There was one little sentence in President Juncker’s state of the union address before the European Parliament in Strasbourg on 13 September that seems, curiously, to have escaped the notice of those newspapers that always jump at any opportunity for a dig at ‘Brussels’ and the European institutions, ‘so detached from the citizens’, that rule over it (see EUROPE 11861). But this little sentence was basically the President of the Commission thumbing his nose at the 27 capitals: “the future of Europe cannot be decided by decree”. This will, without a doubt, have been taken as an absolute insult by many senior national political figures.
In one short sentence, Jean-Claude Juncker put his finger on the main problem with Europe today, without even seeming to have touched it: if the citizens are turning their back on European integration, it’s because they have absolutely no influence over it and it is completely beyond their control, even though it influences and shapes their everyday lives as never before. If you think I’m exaggerating, ask the Greeks, who had austerity forced upon them irrespective of how they voted.
As things currently stand, let’s be frank: the EU – and particularly its Eurozone – are suffering from a major democratic problem. It’s no longer about laying the foundations for a common market, then the single market, tearing down customs barriers and endeavouring to manage any given declining sector of industry. It’s now about political decisions that really do shape the economic lives of the member states and the contents of their citizens’ wallets.
Who is making them? The traditional permissive consensus no longer applies here: the protest votes that have, in recent years, favoured the fortunes of extremist parties, on the right and the left alike, are no more and no less than a reproof for what the citizens see as the democratic misjudgements of the European leaders. As Michel Aglietta and Nicolas Leron observe, the people are now moving towards “the conclusion that although, theoretically, Europe is an historical necessity, in actual everyday life it is becoming a burden, a plague to some, so much so that they would rather risk disaster by going cold turkey than a slow death through asphyxia” (our translation) (1).
The historian and sociologist Pierre Rosanvallon invented the concept of “unpolitical democracy”. This fits the European Union like a glove. In a remarkable “European Issue” (Robert Schuman Foundation), Thierry Chopin quite rightly observes that “Europe is a union of democracies based on a democratic institutional system from a formal point of view, but which is unable to breathe adequate life into the ‘political’ aspect (in the partisan sense of the term) amongst its members” (2). Hence the question: what could be the cause of this “structural obstacle to democratic ownership by the citizens”? The answer is crystal clear: it is the leaders of the member states of the EU, because, as the French lawyer Jean-Luc Sauron put it, they sin by their “unwillingness (…) to share power with the people” (L’Opinion, 10 April 2017).
The first permanent President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy of Belgium, has been expressing outrage in recent days because he heard Juncker float the idea that one and the same democratically anointed individual could preside over both the Commission and the inner sanctum of the heads of state or government. This, he insists, will create a real problem of legitimacy as, in his view and that of those who appointed him, the European Union must not just concern itself with the “European interest” (which is the job of the Commission), but also with national interests, which are balanced within the European Council. It is therefore important, this former head of the Council summed up, to remember that the European Union is a union both of states and of people.
This call to continue the marriage between the inter-governmental and Community approaches had the merit of candour. This makes it no less politically irresponsible in the EU of today, its Eurozone in particular, as it aims to perpetuate a system in which, in Thierry Chopin’s words, “diplomacy prevails over democracy”. Today, in the analysis of the Director of Studies at the Robert Schuman Foundation, “each member state privileges its national democratic legitimacy and European democratic legitimacy has been unable to settle conflicts between national democratic mandates, the sum of which does not produce a European democratic mandate”.
Greater accuracy in any analysis of the democratic ills suffered by the EU and the Eurozone is simply not possible. This lecturer at the Catholic University of Lille also hit the nail squarely on the head when he said that “what the Union lacks, from a civic point of view, lies in the absence of European political alternation, equal to that in the member states and also in the Federations”.
Since the citizen is, today, the victim of a flawed democracy, nationally and at European level, and the victim of the limitations of European governance, which can be characterised by its “executive deficit”, there is an absolutely urgent need to make democratic changes to this “political anaemia in Europe” which may otherwise, according to Michel Aglietta and Nicolas Leron, “again awaken the daemon of authoritarianism”, for it is entirely true that “caught in a fatal stand-off between what could be seen - not entirely incorrectly - as supranational technocratic authoritarianism and nationalist political authoritarianism, chances are that the people will ultimately opt for the latter”.
President Juncker refrained from going this far when he gave the same diagnosis, as it could not have failed to spell political exile or even political death in most of the capitals. But what exactly was on his mind when he casually posited that “the future of Europe cannot be decided by decree” if he is not also of the opinion that it is time to let the citizens have the floor?
And if this was not what he was thinking, there has been a speech in Athens and another at the Sorbonne since then that might have put the idea into his head! It was not Juncker, but – miraculously – the new occupant of the Elysée Palace who was bold enough to say that “the defeat of Europe after all of these years is also a defeat for democracy” and that it is finally time to allow the people to decide on the path we will take together (see EUROPE 11870). It remains only to be seen how the floor will be given to the European citizens and, more importantly, how their voices will be heard by the national leaders, who are no doubt planning to continue to make the decisions. By decree. (To be continued)
Michel Theys
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¹) La double démocratie. Une Europe politique pour la croissance (Double Democracy: A Political Europe for Growth), Editions du Seuil, 2017
²) Policy Paper European Issue 444, 25 September 2017, http://www.robert-schuman.eu