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Popular Democracy and the European Union Polity EUROPEAN GOVERNANCE PAPERS No. C-05-03 Peter Mair PopularAndreas Democracy Follesdal and and the Simon European Hix Union Polity EUROGOV is funded by the EU´s 6th Framework Programme, Priority 7 European Governance Papers EUROGOV ISSN 1813-6826 http://www.connex-network.org/eurogov/ The European Governance Papers are a joint enterprise by Date of publication: May 18, 2005 Popular Democracy and the European Union Polity © 2005 Peter Mair Peter Mair – Department of Political Science, Leiden University [email protected] Citing this EUROGOV paper: Mair, Peter. 2005. Popular Democracy and the European Union Polity. European Governance Papers (EUROGOV) No. C-05-03, http://www.connex- network.org/eurogov/pdf/egp-connex-C-05-03.pdf. © Each EUROGOV Paper and its format and content (texts, images, data etc.) are protected by legislation on Intellectual Property, and may not be used, reproduced, distributed, modified, publicly disclosed, conveyed or transformed in any other way without the explicit permission of the Author(s). The common scientific citation is exempted from these property rights. - 2 - Peter Mair: Popular Democracy and the European Union Polity Abstract Although we still celebrate the late twentieth-century ‘victory of democ- racy’, our understanding of what democracy entails in both theory and practice is increasingly subject to a variety of qualifying definitions, many of which now seem to devalue the role of elections and electoral account- ability. This is also obviously seen in the politics of the European Union, where the efforts to displace conflict dimensions into arenas where democ- ratic authority is lacking, as well as the efforts to depoliticize issues that relate to European integration, have led to the development of a distinct political system in which the exercise of popular control and electoral ac- countability proves very difficult. At the same time, the EU should not be seen as exceptional in this regard, but should instead be seen as symp- tomatic of a wider process of depoliticization. As the experience of the EU suggests, the combination of popular democracy and legitimacy is proving increasingly problematic - not only in Europe, but also further afield. Keywords: constitutional change, democracy, Europeanization, governance, legitimacy, non-majoritarian institutions, political parties, political representation, polity building Table of Contents 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 4 2 Being safe for, or from, democracy.................................................................. 4 3 The EU polity ...................................................................................................... 6 4 Politicization and displacement...................................................................... 10 5 Europeanization and depoliticization............................................................. 12 6 The puzzle of apolitical Europe....................................................................... 14 7 The EU as a construct ..................................................................................... 17 8 Conclusion........................................................................................................ 24 List of References .................................................................................................. 26 - 3 - Peter Mair: Popular Democracy and the European Union Polity 1 Introduction This paper seeks to locate the understanding of the European Union’s democratic deficit within the context of the more widespread drift towards forms of decision- making that eschew forms of electoral accountability and popular democratic control.1 I argue that despite its evident idiosyncracies, the EU should not be seen as particularly exceptional or sui generis, but should best be regarded as a political system that has been constructed by national political leaders as a safeguarded sphere in which policy making can evade the constraints imposed by representative democracy. The scale of the European construct may be unique and without precedent, but the rationale which lies behind it conforms closely to current thinking about the role of non-majoritarian institutions, on the one hand, and about the putative drawbacks of popular democracy, on the other. To study the EU in isolation is therefore to miss this wider, and increasingly relevant picture. As I suggest towards the end of the paper, rather than being seen as a special case, the EU can better be conceived as an outcome, or as the consequence of a longer developmental trajectory, in which the democratic process grows and mutates, and in which the mechanisms that allow democracy to function change and adapt. To put it another way, the fact that conventional forms of democracy and representative government are difficult to apply at the level of the EU is not so much exceptional as symptomatic, and if we could democratize the European Union along conventional lines, then we probably wouldn’t need it in the first place. 2 Being safe for, or from, democracy It is probably fair to say that the world is now more favourably disposed towards democracy than at any point in our history. Already by the year 2000, according to recent Freedom House figures, some 63 per cent of the independent regimes in the world, home to some 58 per cent of the world population, could be classified as democratic. Half-a-century earlier, despite the sometime optimism of postwar reconstruction, just 28 per cent of independent regimes had been classifiable as democratic, accounting for 31 per cent of the world population. Further back again, in 1900, there were no fully-fledged democratic regimes at all, with countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States combining widespread democratic practices in the exercise of public office with some quite severe restrictions on the scope of the franchise. In fits and starts, or in what some see as more or less sustained waves (Huntington 1991; Doorenspleet 2000), democracy in the past 100 years has therefore taken root, has blossomed, and has now finally become consolidated. Small wonder, then, that 1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the workshop on Sustainability and the Euro- pean Union at the ECPR Joint Sessions in Uppsala in April 2004, and to the Connex Workshop on Accountability, Legitimacy and Representation in Leiden in March 2005. I am grateful to participants in both workshops, and to an anonymous referee, for useful comments and encouragement. Work on this paper was facilitated by financial support from the Dutch Scientific Research Council (NWO), grant no. 403-01-006. - 4 - Peter Mair: Popular Democracy and the European Union Polity the twentieth-century has been deemed the ‘Democratic Century’,2 and celebrated as such. As Axel Hadenius (1997, 2) put it in his introduction to an end-of-century Nobel symposium: ‘the principles of democratic government…have been triumphing.’ More importantly perhaps, by the end of the century these principles seemed neither subject to challenge nor capable of being challenged. ‘After the fall of the Berlin wall’, noted Juan Linz (1997, 404) in the same symposium, ‘no anti-democratic ideology appeals to politicians, intellectuals, religious leaders…as an alternative to political democracy.’ Or, as Linz and Stepan (1996, 5) noted, borrowing a phrase from Giuseppe de Palma, democracy had finally become ‘the only game in town.’ But what sort of democracy was this? Even up to the 1980s, this might have sometimes seemed a bizarre question. Up to that point, and certainly during the peak years of the Cold War, the political world had been divided into three more or less simply defined categories: the first world, which was the capitalist world and which was also mainly, but not exclusively, a democratic world; the second world, which was the world of the Soviet Union and China, and which comprised the countries that were then under the communist sphere of influence; and the third world, which was courted and contested by both first and second worlds, and which was neither especially democratic nor powerful. Within this tripartite division, democracy was more or less just democracy, and while it was important for scholars and policy- makers to distinguish between democratic and non-democratic forms of government, and, especially in Cold War terms, to distinguish between different types of non- democracy, the democratic world itself tended to remain undifferentiated. This view eventually began to change in the 1980s, at least at the level of scholar- ship, with the shift in perspective been pushed along in part by the so-called ‘neo- institutional’ turn in political science. If the state was to be brought back in as an independent variable, and if institutions were to be used to explain individual behaviour and choice (e.g. Shepsle 1995), then it was obviously going to be necessary to highlight differences between institutions as well as between various forms of democracy: otherwise there would never be enough variation to weigh in the explanations. The shift in perspective was also helped by the influential work of Arend Lijphart, who had initially sought to identify a distinct democratic regime type, consociational democracy, and who later, in a widely cited book, specified the various institutional differences that could be associated with the contrasting majoritarian and consensus models of democracy (Lijphart 1984). It was only with
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