Europe's Crisis, Europe's Future

Visions for Europe: Democratic Legitimacy and EU Institutions

176 The Europe that emerged from the catastrophic first half of the twentieth century was like a dream come true. It embodied a transformative vision, it opened the way for decades of peace and prosperity; it first imagined, and then created, strong institutions. For a long time it had democratic legitimacy, not because the nature of the decisionmaking mechanisms as such augmented democracy, but because the broad vision at the top was broadly in line with the aspirations and the understanding of the citizens. The perceived decline in “democratic legitimacy” of the European institutions is due to a growing gap between what the citizens of Europe can understand, follow, debate, and take into account when voting, and the decisions and policies of their leaders and parliaments. Such a gap in contemporary governance is not unique to the EU; it exists at all national levels to various degrees. The gap has become extreme, however, in the case of the EU and unfortunately has been reinforced too many times by national politicians blaming the “complex EU bureaucracy” for things that go wrong at home. The building of European institutions started when the six original countries signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957. At this writing in late 2013, there are twenty-eight members of the European Union, and about ten additional countries in close association, many of them prospective members, many relatively small such as Serbia, Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland, to name a few, but Visions for Europe: Democratic Legitimacy and EU Institutions kemal derviş 9 democratic legitimacy and eu institutions 177 also the much larger Turkey, which started formal membership negotiations in 2005. The United Kingdom, a full but reluctant member, wants to “renegotiate” the terms of its membership. The latest European Treaty was put in place in 2009 following the failure to ratify the proposed European Constitution. The Treaty of Lisbon represented a valiant attempt to adapt the European institutions to the new EU with close to thirty members, but it still carries the heritage of a structure put in place when there were many fewer member states. The eurozone crisis led to an even greater level of institutional complexity: the creation of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the various stabilizing initiatives of the European Central Bank (ECB) (Long-Term Refinancing Operation 1, Long-Term Refinancing Operation 2, and Outright Monetary Transactions) (Draghi 2012a), and even a new intergovernmental treaty, outside of formal EU “law,” to allow some further steps toward a more integrated eurozone, without having to have the United Kingdom sign up to them.1 With each enlargement, with each new treaty, and with each new mechanism to help Europe fight the crisis, the complexity of governance in the EU has increased. With increased complexity has come an increasing inability of the average citizen to understand how this governance works or is intended to work. It is not that in a formal sense democratic legitimacy has decreased. Each step forward could only be implemented with the approval of the democratic processes within the European democracies, although some decisions can be taken by weighted voting. The European Council assembles democratically elected governments. There have been gray areas at times, as we saw in the worries and deliberations of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany in Karlsruhe. There have not been, and cannot be, however, purely technocratic agreements in Brussels that are not endorsed by the national political processes , even if by delegation and sometimes without the need for unanimity. Some agreements, moreover, are subject to formal approval by the European Parliament. Legitimacy and Visions for Europe Legitimacy has a legal dimension, but in politics it is even more about perception. Legitimacy comes from acceptance. The need for a clear and broadly accepted vision is crucial, therefore, for greater legitimacy. Such a vision existed in the 1. The Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union is available at http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_DOC-12-2_en.htm. 178 kemal derviş 1950s and 1960s: a vision of irreversible peace on the continent, after the horrors of two World Wars. Linked to that vision of peace was a vision of shared economic prosperity, which began to be realized by the late 1950s and gained momentum in the 1960s. These linked visions of peace and prosperity continued to be strong drivers in the 1970s and 1980s, and they were the source of the acceptance and legitimacy...