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How Democratic Is the EU? Transcript How Democratic is the EU? Dr Andreas Rödder Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz Gisela Stuart Chair, Change Britain Chair: Hans Kundnani Senior Research Fellow, Europe Programme, Chatham House 25 September 2019 The views expressed in this document are the sole responsibility of the speaker(s) and participants, and do not necessarily reflect the view of Chatham House, its staff, associates or Council. Chatham House is independent and owes no allegiance to any government or to any political body. It does not take institutional positions on policy issues. This document is issued on the understanding that if any extract is used, the author(s)/speaker(s) and Chatham House should be credited, preferably with the date of the publication or details of the event. Where this document refers to or reports statements made by speakers at an event, every effort has been made to provide a fair representation of their views and opinions. The published text of speeches and presentations may differ from delivery. © The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2019. 10 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LE T +44 (0)20 7957 5700 F +44 (0)20 7957 5710 www.chathamhouse.org Patron: Her Majesty The Queen Chairman: Stuart Popham QC Director: Dr Robin Niblett Charity Registration Number: 208223 2 How Democratic is the EU? Hans Kundnani Good afternoon, welcome to Chatham House. Welcome back to those of you who are regulars. Just before I get going, some – just some housekeeping points. This event is on the record and it’s being livestreamed, so welcome as well, to those who are watching online. Please put your phones on silent and, because it’s on the record, you can tweet. We encourage you to tweet, using the hashtag #CHEvents or #CHDemTech, which is the hashtag for the project on democracy and technology in Europe, which as some of you know, I’ve been leading. We’ve been having a lot of discussions around the, sort of, technology part of that. We’ve had discussions on digital parties and on social media, and so on. Today we’re going to focus on a different aspect of democracy in Europe, and that’s the specific question of where the EU fits into the picture, as it were, of democracy in Europe. I should explain the slight change in our speakers. Some of you would have been expecting Sarah Ludford. She unfortunately had a death in her family last night, and Gisela Stuart very kindly, at extremely short notice, agreed to step in. I just emailed her literally an hour or two ago, and couldn't think of a better replacement, so thank you very much, Gisela, for joining us [applause]. Gisela, I think, needs no introduction at all for this audience. She’s the Chair of Change Britain, which is the successor organisation to the official Leave campaign in the 2016 Referendum. She was a Labour MP from 1997 to 2017 and a Minister in the Blair Government, and she’s the Chair of Wilton Park. Andreas Rödder, to my left, is a prolific and wide-ranging Historian at the University of Mainz, also a very influential figure in the Christian Democrats. He and I go back a long way, and in particular, we both took part, or, actually, Andreas organised a conference, five or six years ago, in Berlin, which was extremely eye opening for me about German Euroscepticism and some of the similarities and differences between that and British Euroscepticism. At some point, we may get into that. He’s also written, very interestingly – we had an ongoing conversation, actually, about German power in Europe, and your most recent book is about conservatism is a, sort of, new manifesto as it were for conservatism. So, the essay question we’ve put is, How democratic is the EU? Obviously, this is a very live issue, in this country, in the context of Brexit. It seems to me that the Leave side of the argument, this has been one of the central arguments on the Leave side, that the EU is undemocratic, anti-democratic. The Remain side, it seems to me, has had less to say about this issue and has tended to focus on some of the other benefits of EU membership, like, above all, the economic benefits, but perhaps we can start with you, Andreas. What is the right way to think about the relationship between the EU and democracy? Is the EU democratic? Is it undemocratic? Is it non-democratic, as Peter Mayer, the Irish Political Scientist, put it? What’s the right way to think about the relationship between the EU itself and democracy? Dr Andreas Rödder I would say the EU is no – at least no parliamentary democracy, and at the same time, I would say it does not have a democratic deficit, and I would like to explain this, even if it seems like a contradiction to you. So, the question is, why is the EU not a democracy, why is it not a Parliamentary democracy? And I think there are at least four reasons for that. The first reason is that it consists of two threads of legitimation. The one is the intergovernmental thread, going from the electorate via the elected governments of the member states to the European Council. This is the one thread, and the other thread of legitimation is the supranational level, which means this legitimation goes from the electorate to the European Parliament to the Parliament. 3 How Democratic is the EU? So, this is a very specific construction, these two threads of legitimation, and having said that, this leads us to the second reason. This Parliament, which forms the second thread of legitimation, is not the Sovereign of the Government, and I think this is pretty crucial, since that the Parliament decides about the Government is essential for a parliamentary system. So, what we saw was that the European Parliament tried to take over this crucial right of a Parliament in a parliamentary system, to decide on the Government, by the system of the so-called [mother tongue – 05:15], which you all know remained a very German word in the European integration history. So, what the Parliament tried to do was to transform the European Union, the whole construction into a more parliamentary system by assuming the right to designate the Government by the Parliament. In a certain way, this worked in 2014. It was a coup, which was fabricated by Jean-Claude Juncker and Martin Schulz, but as we saw, it did not work in 2019, and this was really crucial, since the proof of this constitutional innovation of assuming rights for the European Parliament would have been the repeating of this procedure in 2019. It did not happen, so – but the European Council took back the right to designate the Head of the Commission. So, this was, kind of, rollback of power to the European Council. And there is another argument. Even if the European Parliament had succeeded, it would have won the right to decide not about the European Government, since the European Commission is not similar to a Government in a parliamentary system, but the European Commission is what is called the keeper of the treaties, and sometimes it might be the mover of integration. But first of all, it is competing with the European Council, and as experience teaches, in times of crisis, its influence is pushed back by the Council, as we, for example, saw in the Euro debt crisis. So, you can say that the European Council still is the master of the state of emergency, and as a German this is quoting Carl Schmitt, “Being the master of the state of emergency is the same as the famous definition of the Sovereign.” So, what we are having is a very, very complicated construction, in terms of legitimation and in terms of functioning, which is perfect fodder for Constitutional Lawyers, which means particularly for German Constitutional Lawyers, and I think this was one of the most interesting experiences for you to realise what German constitutional experts are thinking and talking about. And I’ll leave it up to you whether you prefer the German Constitutional Court’s word of the so-called staatenverbund, and we’ll get back to that, or whether you prefer the traditional wording of Samuel Pufendorf, his saying about the old holy Roman Empire, which he characterised as ‘an irregular body looking like a monster’. In a certain way this is still true for the European Union. The third non-democratic peculiarity of the EU, I would say, is the elective franchise for the European Parliament, and the problem is not only – or the – not only the problem, but the point is not that there are different national franchises, but the specific is the principle of the so-called degressive proportionality, which means that due to the different size of member states, a member of the European Parliament for Malta represents some 70,000 inhabitants, while a member of European Parliament from Germany represents 830,000 inhabitants, which is a difference by a factor of 12. So, some say, “Okay, not a problem, this is the same principle as we have it in the Senate of the US. This is due to the principle of the representation of states.” Yes, and this indeed is true for Chambers of States, and it’s true for the European Council, it’s true for the Council of the ECP for the European Court. It’s also true for the German Bundesrat and for the US Senate, but this, the Chamber of State, is not the standard of comparison for the first Chamber, or the Chamber of Representatives.
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