EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY AND VARIABLE GEOMETRY

Extract from an essay written by Josef Janning of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP)

“As euroskepticism grows, the EU desperately needs to address the democratic deficit between its institutions and citizens. While the European Parliament may appear the right forum, its effectiveness is limited by its inherent restraints and the issues compounded by a variable-speed Europe. To represent integrated states and their citizens fairly, building an EP core may be the only way forward – with such a change affecting not only EU institutional balance, but also relations between core and non-core states. How can the democracy problem of European integration be solved as the EU develops a more variable geometry or multiple speeds?

Even if a theoretical solution is unattainable, it might be possible to find a practical fix for the democracy puzzle of national parliaments and their European counterpart, of executives as legislators, of demos and state, majority voting and representation. After all, to most Europeans, the mode of electoral governance they are satisfied with is what democracy means to them. Around the EU, this could mean rather different modes or organization. Opinions seem to converge around two essentials – the political system is built on choices voters make in elections and it delivers by and large to their expectations.

In times of crises, trust in policy makers and legitimacy of their institutions is put to a test. It shows how much public support is essentially built on output, on results measured against expectations. On the European level, output legitimacy seems to be even more crucial than within member states. While the EU has also enjoyed a good level of diffused support over the past decades, its approval rating has fallen dramatically over the past five crisis-riddled years.

Output performance is weak, trust is shrinking, and, as a result, the deficit in democracy on the European level is a serious problem. Disaffected citizens around Europe denounce the EU’s decision making as undemocratic and along these lines turn against national parliaments for not being able to stop Brussels. The lack of credible European democracy weakens trust in democratic governance at home. Maybe not surprisingly, the European Parliament (EP) has not been at the center of the debate. The trust crisis has not turned public attention to it; understandably, given the very limited impact the EP has on eurozone crisis management. What is more, many in the public perceive the EP pushing Europe rather than truly representing their interests – a dilemma with which the EP has not yet come to terms.

Many Europeans still view the EU primarily as a political space for intergovernmental bargaining and compromise. Since its supranational features were and are also based on intergovernmental consensus, even these thicker layers of integration could be interpreted in such categories. In this view, the role of the EP appears somewhat obscure: Clearly, the EP is part of the checks and balances of the EU system, but it can hardly be seen as a genuine democratic representation of the citizens of the Union. For this to be true, the EP would have to be based on a single and equal election law, guarantee the equality of the vote, and possess the right of initiative, including budgetary authority. In reality, the EP represents an abstract idea rather than specific people; it stands for the “European idea” as seen by a mostly bipartisan majority of its members vis-à-vis the Commission’s interpretation of the European idea as expressed in the treaties, or the Council’s version of the European idea as the aggregated consensus among member state interests. It would be rather difficult to establish a clear link between votes in the EP and the political preferences and choices of the majority of European citizens.

On the other hand, national parliaments face their own difficulties in assuring full democratic legitimacy of EU decision making. Not only does EU legislation require more expertise and attention from national parliamentarians than many are willing to offer, their role is also constrained by the binding effect of package deals and logrolling in the Council of Ministers or the European Council of Heads of State and Government, the procedures of which are still not transparent to members of national parliaments. Also, qualified majority voting (QMV) in the Council limits impact of national parliaments, because the positions of governments based on their majority in their national parliament can be outvoted on the EU level. In that sense, QMV changes the nature of the game. Instead of representing the sovereigns of member states (i.e. the citizens of each member state represented by their respective parliaments), the Council formations have mutated from a collective of sovereigns to an abstract sovereign. Not even the reform of the weighting of votes under the Lisbon Treaty could reestablish the clear link between a majority in the Council and a majority of Europeans.

Against this background, multiple speeds or variable geometry add a further layer of complications to the EU’s democratic legitimacy. Understood as deeper integration by most or many member states within the framework of the EU, variable geometry represents an opt-in strategy as opposed to à la carte practices of opting out. It poses a new problem and deepens an old one: new is the issue of the EU-28 institutions performing tasks within areas that do not affect all member states. And with the eurozone bailout decisions, the problems of democratic accountability and public scrutiny in policy areas of deeper integration have reached a new scale.

Why does this matter? Mainly because the ongoing crisis management within the eurozone drives variable geometry forward by deepening integration among its members and – as with the fiscal compact – among member states at-large, while at the same time the British government seeks renegotiation of its treaty obligations and considers further opt-outs for itself and other member states. In a more general sense, the current treaty framework offers more options than ever before for member states to go ahead with “more Europe” using the flexibility clauses in general, or the instrument of “permanent structured cooperation” in the field of security and defense policies.

It’s the density of integration, its allocation of more power to the Union level, and the state-like quality of the EU, which requires an adequate level of accountability and control. This looks like the perfect assignment for the EP, which has repeatedly criticized the Commission and the Council for their crisis management and for marginalizing the role of the EP. However, should the EP with its deputies from all member states scrutinize decisions affecting only participating member states? In other words, should British, Swedish, Danish, or Romanian MEPs provide legitimacy for decisions on the euro directly affecting the French or Spanish, while the same issues may be highly controversial in the national parliaments of these countries?

In the EP, the response is a firm “yes,” if only to avoid a regression of the body to its pre-1979 status (before the first direct elections) of an assembly of the people. So far, the EP does not seem to want to apply the Council’s practice of "non-in" or "pre-in" member states participating in debates on eurozone issues and even chairing such debates as part of the rotating presidency, but not taking part in voting. Even this pragmatic approach has limits, though. The Eurogroup has its own format on the Council level; the European Council has followed and also established a special format and presidency exclusive to the participating member states. Given the sensitivity of fiscal crisis management, the incentives to keep the participation to the countries involved are likely to grow further.

After the elections in May 2014, many in the EP themselves might reconsider their present preference in light of the many euroskeptic faces in their midst. The euro crisis has given rise to rather populist parties and new movements in many member states. The next EP could well be the most euroskeptic since 1979. Thus much speaks for thinking about ways to conceive of an EP with variable geometry. One option would be to have all MEPs participate in eurozone debates with voting restricted to MEPs from participating countries, and thus to supersede the affiliation by party alliances with member state representation. An alternative could be to create a special body within the EP to perform democratic oversight for every issue area of variable geometry, allowing MEPs from participating countries only, possibly adding to them delegates of respective national parliaments. A third approach could be to create a full parliamentary body alongside the European Parliament. This could become almost unavoidable if and when the deepening of integration would be based on a new legal footing not covering all EU member states, i.e. if Europe should head more in the direction of a "two Europe" scenario instead of more variable geometry.

All of these options would affect the institutional balance within the EU. The EP’s link to the European Commission would weaken (unless one would also foresee a separate Commission for a comprehensive opt-in project based on the euro). Likewise, the prospect of a Commission as a democratically accountable EU executive would be obscured, at a time when the EU’s party groupings are considering running their campaigns with leading candidates who would claim the presidency of the Commission for the winning side. What is more, these options could also negatively affect the EP’s own transition from its current stage of representing an abstract "European interest" vis-à-vis aggregated government interests to representing the people as citizens of the European Union. If the principal task of the EP is to ensure a strengthening of democracy on the European level, this will require connecting with its citizens and scrutinizing the executive. On both, the EP’s current balance sheet is meager, not only because of its institutional constraints, but also because of its self-definition.

Thus, variable geometry and democratic legitimacy don’t go together well in the European Union. Three paths offer reconciliation of the growing tension between deeper integration, asynchronicity, and public scrutiny. First, a deepening of integration could rely primarily on intergovernmental agreements outside the existing treaties, legitimized by output alone, resulting in even more executive federalism than exists today. Second, progressing integration could bring about a chamber of national parliaments. This would raise the issue of the role of the Council of Ministers as the legislative body representing the member states in the emerging two-chamber system of EU legislation; or it could call into question the EP’s role if national parliaments had to provide democratic control. Third, deeper integration could depart from variable geometry and follow instead the approach of concentric circles, creating a core Europe based on its own institutions on the legislative and the executive side. The outcome would be a duplication of European institutions, including two parliaments on the European level – an odd perspective with regard to public understanding and support of policymaking on the European level. This double parliament would likely result in a marginalization of the parliamentary body of the outer ring, even if the two bodies had overlapping membership (members of the core parliament would at the same time be members of the wider body). A similar issue would arise for the European Commission.

Given the integration needs of the eurozone and the lack of consensus on these needs in the EU at-large, building a core could become the only way to move forward. Democratic accountability for these core states would entail special institutions for these members (at least on the parliamentary side). But this, in turn, would marginalize those outside of the core as well as wider EU institutions, which would reinforce centrifugal tendencies within the Union.”