Do the European Union and the United Nations offer new forms of democratic governance?

By Michele Boselli

I certainly do agree that the EU and the UN offer new forms of democratic governance, for they are the most significant among few editing institutions that can be developed into new models of democracy in the globalization age, otherwise we would have to give up hope altogether that democracy will continue to thrive in human history by deepening where it already exists and expanding where it doesn’t yet. The European Union in particular is a unique, unprecedented experiment in the history of democracy, in being neither a nation-state nor, or not yet, a (con-)federation of nation-states, but rather a new form of democratic governance that we contemporary Europeans have the extraordinary opportunity to build and shape. Indeed, the term “governance”, rather than government, used in the formulation of the question hints to a much broader system than traditional governments, a system in which civil society interact with the institutions in order to fill the much-debated democratic deficit of the European Union.

Why does the EU suffer a democratic deficit? Usually, democratic governments are in a 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 and encouraged to take into consideration their needs. In Governing the European Union, Christopher Lord summarizes in just two the main attributes of the democratic system of government, in which people essentially must be able to: (a) control the decision makers acting on their behalf; and (b) exercise such control on an egalitarian basis. The EU lacks a source of authority in popular sovereignty and the European Parliament is the key existing institution we must refer to when measuring 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 a little more than symbolic functions, over the years it has acquired more powers towards other European institutions and their policies. Parliaments usually have two main 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, 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 of Ministers. There are, however, two deficiencies in this system: the most obvious is that supranational issues are confined in the first, Community-pillar of the Union, so that it has no power of law-making or control on the second (defense and foreign affairs) and third (justice and home affairs) intergovernmental pillars.

European federalists, or supranationalists as opposed to intergovernmentalists, advocate for a stronger European Parliament, the direct election of the President of the Commission (or indeed the President of Europe) and, last but not least, the introduction of Europe-wide, Swiss-style referenda on particular matters to involve citizens in the consensus-building process. in other words: the realization at regional (European) level of the cosmopolitan model of democracy discussed by David Held in chapter 20 of his Models of Democracy. Cosmopolitan democracy has several sources of participation instead of a single territorial basis: a pan-European Parliament, national assemblies, sub-state authorities and social movements offering alternatives to the de-democratizing effects of economic globalization. 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 legitimization; from performance as virtually the sole criterion towards issues of democracy and identity; from inter-European élites to national populations as the addresses of legitimacy claims" (Bentham and Lord, in Bromley et al, 2001, p. 301).

Cosmopolitan democracy, however, is not the only model contemporary political thinkers have articulated for the future of democracy, but "it combines aspects of both radical communitarism and liberal-internationalism" (McGraw, 1997, p. 252). the latter has its remote origin, as the name suggests, in the thinking of enlightment philosophers and liberal-democratic models from John Stuart Mill's developmental democracy to Robert Dahl's poliarchy, essentially supporting change through gradual reform of existing institutions. thus they foresee democratization at the global level by the creation of a People's Assembly (initially constituted by national MPs) and a Forum representing civil society, both associated with the UN General Assembly; and an Economic Security Council along the existing one. Radicals, on the other hand, rejects reform in favour of a new, alternative model implying a profound transformation of the present organization of socio-economic relations and the relevant existing institutions. Founding their theory on the political tradition beginning with Rousseau, then Marx, up to contemporary New Left, they propose a model of direct and participatory democracy known as demarchy, where representation is no longer linked to a specific territory but derives by common interests of a community, for example in transport, environment, health, education, etc. "[It] is a 'bottom-up' theory [...] of 'human governance' which is grounded in the existence of a multiplicity of 'communities of fate' and social movements as opposed to the individualism of liberal-internationalism [...]" (McGraw, 1997, p.249).

However, cosmopolitans, liberal-internationalists and radicals all share some common ground: they all accept that globalization challenges democracy as we know it, and they are consequently engaged in its deepening and broadening in the direction of global governance, but they all reject the idea of a world government. They are therefore belonging to the family of transformationalists, as opposed to the realist one, which believes that globalization in nothing new under the sun and simply proposes to tackle this challenge by transposing in a world government the analogous centralization and strengthening of the US government one century ago, when it faced a similar challenge by the growth of businesses, albeit on a national scale. Realists seek to improve the efficiency of the UN by making it more responsive to the interests of the great powers, which are the organization's main financial contributors, while the distinctive approach of cosmopolitans, liberal-internationalists and their vision of reform (or alternative) towards geo-governance clashes with the veto and financial power of the hegemonic states. Moreover, in the United Nations, as the institution of global governance par excellence, the situation is more complicated than that in the EU because of its global, rather than regional, scale, and by the fact that not all its member-states are consolidated democracies, let alone that in many cases democracy is a concept that do not even cross their governments' minds.

The two key issues creating tension between reform of the UN and its democratization, the financial one and the Security Council's composition and power of veto (so that the five major powers block reform), are not independent from each other but related between them, as Mark Imber exemplifies:

The city of New York spends more money trying to keep the peace on its streets than the UN has to spend on keeping the peace throughout the world. Now, what the statistics tell us is that there is an enormous gap between the UN expectations and the UN ability to deliver. I would therefore suggest that the true test of any reformer who approach the UN [...] is to ask them if they are prepared for the UN to take some independent financial resources of some kind [...] This would require the member states to go through a major change of conscience about the difference between whether they are prepared to regard, in the post-cold war world, the UN as remaining within restricted intergovernmental and limited for that it is now, which ultimately the Security Council powers can control, or whether the major powers are prepared to experiment with geo-governance in a more genuinely open form, in which case they should not be afraid of major international organizations taking certain independent financial powers...

For example, the most significant argument for adding Germany and Japan to the current five permanent members of the Security Council is that they are big financial contributors to the UN budget. But adding them (who were excluded as losing powers of the Second World War) would open the way for similar claims by other countries, on the basis of (a) military might (possession of nuclear weapons); and/or (b) industrialization and wealth, like Germany and Japan but other members of the G8 as well; and/or (c) sheer demography, the most notable case being India. But then Pakistan would claim the same treatment in "virtue" of possessing the atomic bomb, and another de facto nuclear power should be admitted: Israel. Italy would demand to be taken aboard as the only big European country left out, and Canada as the only one left out from the G8. Now that we have this North-biased Security Council (Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, UK, US, the current five in bold), the most obvious candidates to re-address the North-South balance would probably be Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico and Nigeria. But such 17-member Security Council is still unsatisfying: what about Argentina, Iran, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine...?

It is interesting to note that two EU member-states have permanent seats in the Security Council: Britain and France. It is difficult to imagine these two former super-powers coming to terms with their diminished role in representing less than one per cent each of the world population and relinquish their seats in the Security Council to the British Commonwealth and the European Union respectively. However, it is possible to imagine a third European seat belonging to the EU as a whole (minus Britain and France) rather than to its single member-states. Another permanent seat would be assigned to Africa (or Sub-Saharan Africa if simpler), thus forcing big countries such as Nigeria and South Africa to pool their foreign policies, this in turn hopefully leading to a greater co-operation in other fields and, ultimately, an African Union or United States of Africa. Even more likely to work would this model be in South America, where a common market already exist, while it will probably be more difficult to convince Arab nations to pool their efforts with Asian Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia. The resulting 11-seat Security Council (Sub-Saharan Africa, Arab/Muslim, Asean, China, EU, France, India, Mercosur, Russia, UK, US) would reflect a more balanced picture of contemporary world, with a relatively lighter European presence (27% instead of 40%), and still keeping the majority of consolidated democracies at no less than 55%, so that the power of veto could be abolished and resolutions taken by majority or qualified democracy of eight members.

This may seem a fantasy, but it "should be emphasized that it is a fantasy to imagine that one can advocate democracy today without engaging with the range of issues elaborated here", concludes Held about cosmopolitan democracy (Models, p.356). Ten years ago the International Criminal Court, a pillar in the cosmopolitan vision of democracy, was a fantasy too; but today, after having being recently ratified by the required number of at least 60 countries (thanks to the great effort of Non-Governmental Organizations under the umbrella of the Coalition for an International Criminal Court), it actually took off. And this little exercise of mine in the Security Council composition shows how the development of the European Union towards a new form of governance is needed not just for the sake of democracy in the EU itself, but it will be greatly beneficial for the United Nations as well, in paving the way for the new model of cosmopolitan democracy and setting an example for regional governance in other continents.

Reference:

- Bromley, et al., Governing the European Union, Sage Publications 2001

- Held, Models of Democracy, Polity Press 1996

- McGraw et al., The Transformation of Democracy?, Polity Press 1997