Ruling the Void (16 page)

This has always been the case in the UK, of course, where displacement has never been particularly pronounced, and where the European divide has long been a mainstream partisan divide. In France too, the issue has often come quite strongly to the fore in national elections, both parliamentary and presidential (e.g., Knapp, 2004). However, it is now striking to note how this pattern has begun to spread – to both the Netherlands and Austria during their 2002 elections, for example. Part of the reason for this, as van der Eijk and Franklin have emphasized (2004), is simply the increased salience
of the Europeanization dimension as such – Europe now counts for more, and the conflicts it stimulates were further exacerbated by the lead-up to the 2004 enlargement and in the discussions regarding possible Turkish membership. Part of the reason lies also in the rise of new populist parties on both the right (mainly) and left (occasionally), and in the resentment and even hostility towards the established political class that can now be seen in a large number of European polities. (
Table 5
, overleaf) In this case, Europe has become a key issue with which to launch a populist assault, in that hostility to European integration has become one of the best possible weapons in the political armoury of the anti-establishment forces. Unlike the other issues – such as immigration – that also feature in the attack, it is one that unites, or is at least shared by, the outsiders on both right and left. In this sense, it can and does play a crucial role. This is hardly surprising, especially given that the long march towards European integration has always been a project driven by Europe’s political and administrative elites; that is, it has been an ‘elite-led process which has been largely unexplained and certainly under-advocated to the average citizen’ (Bellamy and Warleigh, 2001: 9). Moreover, and largely by agreement across the political mainstream, it has also been a project that has been pursued without becoming politicized and without seeking to generate any fanfare. Indeed, if anything, it was to be developed by sleight of hand.
⁵
In the spirit of the so-called Monnet method, the EU-building process was almost always kept clear of conventional
adversarial politics and public political debate. Hence the displacement discussed above. As an elite objective, however, or as
the
elite objective, effective progress towards European integration could only be achieved as long as the elites themselves were trusted. This was the essence of the permissive consensus. It was a consensus in the sense that there was agreement more or less across the mainstream, and it was permissive in the sense that popular trust in the elites ensured deference to their decisions.
⁶
But once that trust and deference began to fade, and once disengagement and disillusion began to set in, the elites became vulnerable. And as they became vulnerable, so too did their projects, and in particular that for Europe.

Table
5 Vote share of populist parties in western Europe

This is not to suggest that European integration has now become a major issue of political dispute, or even a major cleavage. That would be a great exaggeration. But precisely because of the importance of the permissive consensus in the past, and precisely because that consensus so self-evidently concerned an elite project, the European issue has become a hammer with which to beat the establishment. This occurs not just on the right. The hammer is available to anti-establishment forces on both left and right, and both sides are happy to wield it. This new pattern of competition portends an increasing politicization of the matter of Europeanization, and hence also a possible breakdown of the long-term permissive consensus.

Even though its direct effect may be relatively limited, Europe exerts a strong indirect influence on the parties and their modes of competition, and in this regard its importance should not be underestimated. To begin with, the development of a European level of decision-making has clearly played a major role in the hollowing out of policy competition between political parties at the national level. This has happened in two ways. First, and most obviously, one major effect of Europe is to limit the
policy space
that is available to the competing parties. This happens when policies are deliberately harmonized, and when we are confronted with more or less forced convergence within the Union. That is, it comes from adopting the
acquis
and from accepting, at least in certain key policy areas, the rule that one size fits all (e.g., Grabbe, 2003). National governments may still differ from one another in how they interpret and act upon these demands for convergence, of course, and in this sense there may remain a degree of variation from one system to the next. But even when such interpretations differ across countries, they rarely appear to differ – at least across the mainstream – within countries. Thus even when one of the member states does seek to opt out of, or evade a particular policy, this usually happens by agreement between government and opposition, and hence the policy space remains restricted and the issue in question rarely becomes politicized.

Second, Europe limits the capacities of national governments, and hence also the capacities of the parties in those governments, by reducing the range of
policy instruments
at their disposal, and hence by limiting their
repertoire
. This occurs through the delegation of decision-making from the national level to the European level – whether to the European Central
Bank, or to Europol or to any of the many new regulatory agencies that now proliferate at all levels within the European polity (Kelemen, 2002). These are the so-called non-majoritarian institutions, from which parties and politics are deliberately excluded. In this instance, policy is decided according to a variety of different expert or legal tests of merit, and in principle, at least, is not subject to partisanship. If we think of parties and their national governments as armies being sent into battle on behalf of their supporters, then the effect of such delegation to Europe – as well as to other non-majoritarian agencies at national level (e.g., Strom et al., 2003; Thatcher and Stone Sweet, 2003) – is to reduce the amount of weaponry at their disposal, leaving them less and less capable of carrying through their putative campaigns. In addition, Europe has the effect of disallowing what had once been standard policy practices on the grounds that they interfere with the free market. Particular goods can no longer be excluded from import or sale, particular qualifications can no longer be deemed inadequate, and particular domestic services can no longer be privileged. Moreover, as companies such as the budget airline Ryanair have found to their cost, governments are severely restricted in the extent to which they, or other public authorities, can offer subsidies or help to particular industries or companies, and they are also limited in the exercise of their traditionally very basic function of determining which persons may enter and/or seek work within their territory. In other words, practices that involve public bodies in selection, privileging, or discrimination become more and more restricted, and hence the stock of policies available to governments, and to the parties that control those governments, steadily dwindles.

Both sets of limits serve to substantially reduce the stakes of competition between political parties, and to
dampen down the potential differences wrought by successive governments. To be sure, elections continue to determine the composition of government in most polities, and as more and more party systems tend towards a bipolar pattern of competition, and towards a contest between two teams of leaders, this aspect of the electoral process is likely to become even more important. But insofar as competing policies or programmes are concerned, the value of elections is steadily diminishing. Thanks to the European Union, although crucially not only for that reason, political competition has become increasingly depoliticized.

There are two other senses in which the deepening of European integration can be seen to promote depoliticization and disengagement. First, there is the simple socializing effect, in that the existence and weight of the European institutions, and of the Commission in particular, is clearly going to accustom citizens to a more general acceptance of being governed by bodies that are neither representative nor properly accountable. The corollary of this is obviously that less attention need then be given to those institutions that are, contrastingly, representative and/or accountable. In other words, if important decisions are made by so-called non-majoritarian institutions, and if these are accepted and acceptable, then questions must be raised about the centrality, relevance, and sheer necessity of those institutions that still do depend on the electoral process. In short: politics is devalued to the extent that key decisions are taken by non-political bodies (see also Flinders, 2004).

Second, because the European Parliament – the one European body that does depend on the electoral process – fails to generate much commitment and enthusiasm on the part of citizens, it may well be responsible for
a negative spillover effect in national politics. This can happen on the one hand through contagion, whereby a disregard for the European Parliament as a legislative institution, and in particular a disregard for the MEPs who work in that institution, can feed into, or be encouraged to feed into, a disregard for national parliaments and national representatives. If one elected body is seen to be ineffective and self-serving, then why not others? On the other hand, it can happen through a learning process, in that by not voting in European elections, citizens may learn that it is also possible and non-problematic to abstain from taking part in national elections. If voting is seen as a duty, then neglect of that duty in one arena may encourage neglect in other arenas, including the national parliamentary arena; and if voting is a habit, then even one experience of abstention may be enough to break that habit entirely. In other words, by democratizing the European Parliament, the polity-builders in Europe may have inadvertently contributed to devaluing the electoral process as a whole.
⁷

If we put all of these factors together, what we see is that the reduction in the stakes of political competition at the national level, along with the wider process of depoliticization to which Europe contributes, acts to downgrade the real and perceived importance of traditional democratic processes: if politics becomes less weighty, then so too does democracy – at least in the sense of popular participation and electoral accountability. The result is not only the familiar democratic deficit at the European level, but also a series of
domestic democratic deficits within the member states themselves. Because democratic decision-making proves marginal to the working of the European polity at the supranational level, it also tends to lose its value in the working of the various component polities at the national level. It is in this sense that, through the EU, European citizens learn to live with an absence of effective participatory democracy. They also learn to live with a growing absence of politics. For while European integration serves to depoliticize much of the policy-making process at the domestic level – by reducing the policy range, instruments and repertoire available to national governments and to the parties who organize them – it fails to compensate for this reduction by any commensurate repoliticization at the European level. It is true that some corresponding repoliticization can be seen in the growing evidence of contestation over the matter of Europeanization, as well as in the re-animation, through Europe, of formerly dormant regional or territorial lines of conflict.
⁸
As yet, however, this occurs only on a very limited scale, too small to count. Political conflict in this sense is being voided in Europe, by Europe. The question is: Why should this be the case?

In the enormous and still growing literature on the EU system, one recurring theme concerns the apparent exceptionalism of what has actually developed in postwar Europe. In its most succinct form, this is encapsulated in the notion that the European Union represents
a so-called
n
of 1,
⁹
a case to be investigated on its own, being neither a national state nor a conventional supranational or international organization, and neither part of the national political systems of Europe nor a distinct political unit in its own right. Above all, it is seen to be exceptional in that it lacks a ‘demos’, and hence, by definition – or so it is asserted – is a system that cannot function democratically: Karlheinz Neunreither (2000: 148) puts it baldly: ‘There is no chance of a possible EU democracy, because there is no European people, no demos. No demos, no democracy – quite simple.’ With time, of course, with education and with socialization, such a European demos might eventually emerge, and then it would become possible to speak of constructing a real democracy within what is now the European Union. Until that time, however, we will have to make do with something other than popular democracy, for it seems that ‘without a clear sense of a European demos it is difficult to adequately institutionalize government either by or for the European people’ (Bellamy and Warleigh, 2001: 9). What we have in Europe, therefore, is some strange and ill-defined polity, which, by virtue of the lack of definition, appears to be exempt from the standard tests applied to other sets of governing institutions (see also Gustavsson, 1998). If it is a non-democracy, it is because, in the end, it is a non-polity. This is also the lesson that Jo Shaw (2000: 291) appears to draw in concluding that the EU is a ‘polity-in-the-making’, for in such a context, she suggests, ‘democracy remains both a conceptual problem and a practical challenge, requiring multilevel and multi-actor solutions that are “beyond the state” and, perhaps, also beyond the conventions of western style representative liberal democracy’. In these
terms, it seems that even the notion of a democratic deficit may be misleading, since it presupposes the application of inappropriate standards.