The present situation would seem to be particularly favourable for instituting new (and, hopefully, more democratic) reforms in the integration process. The simultaneous or sequential crises of the environment, COVID-19, migration and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine have demonstrated very widespread support among elites and mass publics for an expansion of the EU’s functional tasks and financial resources. Five policy arenas that were previously considered as especially restricted to the sovereign authority of national states – subsidiarité oblige – border control, health, defence, environment and, most recently, energy have now “spilled-over” to an unprecedented degree into speculation about modifying and extending the trans-national level of decision-making.
Granted, this may be purely “conjunctural.” No new permanent agencies have yet been created, much less new treaties signed, ratified and delivered. Virtually all that has been accomplished at the regional level is the result of improvisation and spontaneous innovation in response to unprecedented external shocks. If and when these threats have dissipated, both politicians and citizens could very well choose to return to their “natural” arena of authoritative decision-making, i.e. their (allegedly) sovereign national states.
One other contemporary aspect is also encouraging. Since its foundation, European integration has depended on a core accomplishment, namely, that the rate of increase in exchanges of goods, services, capital and people among the member states was greater than their comparable exchanges with states outside the region. There is considerable evidence that this has not only been the case, but has accelerated in recent decades. The exception was Great Britain with its residual empire, the Commonwealth, and this was certainly an element in its decision to exit the process. Dialectically speaking, BREXIT has been an advantage for those who remained since it provided a graphic reminder of how much they had come to depend on and value these intra-European exchanges, and how difficult it has been for the British to adjust to their absence from the process.
Whether or not all this will translate into promoting greater support for an eventual democratic Euro-polity remains to be seen, but again the conjuncture seems to be favourable for innovation in the effort.
In fact, these Papers could not (or, at least, should not) have been written several years ago. As long as the EU was confined in its policy-making to just regulating the functional consequences of removing barriers to intra-European commercial and financial exchanges, its institutions were highly unlikely to be challenged. Its practices could certainly be questioned in terms of efficacy or efficiency, but not the procedures that had produced them. In other words, “output” legitimacy would have sufficed, especially when compared to the available, strictly national, alternatives of autonomy and protectionism which almost certainly would have produced less favourable outcomes.
The advent of the Maastricht Treaty, followed by the crisis of the Euro and, now, by the compound crises noted above has radically changed the situation. The EU – at the (admittedly unequal) request of its (enlarged) member-states – has been compelled to deal with substantive issues that cannot just be regulated, but which have to be distributed and re-distributed unequally among them … and to be paid for with a very important increase in its “own resources.”
This is why there now exists a legitimacy crisis in the EU – a “democracy deficit” – that has to be addressed. And it is doomed to get worse unless the way in which it makes its decisions and justifies them is changed.
Moreover, this conjuncture is happening at a moment when the legitimacy of the political regimes in its member-states is also under stress. In fact, it could be argued that by far the more important “democracy deficit” exists at the national not the supra-national level – if only because the habits and expectations of citizens are more firmly entrenched at that level of aggregation.
For a variety of reasons too lengthy and complex to discuss in this text, the unusual complementarity between democracy and capitalism that Europe experienced during the so-called “Trente Glorieuses” – the Thirty Years following World War II – began to come apart in the 1980s. On the one hand, core democratic institutions such as political parties and trade unions lost members and credibility; and, on the other, income inequalities and working and middle class insecurities increased at rates only experienced at the end of the (contentious) Nineteenth Century. The dynamic of elections, instead of following a predictable “centripetal” pattern that favoured centrist parties and was oriented toward citizens with “median” preferences, became more unpredictably “centrifugal” and focused increasingly on mobilizing voters at the extreme ends of the party spectrum. Trust in politicians of whatever stripe declined to levels never before observed by survey research.
As far as this author knows, no one has blamed this deterioration in national and sub-national democracy on European integration alone.[1] The usual culprit has been globalization, especially with its prime instigator and beneficiary, finance capitalism. However, to the extent that the EU is regarded as a passive (or even an active) agent promoting these forces, it has had to share in the blame.
In the event that a sufficient number of the reform proposals in these Papers were to be enacted (admittedly, a dubious proposition), the policies of a future Euro-polity would more clearly reflect the preferences of its popular demoi than of its financial aristocracy. None of its member-states is even remotely capable of regulating these flows alone, and there is no hope that the other “giants” of global capitalism, the United States and the United Kingdom, would bother to make the effort.
Given this “conjunctural” nature of the present context is one reason why, in these Europolitan Papers, I have largely refrained from the temptation to exploit it by advocating major formal innovations that would require a revision (or substitution) of the EU’s existing foundational treaties and that would depend on unanimous approval of the member-states, sometimes by national referendum.[2] I 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 changes in the perceptions of citizens concerning their interests, identities and passions. To return to the wisdom of its founder, Jean Monnet: « Nos problėmes ne peuvent être rėglés que pour une action et une solidarité croissante. »
Another way of putting this point (of which Monnet was no doubt also aware) is that Europe, then and now, was and is firmly entrenched in a post- or, better, un-revolutionary structural context. No significant actor can plausibly invoke the spectre of such a threat as a motive for promoting regime change, i.e. for reforming the rules about making rules – least of all, at the level of Europe as a whole. The prospect of regime decay from within is much more credible at both the national and supra-national levels, but it provokes a radically different structure of incentives for change, especially if the diminished democracy or prospective autocracy is likely to respect the rights of property-owners and the privileges of existing élites.
For both these conjunctural and structural reasons, I have tried to restrict my speculations to strictly marginal and incremental improvements – which is not claim that they will be easily attainable.
Philippe Schmitter
Emeritus Professor
European University Institute
Comments
Readers are welcome to send comments to egpp@eui.eu. Comments will be reviewed before publication below and will include the name of the author.
[1] Probably because a very similar pattern of decline has been occurring in almost all of those advanced liberal democracies that are not members of the EU.
[2] For several of these more ambitious democratic reforms, see the product of the Conference on the Future of Europe. Also Stephanie Hennette, Thomas Piketty, Guillaume Sacrestie and Antoine Vauchez, Pour un Traité de Democratisation de l’Europe (Paris : Ėditions du Seuil, 2017).