EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE FOR EU DEMOCRACY

Author : Heather Grabbe, Director of the Open Society European Policy Institute.

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The European Union’s dwindling democratic legitimacy is an acute political challenge. Trust in EU institutions is declining even in countries where the union once had high levels of support. Populist parties are rising and turning against the EU. To restore its legitimacy, the EU needs to respond to public apathy and anger with emotional intelligence and to offer solutions that feel relevant to people outside the Brussels bubble.

How the EU Disappoints

• To ordinary citizens, EU institutions appear distant, elitist, and difficult to understand. The euro crisis has reinforced the trend toward EU-level technocratic solutions at the cost of democratic political deliberations.
• The EU has more accountability mechanisms than other levels of government in Europe, but the complexity of the system makes the union seem even more obscure and distant to citizens.
   
• Many of the great achievements of European integration benefit individuals and businesses that are already successful. The vulnerable parts of society see the EU as a threat to the remaining protective functions of the welfare state.
   
• Giving more powers to the European Parliament cannot solve the problem. Parliamentary elections consist of parallel campaigns in each EU country that are dominated by national politics. As long as that persists, the European Parliament cannot fully connect citizens to the EU.

Ways the EU Can Rebuild Trust

• Upgrade technology to enable greater citizen participation. The European Parliament needs to connect with citizens through cyberspace to put itself at the heart of transnational public debates. EU institutions could interact with national parliaments more systematically and engage directly with local and regional public assemblies by using Internet-based technologies. Citizens would engage more if they knew about opportunities for direct and web-based participation and had access to deliberative mechanisms.
• Provide more ways for citizens to have their grievances addressed at the EU level. The protection of individuals’ rights at the EU level has become much stronger in recent years, but the public is largely unaware of these efforts and sees rights as mainly applying to minorities. The EU should widen access to justice and ensure more consistent protection of fundamental rights—and better explain these opportunities to citizens.
• Deliver more security and better living standards to citizens, especially to the people who feel left behind by globalization. If the EU became associated with safety nets for citizens, not just austerity and fiscal discipline, it would enjoy greater support. Well-targeted, EU-level schemes to ensure job opportunities and minimum unemployment insurance would go a long way toward reassuring citizens.

How the Citizen Experiences EU Democracy Today

In 2014, well over half of the European Union’s (EU’s) citizens found the European Parliament (EP) elections so boring and irrelevant that they stayed at home. One in four of those who did bother to vote chose populist and anti-EU parties. The EP’s election slogan was “this time it’s different.” To citizens, it felt like more of the same.

Politicians in Europe are out of touch with the voters. The critical component—how citizens experience democracy at the EU level—is not considered often enough in debates about the EU’s democratic future. Disappointing experiences have driven voters to anger or apathy.

To restore its legitimacy, the EU needs to respond to that anger and apathy with emotional intelligence. Proposals for reforming the EU should be judged by whether they affect the experience of democracy as felt by citizens.

Europeans have experienced frustrations about democracy, no matter their socioeconomic status. They find local and national politics annoying and unresponsive to their needs, hopes, and fears. The EU should be able to help them, in theory; but in practice it seems faraway, top-down, technocratic, obscure, unfair, and unaccountable. Some of these problems are perceptions that are not matched by reality, but others are very real. A look at what has driven EU voters to anger or apathy highlights innovations that would improve how the EU touches citizens’ daily lives and the many ways in which individuals interact with EU-level politics.

Some of the EU’s flaws can be remedied, but others are intrinsic to the design of European integration. The EU does not have the democratic polity of a nation-state. The disconnect from direct democracy is to a large extent hardwired into systems of supranational governance. Any institution that was created to forge consensus among governments will necessarily be at one remove from the people who elect them. When national leaders make decisions collectively, they inevitably seem unfair in different ways to different voters.

The euro crisis has made the democratic disconnect more than a theoretical issue for millions of citizens because they have experienced the negative economic impact of EU-level decisions in their daily lives. They feel angry about decisions, such as austerity measures, that they consider to be unfair, harsh, or overly burdensome. They have not experienced much on the positive side to counterbalance all the bad news from the EU about the crisis.

Usually defenders of the EU argue that it has already delivered great benefits to all its citizens for more than half a century through peace, stability, and prosperity. This is a huge and important truth. But these gains are taken for granted now; they can no longer sustain popular support for a top-heavy political system. The EU has problems with both input and output legitimacy.

Politicians and institutions should become more emotionally intelligent about how they engage citizens—not just by showing that they sympathize, but by making incremental changes, however small, that enhance the benefits of European integration as experienced by ordinary people. If voters truly felt that politicians took them seriously, their confidence in the system would rise. They need to feel their voice is heard on issues they care about and to see personal and individual benefits from European integration.

Individual Europeans  today expect better quality of service, more responsiveness to their needs from the private and public sectors, and obvious personal gains. They also expect more direct involvement in the European project than their grandparents had when it began in the 1950s, and are less deferential than older generations. These sophisticated consumers want a more user-friendly experience of politics. But politicians and institutions have not caught up with them.

Europeans should improve what they have, not reject the EU completely because it is flawed. The debate between those for and those against the EU is based on false dichotomies: either the EU deserves uncritical support, or it is hopeless and doomed. Neither is true.

The EU has many flaws and needs reform. But to attempt a major institutional overhaul of the EU now, on the tail end of a huge internal crisis and while facing major external challenges, would be unwise. Instead, step-by-step improvements should pave the way to building public support gradually by changing how citizens experience the EU.

Giving the European Parliament more powers will not be a silver bullet that brings more democracy to this complicated polity. And the innovations of the Spitzenkandidaten and a grand coalition in the European Parliament could make the institutions feel more remote and elitist to citizens. Attempts to replicate national models of democracy at the EU level could achieve the opposite of their aims because the structure of the EU is fundamentally different from a national democracy.

The EU’s greatest weakness is the constant ebbing of public support, so any remedies need to be emotionally intelligent—they need to be felt positively by ordinary citizens in their daily lives. Individuals need to see the EU adding value by compensating for the shortcomings of their national governments. The greatest value of European integration is that it helps national governments move beyond short-term mind-sets, vested interests, and disjointed policies. For the average voter, that means the EU tackles long-term problems like combating climate change, terrorism, overcoming special interests through fair application of regulations, and countering security threats.

The vital elements of a strategy that would meet the specific conditions of a supranational polity and improve people’s experience of the union are stronger engagement and outreach to link EU-level decisionmaking with the many areas of democratic life in Europe. The European Parliament needs to connect with citizens through cyberspace to turn itself into the locus of transnational public debates. It also needs to interact with national parliaments more systematically. The rise of regionalism is an opportunity for the EU to engage directly with local and subnational public assemblies.

But the most satisfying experiences of democracy are those that citizens themselves enjoy. The EU should greatly expand the opportunities for direct, individual participation, rather than continuing to rely on representative bodies. The broader crisis of representative democracy across Europe makes it impossible for the EU to continue using umbrella organizations based in Brussels. Instead, it needs to create deliberative mechanisms and Internet-based engagement for many more citizens.

The EU could do a lot more to show that it is fair and protects individuals’ rights. Protections at the EU level have become much stronger over time, but the public is largely unaware of them or sees them as mainly applying to minorities. The EU should widen access to justice and guarantee more consistent protection of fundamental rights—and ensure that citizens better understand these opportunities.

No remedy to the EU’s many ills will work unless the union delivers better and fairer benefits to citizens, especially to the people who feel left behind by globalization and cosmopolitan politics. One of the features of twenty-first-century life that most distresses European citizens is the sense of lost security, employment, pensions, and the welfare state more broadly. If the EU became associated with safety nets for citizens, not just austerity and fiscal discipline, it would enjoy much greater popular support. The provision of social security in general has to stay at the national level because countries have different cultures and social contracts. However, well-targeted, pan-European schemes at the EU level that provide job opportunities and minimum unemployment insurance would go a long way in reassuring citizens.

Some ideas:

1. Get MEPs Into Cyberspace
2. Turn the EP Into the Focal Point for Transnational Public Debate
3. Reach Citizens Through National and Regional Institutions
4. Give a Higher Profile to Parliamentary Scrutiny Committees
5. Give National Parliaments the Right to Suggest EU-Level Action
6. Invite MEPs to Address National Parliaments
7. Have Commissioners addressed national parliaments on their areas of responsibility more often
8. Give National Parliamentarians a Role in Eurozone Oversight
9. Create New Mechanisms to Involve Regional and Local Authorities in EU Decisionmaking
10. Strengthen and Publicize the Right to Petition
11. Invest in Deliberative Mechanisms
12. Make It Easier for Individuals to Access the European Courts
13. Allow Public Interest Action on Human Rights
14. Make Infringement Proceedings More Transparent
15. Implement the Youth Guarantee More Ambitiously
16. Move Ahead With the European Unemployment Insurance Scheme
17. Make It Easier to Work in Other EU Countries