Ruling the Void (17 page)

But for all its currency, this argument remains somewhat puzzling. To begin with, the assertion that the absence of a single, culturally coherent and presumably self-conscious ‘demos’ precludes the implementation of democratic solutions appears to fly in the face of all the attempts, both successful and unsuccessful, to establish democracy in multi-cultural or even multi-national territories. Indeed, even to raise this question is to invite a return to the classic early postwar discussions in political science about whether a viable democracy was possible in a culturally segmented or plural society. In that early literature at least, whether based on empirical data or theoretical argument, the answer was clearly yes: it was possible, even if the institutions of the democracy in question did have to be constructed in such a way as to allow for minority vetoes, cross-community cooperation, and what would now be called subsidiarity. In other words, it would be possible if the democracy in question were to be consociational, consensual or even ‘working’ (see Almond, 1960; Lijphart, 1977). It is precisely in such terms that Belgium, for example, which clearly lacks a single Belgian demos, or Switzerland, which lacks a single Swiss demos, or even Northern Ireland, which lacks a single British, Irish or even Ulster demos, can work with more or less standard democratic procedures and with the institutions of a fully democratic polity.

Even this is not the key issue, for if we also look again at the classic discussions in political science, and at the work of Almond (1960) and Easton (1965) in particular, then it seems hardly plausible to set the EU aside as something exceptional and incomparable. That early literature shared much with the contemporary literature on Europe in that it also struggled to come to terms with
‘polities’ that were not conventional states – polities in the making, or polities that were somehow primitively organized, or whatever. That literature also made major headway in seeking to extend the conceptual scope of political science beyond the limits set by its then more or less exclusive application to the developed political world and to what were seen as conventionally structured state forms (see Mair, 1996: 312–19). It did this in two ways. First, it sought to develop a new conceptual language that went beyond those conventional terms, becoming sufficiently abstract to accommodate the primitive, developing or so-called exceptional polities. This was the language of ‘the political system’, a language that allowed scholars to analyse the unusual and often poorly crystallized institutions that characterized much of non-western politics (Almond, 1990: 192), and that was able ‘to encompass pre-state/non-state societies, as well as roles and offices that might not be seen to be overtly connected with the state’ (Finer, 1970: 5). Second, it sought to relate this new conceptual language to more concrete and specific terms of reference in a fairly rigorous and systematic fashion, such that particular cases and institutions could be compared to one another at varying levels of abstraction. This was the approach that was outlined by Sartori (1970) in a now famous article, in which he distinguished between different levels of abstraction and specificity, and proposed a set of clear guidelines about how to move between these levels without at the same time stretching or abandoning the concepts involved. Adoption of this now-classic language and set of terms of reference has the advantage in this context of allowing us to treat the European Union as a political system, and, in this sense, as something that is comparable to other political systems.
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That is, we can put to the European Union as a political system the questions that can be put to to any political system – and we can expect of the Union the standards of accountability and legitimacy that are expected of others. In this way, we can move beyond the limits imposed by assumptions of exceptionality. Whether the EU may be deemed a state is in this sense beside the point, since the purpose of using the concept of political system is precisely to avoid the confines of the concept of the state, and we do this by moving up the ladder of abstraction towards a definition that can more easily accommodate non-conventional political forms.

In other words, and following Almond (1960), the EU is a political system, in that, just like other political systems, it makes and implements binding decisions, and has the capacity to (a) extract resources; (b) regulate behaviour; (c) distribute benefits; (d) respond to demands; and (e) symbolize values and identities. Precisely how it does these things, or how it exercises these common capacities, may well be peculiar to itself, of course. But this is more or less true for any individual political system, and it is only through noting these differences that we can learn about and begin to understand the concrete cases that are to be found in real-world situations. Moreover, precisely because every individual system and actor is at bottom sui generis and unique, it is only possible to compare different cases by developing more abstract concepts with which to analyse and accommodate them. This is the essence of comparative inquiry: ‘to substitute names of variables for the names of social systems’ (Przeworski and Teune, 1970: 8). So, the fact that the precise form taken by the EU political system is sui generis, and that it may bear very little relation to the equally sui generis forms taken by the political systems of France, or Germany, or wherever, is not really important. It goes without saying that while
France, for example, is a political system, not every political system is France.
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What matters in the case of the EU is that it is a political system, and that it can be analysed and compared as such.

So in what particular ways does this political system differ from others, particularly those in the European area? One way it differs is in its outputs, since in terms of Almond’s list of the capacities of political systems, about the only output in which the EU has a pronounced role, as Majone (e.g., 2003) has often pointed out, is that of regulation. Indeed, for Majone, this is what makes it distinctive – distinctive as a state. The EU does not engage very extensively in the redistribution of resources, except perhaps via the structural funds; nor does it even do a great deal towards positive integration. But it is responsible for a substantial range of regulation, such that, following Majone, it might even be seen primarily as a regulatory ‘state’. The EU also obviously differs when looked at in terms of its inputs, and this is clearly where the problems of representation and democracy arise. For, while in other political systems, and again particularly in Europe, inputs/demands are primarily voiced through elections and, within the electoral process, through parties, this is hardly the case in the EU political system as such. This is not to suggest that the system is unresponsive, however. On the contrary, it may even be said to be highly responsive – across its own institutions, to lobbyists, corporate interests, action groups, to individual citizens as well as other actors who gain voice through ‘self-representation’ in the courts and so on. The EU also sees itself as strong promoter of participatory governance, and clearly favours extending the involvement of
elements within civil society – organized groups, social movements, professional associations, stakeholders – in its decision-making procedures. Indeed, Beyers and Kerremans (2004) have recently shown that important channels of access are available even if they are used primarily by advocacy coalitions and lobby groups. But what is most striking about the EU when compared to other political systems in the post-industrial world is that it is not responsive in the terms of elections, parties and the conventional procedures of popular democracy. This is the core of the puzzle we are dealing with here, and it cannot simply be evaded by reminders of the uniqueness of the Union as such. What we have here is a political system that cannot adequately be reached or accessed by means of elections and parties, that is, by means of traditional representative organs and channels; a system that is open to all sorts of actors and organizations but more or less impermeable as far as voters are concerned; that cannot seem to work within the familiar conventions and modalities of representative government.
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In this lies the real puzzle concerning apolitical Europe: the point is not how to come to terms with something that is exceptional and sui generis – the issue of Europe as an
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of 1 – but rather how to understand why the EU has been made that way. Instead of thinking about the forms of legitimacy that might succeed in a system that eschews popular democracy, it is more relevant to ask why popular democracy was eschewed in the first place.

In this context, the most important single feature to be borne in mind is that the EU is a construct, a system designed and built by constitutional architects. To be sure, like all other political systems, and like all other institutions, it has developed its own momentum. In this sense, while the EU may have been originally constructed in a particular way and for the furtherance of particular national or sectoral goals (Moravcsik, 1998), it has always had the capacity to go beyond this initial stage, and, as various neo-institutionalists and neo-functionalists remind us, it has long been a textbook example of how institutions can rapidly outgrow their original intent (see Sandholz and Stone Sweet, 1998). In this respect, it may even be said to have passed beyond control. But even to accept this is not to deny that in terms of its core parameters and institutional makeup, including all the modifications and extensions that have been built in the period from the founding Treaty of Rome to the present, we are dealing with a system that was established and approved by politicians who were both government leaders and party leaders. We may like to think of the EU as being somewhere ‘out there’; but it is also sometimes salutary to recall that this is no deus ex machina, but something that is the result of hands-on moulding and shaping. The EU is the house that the party politicians built. The puzzle is that they built it without any substantial room for either politics or parties.

Why build a system of government that lacked conventional and familiar forms of democratic accountability? Even if we accept that this was not a problem in the early and very restrained stages of European polity-building, why extend the powers of an initially quite limited and bureaucratic organization without at the same time introducing some meaningful form of popular-democratic control? Given the recent growth
in the EU’s remit, why continue to resist the adoption of at least some elements of a democratically accountable presidential system, whereby the president of the Commission would be subject to popular election, or at least some elements of a classic European-style parliamentary system, whereby the right of nomination and dismissal of the Commission, or even of its president, would be in the hands of the European Parliament? Given that a certain amount of power does now reside in the EU system, why not allow its institutions to be properly democratized?
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There are at least three sorts of answer to these questions, and we may look at them one by one.

The first of these we have already considered in noting the problems of the absent demos and the polity-in-the-making: the EC in the past, and the EU now, are simply too exceptional to be suited to normal forms of democracy. Indeed, why should we even consider that democracy might prevail in these circumstances? According to Erik Oddvar Eriksen and John Erik Fossum (2002: 402), for example, ‘the insistence on standards of democratic governance is puzzling when considered in the light of the widely held assertion that there is no European demos, nor a genuine European-wide public sphere.’ In other words, while the practice of electoral accountability and the logic of popular democracy are all well and good when functioning at the level of the nation-state, they are not really appropriate or applicable at the exceptional level of Europe. This is how the theorist Albert Weale (1997: 668) puts it:

Weale might as well have suggested, with greater bluntness, that if Europe doesn’t fit the standard interpretation of democracy, then we should change the interpretation. Rather than adapting Europe to make it more democratic, we should adapt the notion of democracy to make it more European. That political leaders opt for a form of European governance that fails to match up to conventional democratic criteria is therefore a mark of their good sense: they know it cannot otherwise work or prove legitimate. The scale is wrong, the institutions are wrong, and the people – the demos – are wrong. Whichever way we look at it, the answer is the same: ‘Democratic legitimacy within the EU cannot be obtained by modeling its institutions on those of the nation-state’ (Bellamy and Warleigh, 2001: 10).

The second sort of answer sees the decision-making politicians as being motivated more by self-interest than by any sense of the common good. Thus, in one version of this answer, the reluctance to establish democratic institutions at the European level stems from an unwillingness on the part of national political leaders to encourage the emergence of any institutional competitors (e.g., Andeweg, 1995). It is acceptable to have second-order elections in Europe, it might be said, so long as there are still first-order elections at home. The opposite arrangement would obviously be much less
congenial. At the same time, again for obvious self-interested reasons, although perhaps also occasionally for more altruistic motives, national political leaders will have been reluctant to contemplate democratic legitimacy migrating from their own domestic institutions to those of a new Europe. Indeed, it is this argument that sometimes drives British Eurosceptic rhetoric, and finds favour among senior politicians elsewhere in the EU. Nobody who has been in government wishes to be seen now as being in charge of a branch office. As I suggested earlier, however, such a strategy of resistance could prove self-defeating. Although Europe may not acquire much popular legitimacy if run in the Monnet way, its operations can still have the effect of reducing levels of legitimacy at the national level – not least by enhancing the various domestic democratic deficits. In this outcome – and if we can properly think of it in these terms – the sum total of democratic legitimacy is diminished and the position of national political leaders is weakened still further.