulations); and public opinion data show that the European Project remains relatively popular with mass publics. Moreover, at the national and sub-national levels, the “wave” of populist successes seems to have crested and the habitual centrist politicians have become more and more likely to be returned to office.
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The present conjuncture would seem to be particularly favourable to the promotion of innovations in EU governance. The collective response to the sequential crises of COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine have demonstrated very widespread support among elites and mass publics for the expansion of its functional tasks and financial resources. Two policy arenas that were previously considered as especially restricted to the sovereign authority of national states: health and defence, have now “spilled-over” to an unprecedented degree to the supra-national level of decision-making.
Granted, this may be purely “conjunctural.” No major new permanent agencies have been created and funded, much less new treaties signed and delivered. Virtually all that has been accomplished regionally is the result of improvisation and spontaneous innovation to response to unprecedented external shocks. Once these security threats have dissipated, both politicians and citizens could very well return to their “natural” arena of authoritative decision-making, the (allegedly) sovereign national state.
Which is one reason why, in these Europolitan Papers, we have refrained from the temptation to exploit this conjuncture by advocating major formal innovations that would require a revision of the EU’s foundational treaties that require unanimous approval. We continue to stress that regional integration is a process, not a product, and that it is best advanced gradually and tentatively by exploiting the emerging functional interdependencies between member-states and waiting patiently for the transformations that they will eventually produce in the perceptions of citizens concerning their interests and passions. To return to its founder, Jean Monnet: “Nos problėmes ne peuvent être rėglés que pour une action et une solidarité croissante.»
Philippe Schmitter
Emeritus Professor
European University Institute
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[1] Greece proved to be something of an outlier in these regards which contributed to the subsequent crisis in its relations with the EU.