Governing the European Union, by Michele Boselli

4. To what extent can the European Union be described as “democratic”?

In order to debate to what extent can the European Union be described as democratic, first of all we have to define what is meant by “democratic”. Democratic governments as in a usually strong position in terms of legitimization because they enjoy the consent of the people who have elected them and through periodical elections have control of a system where politicians are responsible to take in consideration their needs and incentivated to do so. According to Simon Bromley, “in liberal-democratic states the scope and intensity of government is limited and at the same time guaranteed by the fact that it operates according to the constitutional rule of law, derives its authority and purposes from the rights of the people and is subject to democratic contestation through competitive party elections”. Christopher Lord, in Governing the European Union, reduces to just two the main attributes of such system of government, in which people essentially rule themselves: the public must be able to:

a) control the decision makers acting on its behalf; and

b) exercise such control on an egalitarian basis.

Parliaments usually have two ways of exercising control over executives: the power to appoint or dismiss important office-holders, which is weak in the case of the European Parliament (it may gain a role in executive formation only at some price to its independence), and the power to grant or withdraw financial resources through legislative authority, which by contrast is quite significant in the EP: on some supranational issues it even has the power of co-decision with the Council. There are, however, two deficiencies in this system: the most obvious is the that supranational issues are confined to the first, Community-pillar of the Union, so that it has no power of lawmaking or control over the second (defence and foreign affairs) and third (justice and home affairs) pillars. The second deficiency, reiterates Lord twice, is the absence of a credible electoral link: because the election of the EP is felt by national politicians and electorates as a “second-order electoral contest”, there is no systematic electoral linkage to the politics of representation (electoral outcomes cannot be interpreted as preferences for one or another manifesto on the prospective development of the Union over the following five years) or accountability (a judgement on the performance of the EU and the EP itself over the previous five).

“The EU lacks a source of authority in popular sovereignty” (Lewis) and we are focusing the attention on the European Parliament because it is undoubtedly the key existing institution we must refer to when meausing democracy in the EU. Although it was conceived to reflect national communities more than the citizens of Europe (as the over-representation of smaller member states demonstrates), and initially had little more than a symbolic function, over the years it has acquired more powers towards other EU institutions and their policies. However, it can exercise these powers only on a majority of its membership, not the majority of votes cast, therefore because there are always high levels of absenteeism, in order to produce an EU position on almost any policy the two major European parties (socialists on one side and Christian-democrats plus conservatives on the other) are forced to co-operate in a way that softens political competition and consequently determines the lack of contestation which ultimately is the salt of democracy.

However, not all the consociational politics (a notion introduced by Lijphart in 1977 to describe in a primarily intergovernmental context a form of consensual democracy made of joint decisions based on legislative coalitions, proportional distribution of executive power and veto procedures for important decisions) in the EU are necessarily negative: institutional mechanisms that force players to build consensus not only across member states but also across the political spectrum can be healthy for a new, transnational political system. Bearing in mind the three-dimensional structure constituted by political as well as national cleavages, the Union could run into legitimacy troubles if a major political family is always excluded from the advantages of integration. Moreover, a high degree of cross-party consensus on final decisions does not necessarily limit the possibility of a lively political debate in the committees of the EP studying and reporting to prepare final decisions on various matters. Then again, critics of the consensual processes will retort that “commitite” is instead one of the most evident demonstration of the EU democratic deficit. Take for instance the European Central Bank: obviously the choice of an economic system is also a political one, in need of legitimation as any form of political governance. But since efficient market regulation is a technical matter, regulation is not exactly a political activity, so in the regulatory sphere “independence and accountability can be reconciled by a combination of control mechanisms rather than by oversight exercised from any fixed place in the political spectrum” (Majone).

Instead, in the eminently political sphere, a response to the problem of lack of accountability might consist in giving the EP the power to choose the Commission or its President, but this can be neither practical nor desirable: in the current situation the fact that the Parliament has no obligation to support the Commission (like a majority should normally have in a national parliament in regard of a government in office), offers more freedom to the EP and the advantage that it is often able to put together legislative coalitions on a non-ideological basis where for MEPs losing on an issue does not mean they also lose the possibility to win on the next one debated. Given that strengthening the powers of the EU is not necessarily, as Lord insists, neither practicable nor desirable to the end of the EU further democratisation, the author introduces us to another possible, original and carefully balanced scenario in which “a direct popular election of the Commission President [is] immediately followed by an electoral college in which MPs and MEPs cast votes for individual Commissioners in direct ptoportion to the popular vote received by their parties in the first round of voting for the presidency”, offering the adbantage that a directly elected President would be held accountable by the electorate and at the same time his/her Commission would enjoy the widest popular support.

Would it be feasible? Let’s go back to the 1950s, when Haas developed neo-functionalism identifying three particular spillovers by which an unavoidable European integration would elude control of the member states: the technical spillover of policies from an area to others; the political spillover of attention from national to EU level by individuals, groups and businesses; and the geographical spillover towards non-member states. Indeed, half a century later we see hao enlargement is – with further democratisation -, the most important issue to be tackled in the building of Europe. Democracy and the rule of law constitute one of the three main conditions that applicants must satisfy to join the EU (the other two being a functional market economy and the acceptance into national law of the acquis communautaire). While most of the current member states have a lengthy record of well-established democracy, the communist experience puts the applicants in the position of being thoroughly examined: the potential new members have only recently adopted liberal-democratic political systems and of some relevance to their ambitions is the case of Spain, whose economic and democratic stability were more advanced but its accession took more than eight years.

Democracy could not necessarily be a compulsory feature of international organisation, intergovernmentalists argue, but if the EU is to become a 25 to 30 member states Union the current system of representation in the Parliament and particularly the Commission is certain to collapse. Too much dependence on the link between the Union, national institutions and domestic constituencies could even deepen what is seen by many as the much-debated EU democratic deficit. In conclusion, both intergovenmentalist and supranationalist advocates involved in the debate on to what extent the EU can be described as “democratic” will probably agree that, yes, the EU already have many, if not most, of the features and elements of democracy, but will certainly disagree on the measures to be taken in order to further democratise it, with the former more in favour of keeping the status quo and the latter arguing for a stronger European Parliament, the dict election of the President of the Commission (or indeed the President of Europe) and, last but not least, the introduction of euro-wide, Swiss-style referenda on particular matters to involve citizens in the consensus-building process. This is the trend bound to prevail, as over the time in the EU there has been a shift “from the indirect towards the more direct mode of legitimation; from performance as virtually the sole criterion towards issue of democracy and identity; fron inter-European élites to national populations as the addresses of legitimacy claims” (Beetham and Lord).