New Narrative for a New Europe - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1786608413 ISBN 13: 9781786608413

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (UK), 2018

Synopsis

According to the European Commission, Europe is facing a transversal crisis that obliges the rethinking and redefinition of its narrative. As a result of the economic crisis that has affected Europe during the past years, Europe has in turn faced a structural crisis that forces the reconsideration of its own existence. The foundation of the European project, the promises of Democracy and Human Dignity, need to be assessed. The internal crisis and global challenges require a paradigm shift to establish a new foundation upon which to keep those promises alive. This crisis is multidimensional: environmental, cultural, political, social, economic, etc. and the European Union should tackle it as such.

The book aims at contributing to that debate by offering a new conceptual approach to the core ideas of European integration process (sovereignty, diversity, common challenges, etc). By doing so, the edited volume settles the ground for some institutional and legal transformations that may reflect this new narrative for a new Europe.

About this title

About the Authors

Daniel Innerarity is Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Research Professor at the Basque Foundation for Science (IKERBASQUE) and Director of the Institute for Democratic Governance (Globernance).

Jonathan White is Professor of Politics at the European Institute, London School of Economics. Christina Astier is Researcher at Globernance – The Basque Institute for Democratic Governance (San Sebastián). Her research is mainly focused on global ethics, in particular global distributive justice, and the legitimacy of global governance institutions.

Cristina Astier is Researcher at the Basque Institute of Democratic Governance.

Ander Errasti is Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Barcelona.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A New Narrative for a New Europe

By Daniel Innerarity, Jonathan White, Cristina Astier, Ander Errasti

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2018 Daniel Innerarity, Jonathan White, Cristina Astier and Ander Errasti
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78660-841-3

Contents

Preface: The Need of a New Narrative for a New Europe Jonathan White and Daniel Innerarity, 
Introduction Cristina Astier and Ander Errasti, 
PART I: UNDERSTANDING THE NEW NARRATIVE, 
1 The European Union as a Complex Democracy Daniel Innerarity, 
2 Constitutional Narratives and the Future of Europe Alessandro Ferrara, 
3 European Democracy and the No-Demos Thesis José Luis Martí, 
4 A Plural Europe: A Post-Teleological Narrative Sergio Fabbrini, 
PART II: INSTITUTIONALISING THE NEW NARRATIVE, 
5 Europe and European Studies in Crisis: Inter-Disciplinary and Intra-Disciplinary Schisms in Legal and Political Science Christian Joerges and Christian Kreuder-Sonnen, 
6 Which Narrative for the CJUE?: EU Powers and Fundamental Rights Maribel González Pascual, 
7 The Struggle for Legitimacy through Law in the EU Jan Komárek, 
8 The (Un)Constitutional Mutation of the European Union: The Structural Crisis of Law as a Means of Social and Economic Integration Agustín José Menéndez, 
PART III: GOVERNING THE NEW NARRATIVE, 
9 Off Field?: The EU's Parliamentary Dimension Post-Crisis John Erik Fossum, 
10 A New Uniform Electoral Procedure to Re-Legitimate the Process of Political Integration in Europe Adriana Ciancio, 
11 Europe as a Platform: A Reality and a Possible Future Renaud Thillaye, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The European Union as a Complex Democracy

Daniel Innerarity

1. AN INTELLIGIBILITY DEFICIT

It has been said that an Englishman was praising the operation of a certain device, and a Frenchman objected: 'Yes, that works well in practice, but does it work well in theory'? It is not very appropriate to tell a joke reproducing national stereotypes of a Europe that is so often blocked by its national shortsightedness, but it may be useful in order to explain what I intend to say. My hypothesis is that the EU is living a 'theoretical moment'; that is, a moment where conceptual innovation is essential if we want to escape from the deadlock we are in, which is, first of all, a conceptual deficit. The current moment seems to agree with that character of the opera Così fan tutte by Mozart, who claimed that everything needs philosophy. It is true that the European integration crisis cannot be solved with good theory alone, but we will not emerge from the current crisis without a clarification of what is at stake. We need to talk more about concepts than about mechanisms and leaders. New ideas and not financial or institutional engineering solutions will take us out of the crisis; it is less a matter of political will than a matter of understanding what is really at stake. It is not so much a problem that can be solved through institutional procedures and leadership, but a crisis that must be well diagnosed so that the basic concepts of democracy can be reconsidered in the context of that new and complex reality that is the European Union. All of this must take place in a globalised world where profound social and political changes are taking place.

Among the many deficits attributed to the EU, one of the least denounced – though not less important – is the intelligibility deficit. There are big controversies as to whether Europe is democratic or fair, representative or efficient; but there is no doubt that it is currently almost impossible for anybody to understand. Europe has lost its national sovereigns and has not substituted a European one, replacing them by a machine that can be consensual or asymmetrical, depending on the situation, a machine that avoids conflicts and enshrines irresponsibility. Europe will not make sense until there is a narrative that can be understood and accepted by its citizens. (This narrative may even justify its relative distance, the element of delegation or complexity that inevitably accompanies it.) For these reasons, I maintain that the EU must be understood as a complex democracy, not based on the models of democracy related to the nation-state, and therefore, with great potentialities when it comes to thinking about how to politically organize more difficult, open and complex spaces.

Why a philosophy of the European Union? One could object that we do not lack theories and that my statement actually hides the 'exclusive competence' desire shown by other disciplines. There have been some claims about the importance of philosophy for the development of an appropriate concept of the European Union (Friese and Wagner 2002; Olsen 2004), but there are also those who believe that European constitutionalism is over-theorised (Krisch 2005, 326; Schütze 2009, vii) or that integration is not so much a problem of theoretical reflection but of empirical observation, 'a process that must be understood rather than philosophically built' (Müller 2003, 69).

I understand the distrust that arises when we are confronted with excessively theoretical approaches that usually wander comfortably through the theoretical space and avoid institutional design or the complexity of the political game. But if political philosophy has any ambition, it is to breach that gap between theory and practice, between normative and descriptive, which is a sign of exhaustion shown by theories about Europe. A consequence of this rupture is the lack of cooperation or of an interdisciplinary approach among philosophy, law, and the political and social sciences. Some lack proximity to the institutional praxis, while others lack theoretical development; some disciplines have such a normative horizon that they forget the social conditions needed to move theories into practice, while others suffer from a limited interest in the theories of democracy or in the history of concepts, and that lack of interest is repaid with a perplexity hidden by an excess of empirical studies with little significance.

Moravscik (2006) is right when he states that there is an excessive presence of normative theories in European studies but, in my opinion, there is a more radical problem: a dichotomy between factual and normative theories, which has turned this field into a battle between realists without many hopes and idealists with little knowledge. What we probably need the most is a theory of Europe that is neither a simple description of the institutional mechanism nor a vague cosmopolitan haze. And that is precisely the site where philosophy still has a lot to say. The polarization between theory and practice, between normative approaches and an empirical point of view, between disciplines dealing with values and those that move more comfortably among functional realities, has given rise to many different controversies inside human and social sciences. This dissociation is both a problem and a symptom, and we will not make Europe's reality comprehensible if we do not institute a certain assessment horizon. But we cannot do so if we keep a level of exhortative speech that seems to care very little about the real game of interests, the weight of our historical past or the multiple determining factors that limit political action within a space of deep interdependences. Given the current status of European integration, we should not await a mere description of facts or an abstract normative model when it comes to political philosophy, but we should expect critical momentum and research into the possibilities of shaping the future ahead of us. The act of understanding the EU is not merely a descriptive exercise but a reflection with normative consequences; that is, a reflection that determines the reasonable expectations we may consider in relation to the EU's form of government, its legitimacy and its democraticness. It is not the same to consider it as an intergovernmental negotiation or a transnational experiment; we will not suggest the same solutions if we understand it as an aggregation of interests or as a deliberative discussion required by the political transformations of contemporary societies, their possibilities and specific risks.

Political philosophy is essential to understanding such a unique polity as that of the EU and its novelty in relation to the model of the nation-state. It even has some comparative advantage to the extent that it is not a discipline whose evolution is so closely related to the conceptual universe of the States, as is the case for political sciences, international relations or constitutional law. At the same time, the EU poses a huge challenge to the political philosophy and the theories of democracy. So much so that it imposes an obligation to verify certain presuppositions and to examine the conceptual and practical resistance in new contexts. I am convinced that it can be a valuable contribution to European Studies that seem to have lost that capacity to develop a general theory about the meaning of integration. The abandonment of ontological matters and the preference for individual institutions and policy areas have generated a great deal of empirical material but have left a fragmented and excessively specialised space, without theoretical ambitions or the ability to develop an all-encompassing notion of what it is at stake (Bickerton 2012; Ludlow 2010, 24).

2. A NARRATIVE FOR EUROPEAN INTEGRATION

This is the context where the problem of formulating a new narrative for the European Union is considered with special intensity, now that certain big narratives, which made it comprehensible and conferred social legitimacy, are over. If Tocqueville's statement about human beings inventing things more easily than words to describe them is true (Karmis 2005, 152), it could be confirmed that after the action and the description, we still have an added difficulty: making it understandable. We refer to this third task when we talk about a narrative for Europe.

Now that different integration legitimacies have been weakened, the only powerful narratives still standing are populist rebuttals fed by that evil game of 'blaming Brussels' and, above all, by the evidence that we are not up to the problems that we have to manage. At a time when a lack of the epic is not compensated by functional legitimacy and where the European project cannot rely on the appeal to emphatic achievements or on the discreet favour of effectiveness, the landscape is filled with negative references. Everyone can understand what is being suggested when talking about the 'monster of Brussels' (Enzensberger 2011), with respect to which the appeal of 'more Europe' emerges, in the best-case scenario, as weak speech. Among other things, this happens because we are at a time of the evolution of democratic societies in which, though there is no worthwhile legitimacy if it is not effective (regarding economics, conflict resolution or the social order), the citizenship has the right to link the value of the European project to certain normative and strictly political hopes.

But in the worst-case scenario, the rhetoric of progress on integration may implicitly suggest a deterministic historical linearity. The narrative of the Monnet method, 'dynamics in small steps with sustainable significance' (Wessels 2001), takes many things for granted and, at the same time, has a coercive resonance, inviting us to surrender to what will end up being imposed. Any narrative that suggests that what we should do has nothing to do with freedom, with a contingent configuration, but with acceptance and submission of an inevitable dynamic has little or no future in a democratic society. A narrative is not a simple list of historical events, nor is it an inevitable dynamic or a list of our future obligations, but a story conferring certain significance to our past and future actions, a significance that we approve. And the best way to ensure that a narrative is not accepted is for it to imply that we are facing a reality that cannot be rejected.

In this sense, integration theories have emphasised inevitability too strongly. Explaining our crisis as simple regressions or stagnations of the integration process is mistaken and, above all, democratically unacceptable to the extent that it implies that our freedom is not convened in any way. Therefore, any European narrative must stop thinking about integration as a linear process and the crisis as an agent of change of that development. This narrative must pay more attention to the regressions and even to the concept of European disintegration (Eppler and Scheller 2013). What I mean with this is that there will not be a Europeanist narrative as long as we keep it in a deterministic corset that discredits, in principle, other possibilities. We made it very easy when we established an antagonism to organize the controversies between the 'pro-European' and the 'euro-sceptic'. While discussions revolve around whether certain political decisions should be communitarised or continue within the realm of the States, such distinction constitutes a sufficient framework for analysis. But with the increasing complexity and multidimensionality of European politics, such distinction clashes with its own limits because many of our problems cannot be reduced to the 'more or less Europe' issue. This is so, among other things, because our controversies do not exclusively focus on levels of competence but on the content of policies. Today, we discuss which political measures can or must be adopted to achieve the objectives set in the already integrated political arena in such a way that those arguments cannot be categorised in pro-European or euro-sceptical neutral perspectives.

3. THE DOUBLE DEMOCRATIC CHALLENGE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

The idea of providing a narrative for the European Union suggests that we are going to explain what is inevitably complex in an arbitrarily simple manner. If that were the case, whatever we gained in terms of popularization would be lost in accuracy. We would have achieved nothing if what has been understood and accepted was substantially different from what we have to narrate. This is the quid of our problem, and the sooner we recognize it the less exposed we will be against populist or technocratic simplifications.

The European Union is facing a democratic challenge, but that also implies a challenge to political philosophy.

The EU's democratic deficits reflect less about democracy in Europe than they do about democratic theory itself. The EU is a problem for democratic theory because it is not the kind of thing that can be democratic on modern accounts of democracy. Institutional deficits arise not because of faults in the design of democracy within the EU but because the normative significance of the same institutional designs changes when it is translated into a new context. [...] The new polities of Europe lack the salient features of the democratic polities imagined by modern democratic theory. This fact reflects changing historical and political conditions and cannot be 'fixed'. The true democratic deficit, I submit, lies on the side of democratic theory, which cannot comprehend developments like the EU. (Goodhart 2007, 575)

Thus, the question we have to ask ourselves is a double one: What contribution should political theory make in order to understand the European Union? And what challenge does a polity as novel as the European Union pose to said political theory? If the former demands organising institutions and decision-making procedures so they can be up to our criteria of democraticness, the latter implies revising these criteria of democracticness so they are not incompatible with the complex reality of the European Union. The first move by itself leads to an extreme normativism, indifferent to the conditions of possibility within which our political life actually develops. If we were to perform only the second move, we would be degrading our democratic ideals to the facticity of our mediocre 'muddling through'. In my opinion, the only way to avoid moralism and cynicism is to understand the double democratic challenge, theoretical and practical, of the European Union and to solve it within a complex theory of democracy. This operation would not be a kind of zero-sum game between theory and practice, between democratic values and political realities, but a huge possibility for both of them. So much so that if we do it right, we could have a more sophisticated theory of democracy and more democratic institutions.

It would entail, first of all, chasing the aims of the European Union in relation to those of the member states, without subordinating the latter to the former. Neither subsidiarity nor assigning new roles to national parliaments nor even the boundaries established by constitutional courts have managed to determine the type of power that corresponds to the EU. The current model has had a high cost in terms of detachment and victimization. The key would be a brand-new idea of power at the European level that would fully consider the interests of member states without imposing on them. For this to even be thinkable and understandable, we would need great political innovations in Europe but, above all, great political innovations within political thinking itself. It is not a matter of finding new institutions to adapt familiar ideas to new contexts, but a matter of understanding that changes in the configuration of our social reality, in Europe and in the whole world, demand a reconstruction of the theory of democracy that would take away everything that has been attached or linked to it as if it were an essential part of it (sovereignty, territoriality, homogeneity, statehood, to name a few examples) and not just mere contingent additions that it might, and should, discard.

So far, we have solved this problem either by trying to expand the basic concepts of democracy, taken as demos, popular representation or control, in order to cover the European sphere, or by using the trick of positing that we are looking at a sui generis reality and, thus, basic categories of democracy could remain intact, admitting, in this case, a harmless exception. But the full seriousness of the problem still awaits us: How can we think and build a democratic reality dissociated from its territorial basis and from the reality of a sovereign State? Solving this problem implies not only institutional innovation but also, and above all, the need to reconsider our concept of democracy. Or, stating it the other way around: we will only be capable of achieving institutional innovation if we rethink our concept of democracy and the categories associated with it.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (UK)
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1786608413
• ISBN 13: 9781786608413
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 278
• Editor: Daniel Innerarity, Jonathan White, Ander Errasti, Cristina Astier