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Europe Daily Bulletin No. 12948

10 May 2022
Contents Publication in full By article 19 / 19
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No. 059

La démocratie communautaire

 

This book by researcher in political theory at the University of Frankfurt, Aliénor Ballangé, which is both well-written (something worthy of a specific mention these days) and highly enlightening on the subject of the intellectual genesis of a European Community that went on to become a Union, takes us on the trail of an imperfect and controversial European democracy whilst giving us clues to rethink it along the way.

 

“When the Community project was born, there were three conflicting major ideological trends on the vision of the ‘proper government’ of Europe. These were the planners, the Federalists and the ‘ordoliberals’; all created a singular definition of democracy: community-based for the first group, popular for the second, ‘market-based’ for the third. Whereas the ordoliberal family tree seems to have stabilised its hegemony in the 1980s, the communalist-planners and popular-Federalist factions continue to feed the image that Community democracy grows out of itself. So much so that Community integration soon became polarised between the process of democratisation from which no return is now possible and an increased technicalisation of common matters, which now makes it impossible for any sovereignty to be shared between the elites and the people”, the author argues, adding that “it is, in part, from this impossible synthesis that the political crisis affecting the EU for the last ten years has emerged: some calling for democracy by the people to be reinforced, others consolidating a model that they believe to be beneficial to the greatest number. However, this tension – which is both the wealth and the complexity of Community democracy – is impossible to understand in light of the analysis of the competing discourses that have created the foundation of the current political model » (our translation throughout). Additionally, rather than creating a stable definition of Community democracy, the work looks at “how the discourses help to construct the image of the European people and the role they are liable to take in European integration”.

 

The work focuses on the first era of European integration, undertaken without a constituent people, from the 1930s – when the concept of a political Europe was starting to emerge “from the ruins of a cultural and philosophical Europe” – to conclude in the late 1970s, “when the first elections to the European Parliament would make a reality of the constitution of a body of European voters”. Meant the trauma of two world wars, “a nebulous grouping of intellectuals with profiles, discourses and ideologies that in many cases clashed, condensed around a shared intuition: that of the need to rebuild the link between people who had been torn apart by several decades of war”, Ballangé writes, adding: “the aim at the time was to think up the conditions in which a Community democracy based on the rights of the person rather than on the power of the masses, on the impartiality of institutions rather than the manichaeism of the parties, on the rationality of the economy rather than the fickleness of politicians, could become a possibility. Against this backdrop, the European revolution soon looked like the opportunity to displace an obsolete form of democracy – national, liberal, bourgeoise – to allow another form of democracy to be built up on radically new foundations. Instead of the instability of the electorate, there would be the competence of specialists, instead of corruption of representatives there would be the neutrality and objectivity of independent bodies, instead of the atomisation of the masses there would be, for the first time, an all-encompassing and peaceful ‘us’”.

 

And yet, this form of ‘non-partisan’ democracy was not entirely free from paradoxes: decided upon from ‘on high’ by academic, intellectual and technical elites, the Community revolution took place largely behind the backs of the people, even though the people were openly called upon to mobilise in favour of the European project in certain Federalist discourse”, the author notes, stressing that “for most of the pro-Europeans at the time, the people were part of the problem with democracy: emotive, fickle, credulous and easy to manipulate (and this was long before the Internet, social networks and fake News: Ed), they believe that the people had neither the clarity of thinking nor the rationality to determine what was good or bad for them”.

 

But what people are we actually talking about? “Absent, untraceable, aporetic, the ‘European people’ is the paradoxically most present absent figure of European literature. Born with the integration of the continent, this figure even seems to gain visibility the more its object widens, escapes and evades it. So much so that the spectre of the ‘European people’ looks at the same time like the eternal ‘revenant’ of Community unification”, the author argues, going on to carry out a lengthy analysis of the various discourses on “European people”. To what extent is this concept compatible with or different from the Community of European citizens to which specific rights are attached, in their capacity as workers or, more so, consumers, to the detriment of the social, cultural and political identity? Can Europe continue to manage without a common identity?

 

By deciding to respond to the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’ by reforming governance, the Commission intends to rationalise democracy in such a way as to increase the satisfaction of the citizens”, she writes, taking pains to point out that “by prioritising the quality and efficacy of procedures over the wishes of ‘anyone who so chooses’ to intervene in the decision-making process – even if this has been at the expense of ‘good’ public management – the governance strips democracy of its polemic content and retains only the principal of an equal right to benefit from the positive consequences of a correctly administrated system produced”. To my mind, however, this reasoning is doubly incorrect: on the one hand, good public management can never guarantee this right, as many measures are sectorial, measures producing positive consequences can have negative ones at the same time, and particularly as the existence of an equal right can never, in and of itself, ensure equal access to this right (inequalities bear daily witness to this); on the other, however good and impartial it may be, governance cannot be a response to the democratic deficit, which rightly refers to the feeling of having no say in objectives and decisions. European integration is still in its youth, but it urgently needs to become more democratic if a real feeling of belonging is to be possible, so that people are no longer inclined to give into the temptation of looking to “take back control”. (Olivier Jehin)

 

Aliénor Ballangé. La démocratie communautaire – Généalogie critique de l’Union européenne (available in French only). Éditions de la Sorbonne. ISBN: 979-1-0351-0676-8. 245 pages. €25,00

 

The Age of Unpeace

 

We may be at the dawn of a new silent pandemic. Like Covid-19, it is spreading across the planet, growing exponentially, exploiting the weaknesses of our networked world and constantly mutating to get through our defences. But, unlike the virus that threatens the whole of humanity with a disease, this new pandemic is being deliberately transmitted from human to human. It is not a biological agent, but a collection of toxic behaviours that multiply like a virus. Connections between people and countries are becoming weapons”, is how British writer Mark Leonard, co-founder of the think tank “European Council on Foreign Relations”, begins this captivating essay on the dangers of our hyper-connected world.

 

It is a small book with a simple idea: the connections that bring the world together also divide it. In a world in which war between nuclear powers is too dangerous even to contemplate, countries manage conflicts by manipulating the things that bind them together. The policy of the superpowers has become like a loveless marriage between two people who can no longer stand each other, but cannot get divorced. And as for unhappy couples, it is the things we shared in the good times that become the tools of suffering in the bad times. In a marriage that is breaking down, vindictive partners use the children, the dog and the holiday home to hurt each other. In geopolitics, it is trade, finance, the movement of people, pandemics, climate change and, most of all, the Internet that are weaponised. And (…) it is connectivity itself that gives people the opportunity to fight, the reasons to go up against each other and the arsenal to deploy”, explains Leonard, who adds that “in the last two decades, fewer than 70,000 people have been killed every year on average in military conflicts (based on data from the conflict research centre of Uppsala: Ed), while millions have suffered from wars of connectivity”.

 

Globalisation has literally connected us: 64 million kilometres of motorways; 2 million kilometres of pipelines; 1.2 million kilometres of railways; 750,000 kilometres of Internet cables under the sea. By contrast, we are separated by just 250,000 kilometres of international borders. 20 years back, fewer than 16 million people were connected, but half of humanity now is (and in 2022, the connected population could rise to 6 billion). Every day, nearly 1.5 billion people connect to Facebook and 500 million tweets are posted on Twitter”, the author points out, underlining the scope of a phenomenon which, in the absence of adequate regulation, offers an unlimited battlefield anybody choosing to use it against states or against legal or natural people.

 

In a chapter dedicated to the connectedness of people, Leonard shows how the Internet promotes the development of micro-communities, the segregation and self-segregation of individuals, the polarisation and fragmentation of society. He also stresses that social media encourages the disinhibition of individuals and promotes behaviour and discourse that the individual would once have repressed. The author also lists the dangers of artificial intelligence, particularly once it escapes direct human control, due to the disconnect between intelligence and moral conscience. By whatever procedure they learn, robots are incapable of evaluating the consequences of their actions or taking account of the collateral effects when making a decision.

 

In the world of business, Amazon, Facebook, Uber and Airbnb have overturned the traditional hierarchies, such as retailers, newspapers, hotel chains and taxi firms. They have empowered hundreds of millions of people, but at the same time, they have concentrated an enormous amount of power in their platforms. The same thing happens in politics, where single-party systems like the Chinese Communist Party and Putin’s Kremlin have been built up rather than weakened by the Internet. In connected systems, power is characterised both by a deep concentration and mass distribution (…). Globalisation has not made the world flat, but has created a new topography of power. Some countries are more connected than others and can use these connections to reinforce their power and prestige, and even make weapons of them”, the author writes, identifying seven strategies that have already been put into use by the “strongest warriors of connectivity”: (1) centrality: getting into a situation in which others are dependent on you so that you can dictate your conditions; this, for instance, is what Russia tries to do with the energy markets; (2) controlling access: used, for instance, by the United States to exclude Iran from the international financial system; (3) data collection; (4) subversion, for instance Russian disinformation campaigns; (5) infiltration, Turkey’s favourite game, using Turkish minorities in Europe and China with its columns in Africa; (6) setting standards (Internet domain names for the United States, GDPR for the EU); (7) the quest for independence, which is more a defensive game, as per what China is trying to do at the moment with semiconductors and chip cards.

 

Leonard recommends dealing with the insecurity generated by the development of connections in five stages. Politicians should first of all become mindful of the situation and the effects suffered by the populations and take account of these. Then, clear limits must be set out in internal policy, on everything from artificial intelligence to multiculturalism, for instance. At international level as well, the states must agree on minimum rules of behaviour in order to make connectivity safe, similar to those set in place after the invention of aviation and the atomic bomb. But “although it is right to recognise the vulnerabilities of Western democracies to the manipulations of States such as Russia or China, I feel the greatest challenge to the liberal order comes from inside our divided societies”, writes the author, adding: “the generational challenge for internationalist leaders is to reform their national systems of education, healthcare, social protection (…) and their industrial policies to produce wealth and distribute it fairly”. Also stressing that the age of troubles in which we are living differs greatly from the Cold War, in that the effects of connectivity are felt in the daily lives of our contemporaries, Leonard finally calls on senior politicians to increasingly seek the assent of the people to the policies set in place. (OJ)

 

Mark Leonard. The Age of Unpeace – How Connectivity Causes Conflict. Bantam Press. ISBN: 978-1-7876-3466-4. 230 pages. €18,00

 

Diplomacy and Artificial Intelligence

 

Volker Stanzel and Daniel Voelsen. Diplomacy and Artificial Intelligence – Reflections on Practical Assistance for Diplomatic Negociations. Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP). 20 janvier 2022. ISSN : 2747-5123. The study can be downloaded free of charge, in English or German, from the website of the Institute: http://www.swp-berlin.org

Contents

INSTITUTIONAL
Russian invasion of Ukraine
SECTORAL POLICIES
EXTERNAL ACTION
ECONOMY - FINANCE - BUSINESS
NEWS BRIEFS
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