European Demoicracy and Its Crisis*
KALYPSO NICOLAÏDIS
University of Oxford
Abstract
This article offers an overview and reconsideration of the idea of European demoicracy in the
context of the current crisis. It defines ‘demoicracy’ as ‘a Union of peoples, understood both as
states and as citizens, who govern together but not as one’, and argues that the concept is best
understood as a third way, distinct from both national and supranational versions of single
demos polities. The concept of ‘demoicracy’ can serve both as an analytical lens for the European
Union-as-is and as a normative benchmark, but one which cannot simply be inferred from its
praxis. Instead, the article deploys a ‘normative-inductive’ approach according to which the EU’s
normative core – transnational non-domination and transnational mutual recognition – is grounded
on what the EU still seeks to escape. Such norms need to be protected and perfected if the EU is
to live up to its demoicratic nature. The article suggests ten tentative guiding principles for the EU
to continue turning these norms into practice.
Introduction
The aftershock of the 2008 global financial crisis in the European Union (EU) has come
to be widely seen as a crisis of ‘democracy’ in Europe. This article starts from the premise
that the EU’s legitimacy deficit will not be addressed by tinkering with its institutions.
Instead, the name of the democratic game in Europe today is democratic interdependence:
the Union magnifies the pathologies of the national democracies in its midst, even as it
entrenches and nurtures these democracies, who in turn affect each other in profound
ways. Threats to democracy in the EU lie in the insularity of its Member States’ governments
and their refusal to face pervading democratic externalities. They lie with citizens
who fail to engage across borders. And they lie in Brussels’ (partial) inability legitimately
to address these democratic flaws while respecting democratic boundaries. We may
better understand what is at stake, I argue, if we analyze, defend and criticize the EU as
a demoicracy – highly imperfect demoicracy though it is.
The idea of European demoicracy is seductively simple: a Union of peoples who
govern together, but not as one. However much shared kr toς or power to govern, we
must contend with the plurality of d moi; but also crucially, however many demoi, we
* For comments on previous versions of this article, I would like to thank Albena Azmanova, Francis Cheneval, Pavlos
Eleftheriadis, Sergio Fabbrini, Cecile Fabre, Nora Fisher Onar, Andrew Hurrell, Gabi Mass, David Miller, Leonardo
Morlino, Fiorella Paddoa Schoppa, Vinicius Rodriguez Vieira, Frank Schimmelfennig, Tristan Storme, Philippe Van Parijs,
Juri Viehoff and Rebecca Welge as well as the JCMS anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank participants in
‘Demoicracy: Government of the Peoples’, University of Zurich March 2012; the Oxford IR colloquium, October 2011;
‘The European Union: What Institutional Model for Which Type of Democracy?’, University of Innsbruck, September
2011; ‘The Transformation of Europe’, European University Institute, Florence, October 2011; and ‘The Future of the
Community Method’, Notre Europe-BEPA, Brussels, February 2012.
JCMS 2013 Volume 51. Number 2. pp. 351–369 DOI: 10.1111/jcms.12006
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need a common kratos to define and deliver, through mutually agreed disciplines, the
responsibilities we owe to one another. This simple ideal is, however, potentially under
threat as proposed solutions to the crisis proliferate which fail to rely on enhancing the
health of national democracies in Europe. To suggest why this may be the case, I take
stock of the incipient scholarship on demoicracy (Nicolaïdis, 2003, 2004a, 2012; Besson,
2006; Nicolaïdis and Pelabay, 2008; Cheneval, 2011; Mueller, 2010; Cheneval and
Schimmelfennig, 2013).
The argument unfolds in five parts. First, I discuss the nature of demoicracy as a third
way against those who equate the democratic potential with the singularity of a demos. I
then go on to justify the use of a normative-inductive method limited in scope to the EU,
while leaving open the applicability of demoicracy at the global level. Next, I lay out
the normative core of the EU understood as demoicracy, predicated on what the project
seeks to escape – namely domination and denial of recognition – and tease out some of the
factors that may explain the resilience or pathologies of demoicracy over time. Finally, I
suggest ten guiding principles for sustaining a demoicratic politics against the backdrop of
the EU’s crisis of democracy.
I. Ontology: Demoicracy as a Third Way
I start with the assertion that a demoicracy is what the EU has become over time, and with
the argument that its peoples should aspire to nurture its demoicratic features in the
context of the euro crisis. The democratic conundrum rests with the connection between
two mirror questions of belonging: how the Union can better ‘belong to its citizens’
through the effectiveness of mechanisms of representation, accountability and participation
depends on what it means for citizens to ‘belong to the Union’, as individuals, as
groups of individuals or as constituted states. The first has to do with governance and
institutions, the second with socio-political reality.
The no-demos thesis, articulated by the German Constitutional Court in its 1993
Maastricht judgment, offered a simple connection: since there is no European demos,
integration must rely on domestic institutional mechanisms like the Bundestag. Somewhat
ironically, since the Court considered the eventual emergence of a European demos
a desirable prospect, the no-demos thesis has been restated ever since as grounds for
resisting European integration. Conversely, it was used as a foil by the European political
mainstream of the early 2000s, and those like Joschka Fischer and Jürgen Habermas who
argued that a European demos could and should be ‘forged’ as the foundation for formal
constitutionalization of European integration. Ten years later, the prospect of fiscal union
has reignited the search for a European demos.
The idea of demoicracy emerged in order to counter the latter arguments by appropriating
and then subverting the no-demos thesis (Nicolaïdis, 2003, 2004a, b; Besson, 2006).
The point is that the Court was right in its diagnosis, but not in its implications. For a
plurality of demoi there may be in the EU, but plurality is what peoples make of it. The
EU can be democratically legitimated by a plural pouvoir constituant (if the topic is
constitutional) or by multiple but connected national politics. Indeed, a single European
demos is not just implausible but undesirable if the EU polity is to set aside the Schmittean
temptation to define itself against ‘others’. Instead, let us invent a different kind of
democracy for the EU (Weiler, 1998; Dryzek, 2000).
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In short: no European demos → no European-level democracy, versus European demos
in the making → European democracy can be replaced by no European demos →
European demoicracy. But this summary covers three different kinds of statements: the
EU ought to be a demoicracy; the EU is a demoicracy (in the making); and the EU fails
to, but could live up to its demoicratic promise. Political philosophers focus on the first,
while political scientists tend to straddle the last two and legal theorists the first two.
A Matter of Paradigms
On the normative plane where ideal political forms are discussed, the demoicratic third
way rests on the plausibility of lumping together its two alternative paradigms as part
of the same cognitive straitjacket. Crucially, a third way may look like the traditional
‘in between’ (international organization versus federal state) and may empirically borrow
from both sides, but contrary to a via media it is normatively antithetic to both. As with
every third way, the idea of demoicracy holds the promise of escape from the tyranny of
dichotomies which still dominate EU debates.
The difference between the two ‘no demos → no democracy’ camps is a matter of
scale, and this matters terribly.At one end of the spectrum, believers in the ‘national civic’,
‘sovereignist’or ‘intergovernmentalist’creeds criticize aspirations to EU-level democracy
in the name of the primacy of the nation-state as locus of democracy (Manent, 2007;
Miller, 2009). Since Europeans ‘belong to the EU’ as separate demoi, with different
political ‘languages’, the EU should remain an intergovernmental construct, centred
around indirect accountability at home and the European Council in Brussels (see also
Scharpf, 2009).
At the other end of the spectrum are those who believe in the desirable and possible
advent of a European demos. They tend to equate more (supranational) Europe with
the promise of economic, social, moral and eventually political progress by virtue of its
anti-nationalism, premised on the assumption that a new territorial scale is necessary
to instantiate democratic principles of representation and justice (Van Parijs, 1998;
Habermas, 2001; Hix, 2008; Collignon, 2004; Morgan, 2005). Thus the model for the EU
is often a version of the nation (Nicolaïdis and Weatherill, 2003).
As a third way, demoicracy is not about ‘splitting the difference’ between these two
mainstream political alternatives but emerges from their respective contradictions and
inadequacies (see Figure 1). It can be defined as follows:
European demoicracy is a Union of peoples, understood both as states and as citizens,
who govern together but not as one. It represents a third way against two alternatives
which both equate democracy with a single demos, whether national or European. As
a demoicracy-in-the-making, the EU is neither a Union of democratic states, as ‘sovereignists’
or ‘intergovernmentalists’ would have it, nor a Union-as-a-democratic state to
be, as ‘federalists’ would have it. A Union-as-demoicracy should remain an open-ended
process of transformation which seeks to accommodate the tensions inherent in the
pursuit of radical mutual opening between separate peoples.
If identifying a ‘demos’ at whatever scale is no longer the grail of democracy, what is?
For a start, European democracy should not be seen as mainly ‘national’ or ‘supranational’,
but as ‘transnational’ – notwithstanding the question of who are the constituting
demoi (Weiler, 1998; Besson, 2006; Cheneval, 2011). It is this, for its stress on the
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horizontal and radical opening, that makes the EU more than a variant of ‘confederation’
and gives its demoicracy a truly ‘transformative’ – as opposed to ‘gradualist’ or ‘mimetic’
– character (Dahl, 1989; Bohman, 2007; Cheneval and Schimmelfennig, 2013).
Crucially, scholarship with a demoicratic parentage tends to address the constitutional,
institutional or legal matrix that underpins the EU as priors to the democratic question –
unsurprisingly since the EU was not designed with democracy in mind. We can recognize
its basic tenets in the work of many authors for whom the EU as ‘not-a-state’ is a core
premise (inter alia, Weiler, 1998; Maduro, 2003; Balibar, 2005; Castiglione et al., 2006;
Menon, 2008; Joerges, 2011; Pelabay, 2011). The concept has strong affinities with
‘multilateral democracy’ (Cheneval, 2011), ‘transnational democracy’ (Bohman, 2007),
‘compound democracy’ (Fabbrini, 2010), ‘directly deliberative polyarchy’ (Cohen and
Sabel, 1997), ‘agonistic democracy’ (Mouffe, 2000) and, for that matter, some of the
variants of federal and cosmopolitan democracy, or constitutional pluralism (Walker,
2002; Kumm, 2009). And it chimes with Joseph Weiler’s defence of the EU at its best as
committed to a philosophy of constitutional tolerance (Weiler, 2001). In their most general
form these works examine the uneasy coexistence between peoples, both as states and as
citizens, translating into democratic language the duality of Member State and Community
legitimacy in the EU with its co-mingling of international and constitutional logics
and vocabularies.
Because a demoicracy prism starts with our individual embeddedness in national
communities as separate demoi and with the primacy of the state, the term ‘demoicracy’
can be misunderstood as a label for the first camp (Van Parijs, 1998). At the same time,
because a demoicracy prism does not end with essentially self-serving demoi, stressing
instead with the second camp the importance of shared responsibilities over time,
Figure 1: EU Demoicracy as a Third Way, Not an ‘In-Between’
Source: Author.
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believers in demoicracy often find themselves lumped with ‘federalists’ under a generic
‘pro-EU’ label. This may be why some of the earliest and most cogent expressions
of this philosophy were not framed as a third way, but rather in direct opposition to the
‘federalist’ (or ‘unity’) school (as with Weiler, 1991). This is also why, while the idea
of demoicracy owes much to the ‘post-national’ constellation, it parts with its more
Euro-patriotic and anti-national expression (Habermas, 1998; for a discussion, see
Lacroix, 2009; Nicolaïdis 2006, 2012).
Last but not least, much of the inspiration for demoicracy comes from intellectual
traditions (federalism, cosmopolitanism, constitutionalism) which accommodate conflicting
views about the realm beyond the state. Defenders of demoicracy may appeal to
affinities with the ‘essence’of these traditions (on cosmopolitanism, see, for instance, Beck
and Grande, 2007) – an essence anterior to or distinct from the particular variant of the ‘state
writ large’ which might have tainted each of them in the public and scholarly imagination
(as with a demoicratic reading of Kant’s federal cosmopolitanism, for instance). Or, to make
up for the capture by statist lenses, they may side with composite notions like constitutional
pluralism, or the idea that the EU should not cross from a federal union to a federal state
(Menon and Schain, 2006; Nicolaïdis and Howse, 2001). Or the sticky nature of statist
variants may lead them to give up on their respective ‘isms’ altogether.
A Matter of Emphasis
Beyond the rarefied confines of philosophical paradigms, however, the idea of European
demoicracy was initially meant as another defence of the EU as is (Moravcsik, 2002;
Weiler, 2000). If the Rome Treaty had provided an original institutional matrix faithful to
the core tenets of a demoicratic vision, it was improved by sequential amendments, from
the institutionalization of the European Council, to the right of exit clause or the role
of national parliaments in the Lisbon Treaty. On this institutional front, European
demoicracy has been a work in progress, albeit with caveats (Nicolaïdis, 2003, 2004a, b,
2006). It is at least clear that the EU has remained ‘not-a-state’ while progressively
adopting a constitutional ‘operating system’, as in Weiler’s formulation. And that this
operating system, while not intended to address democratic concerns, was actually potentially
suited to do so.
In this perspective, the frame of demoicracy can serve as an interpretive strategy that
can be mistaken for the ubiquitous understanding of the EU as ‘in between’, especially
since the two overlap. Analyzing data and cases through a demoicratic lens may appear
then to be a matter of emphasis: if the European constraint is meant to ‘tame’ the national
(or empower constituencies within it), it can sometimes be a source of dissolution of
national democracies and sometimes a means of perfecting them (Keohane et al., 2009);
a demoicratic lens obviously emphasizes supranationality but understood as a deep commitment
mechanism, an instrumental rather than ontological fact; in a demoicracy, differences
between small and large member states are paramount as they may dictate crucial
conflicts over governance issues (Schure and Verdun, 2008); and a demoicratic perspective
on Europeanization focuses on the mediation exercised by states’ democratic systems
between EU rules and peoples-as-citizens.
Most importantly, and in the spirit of Deutsch’s transactional perspective, analysis
through the demoicratic lens emphasizes the horizontal at all levels of interaction – positing
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‘mutual opening’as the result, not the precondition, of a political-legal order centred around
horizontal transfers of sovereignty between states and regulatory systems – a point
increasingly accepted by scholars of multi-level governance (Hooghe and Marks, 2001).
EU governance, though networked and experimental, is still centred around states. In this
sense, the German Constitutional Court’s intervention in the fiscal crisis has been broadly
faithful to demoicratic principles. Most uniquely, the EU has managed to put international
and national legal orders at the service of Kant’s ius cosmopoliticum – albeit in the name
of a rather narrow neo-liberal focus on absolute rights of economic free movement. The
EU’s choice of managed mutual recognition over harmonization to bring about a single
market has long entrenched such horizontal sovereignty transfers. In short, a demoicratic
lens emphasizes the link – or lack thereof – between horizontal transfers of authority,
co-operation, impact and representation.
A Matter of Remedies
Ultimately, the idea of demoicracy was meant to help wean the debate away from
teleology, emphasizing ongoing processes of democratization predicated on growing
democratic interdependence between national polities. A demoicratic lens thus both mitigates
and exacerbates diagnosis of democratic deficits, drawing on scholarship linking
democratic theory with the EU’s unique way of combining various modes of political
representation (see, for instance, Kohler-Koch and Rittberger, 2007; Lord and Pollak,
2010). What is the benchmark of rightful exercise of political power in a demoicratic
setting? If the ideal of the political equality between citizens obtains within states, can
it be relaxed between states – in the name of equality between peoples as collectives? Is
the kind of ‘constrained discretion’ granted to representatives in single demos contexts
likely to be subverted if these representatives conspire across borders to relax these
constraints? How can these two logics be linked by accountability mechanisms which
differ widely across different kinds of democracies in Europe (Schmidt, 2006)? If the
compound nature of EU democracy creates structural limits on both political equality
and legitimate discretion at the heart of representation, are complementary non-electoral
forms of democratic expression (deliberation, participation and contestation) better
suited to its nature?
Above all, the lack of a European demos means that European citizens will not and
should not accept to be bound by a majority of Europeans. If EU-wide majoritarian
approaches are to be rejected, what other EU-wide processes are legitimate? This is where
law, political philosophy and political science must work together. If democratic interdependence
calls for a focus on the responsibilities that peoples owe one another without
turning those into statist-type obligations, we need to identify the concrete consequences
of those responsibilities, drawing on writers on cosmopolitan democracy who read the
so-called ‘all-affected principle’ or ‘stakeholder model’ through a transnational prism
(Bohman, 2007; Cheneval, 2011). But peoples both as states and citizens must internalize
not only socio-economic, but also democratic, externalities. Accordingly, Germans and
Greeks should not only have the right to put the problems they create for each other’s
democratic health on each other’s political agenda, but should entrench institutional
mechanisms to address them. Decisions on how to share the burden of internalizing
externalities can only remain national under these conditions.
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II. Method: Demoicracy as Immanent
The move from the general account of European demoicracy offered above to specifying
its core norms and guiding principles raises important methodological and epistemological
issues.
Normative Inductivism
How should we give substance to demoicracy as a normative benchmark, from which to
assess the quality of the European project today? As Cheneval and Schimmelfennig
(2013) cogently argue, we can reason from ‘first principles’ derived à la Rawls from a
hypothetic original position which allows a fair balance of all possible conflicting views
on what principles the basic structure of a demoicracy ought to follow (Rawls, 1993, 1999;
Cheneval, 2011; Cheneval and Schimmelfennig, 2013). Or we may be inspired by historically
contextual and empirically informed normative reasoning à la Amartya Sen or
Michael Walzer, and non-ideal theory more generally, which starts with recognizing
the ways social arrangements fail to do what they are meant to do. As with Adorno’s
immanent critique, we can try to contextualize our object of investigation and its implicit
ideational basis by discerning evolving aspirations, tensions and contradictions within this
world observed (Azmanova, 2012).
In this spirit, I would argue that the EU normative benchmark can both be found as
immanent in the reality observed and be used to assess this reality, but only under two
conditions: recognizing that one selects underlying EU norms and principles only to the
extent that they are consistent with the simple idea of European demoicracy as a third way,
and that the EU has been and continues to be pregnant with other normative possibilities
and pathologies; and recognizing that the outcomes of actors’ negotiations in the real
(EU) world can be granted normative status only to the extent that underlying power
asymmetries have been sufficiently mitigated by procedural constraints.
Under these conditions, what I call ‘normative inductivism’is likely to approximate the
conclusions of a Rawlsian constructivist approach to demoicracy, but with a crucial added
advantage: this method can draw on the insights stemming from the deep texture of
European history, law and politics. The kind of bargaining, deliberation and contestation
which we find in the evolving EU order can bolster confidence that some balance has been
reached between ‘opposing camps’ such as sovereignists and supranationalists; big and
small states; left and right; republican and liberal states; and last but not least, nomads and
settlers in the EU. The EU’s transformative potential lies not in pursuing an ideal to its
extreme but in a kind of fanatic moderation, by which political actors unrelentingly pursue
compromise under the shadow of consensus, and the Courts pursue balance under the
shadow of politics. The challenge, of course, is to make this logic sustainable.
Scope
A normative inductive approach also has implications in terms of geographical scope –
that is, whether it is appropriate to start with global demoicracy tout court to arrive
at ‘European’ demoicracy. Against the tendency to apprehend the EU as a particular
instantiation of a broader universal form of democracy between states short of statismwrit-large
(Dryzek, 2000; Linklater, 1998; Bohman, 2007; Cheneval, 2011), I argue that
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our normative beliefs about the EU should not be hostage to our normative beliefs about
the (potential and/or desirable) evolution of the international system. While universalizing
viewpoints are often illuminating – Rawls may have understood ‘European peoples’better
than many Europeans – we ought to construct an ideal-type of European demoicracy while
remaining agnostic about its validity beyond the confines of the EU (Van Parijs and Rawls,
2003).
As a result, even if we argue that other regions or even global governance may borrow
experimentally from the EU governance toolbox, this does not mean that its deeper
structure, the kind of democratic bond we are concerned with here, ought to be ‘reproduced’
beyond Europe too (Howse and Nicolaïdis, 2002). If it is desirable to embrace a
‘transformative logic’from the national to the European level, why fall prey to gradualism
from the European to the global? The concern is not only analytical, but also ideological,
in light of the implicit or explicit Eurocentricism pervading much of the scholarship on
global constitutionalism and governance. As if the contemporary echoes of colonialism
could be wished away if only we could ‘get it right’ this time around.
III. Ethos: European Demoicracy’s Normative Core
The EU was born from the ashes of a less than ideal world: its own capacity to almost
destroy it. Thus, not only does the normative core of European demoicracy start from
what Europeans wanted to escape, but this ‘drive to escape’ remains with us today – the
argument cannot be reduced to ‘original intent’. For, as Avishai Margalit (1996) starkly
puts it, ‘it is much more urgent to remove painful evils than to create enjoyable benefits’.
If a globalized European civil war was indeed at the time an evil that concentrated
European minds, I would argue that behind ‘war’ we have two anti-values which endure:
the will to subordinate and the denial of recognition. Hence in spite of the supposed
obsolescence of the ‘peace’ ideal, Europeans continue to aspire to the imperfect approximation
of two corresponding core norms while struggling with their complex implications:
non-domination and mutual recognition. We should discuss normative elective
affinities around these two overlapping normative clusters.
Transnational Non-domination
The EU is an anti-hegemonic, not an anti-national, project. The peoples of France
or Germany qua states would never again be allowed to subjugate others on the continent
thanks to a system of institutionalized balance of power between states. This was the
original intuition of moderate federalists like Spaak and Monnet: 300 years after Westphalia,
while the idea of Union in Europe could prevail as an alternative to the closure of
sovereignty, it would remain complementary to the idea of European nations.
The threat of war may have receded, but that of soft domination in Europe has not. As
the stakes have changed from the survival of demoi to their autonomy, we shift from
international relations to democratic theory, which implies translating to a transnational
context the goal of non-domination as democratic freedom by which men are free from
one another’s arbitrary power (Pettit, 1997; Bohman 2007; Mueller, 2010). But as the
Union strengthens and self-government gives way to shared self-government, the risk of
domination reasserts itself in another guise, as vertical, through the potential arbitrary use
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of supranational powers. So concerned are states-turned-member-states (and Germany
first among them) about possible horizontal domination that they incrementally opt for
vertical domination. As a result, it might appear descriptively accurate to view the EU as
a benign medieval version of empire or a benign commonwealth version of federation to
express such horizontal or vertical forms of soft domination (inter alia, Marks, 2011). But
these labels ultimately clash with the normative core of demoicracy.
There are of course tensions: demoicracy is an exercise in power mitigation, not denial.
In an order characterized by the rule of law, be it domestic or international, it is the arbitrary
use of power that needs to be curbed not power per se. This is especially true in a context
of great asymmetries. To what extent, then, does the responsibility that comes with power
mitigate our preoccupation from domination? When is equality between citizens likely
to turn into de facto domination between peoples? While a demoicratic norm of nondomination
ought to serve as a constant warning against both the Union as a cover for
horizontal domination and the Union as an instrument of domination in itself, what if some
of one is necessary to curb the other? As some have argued, one possible way of achieving
the balance is to exploit the pluralist philosophy of EU constitutional law to address the
tensions of a multiplicity of competing legal orders with overlapping supremacy claims.
Still, it is not clear whether a constitutional lens, however adjusted, can entirely do justice
to the specific challenges of non-domination in a demoicracy like the EU.
Transnational Mutual Recognition
The second norm underpinning EU-as-demoicracy also starts with what Europe sought to
escape: the myriad appalling crimes committed in local battles for supremacy throughout
Europe in the aftermath of World War II and rooted in denials of recognition of close
others – neighbours as intimate enemies – which had pervaded contemporary European
history (Lowe, 2012). A history, in turn, characterized by complex connections between
struggles for recognition within sovereign boundaries and diplomatic mutual recognition
between states as the latter served to avoid inquiring into the former (Honneth, 1996;
Taylor, 1994). Demoicracy arises with the need to subvert the shallow diplomatic norm of
recognition with an intrusive social norm of transnational mutual recognition. At the same
time, it avoids reaching a degree of federalization where harmonization and assimilation
renders such recognition mute.
The EU is more than an alliance of states while remaining a community of others only
if its peoples increasingly connect through multifaceted and deep forms of mutual recognition
– a holistic ideal referring to the entire realm of social interactions: identities and
cultures, political traditions, social contracts, historical grievances and memories (Lacroix
and Nicolaïdis, 2010). It is on this basis that European peoples may accept, or better wish,
to open their democracies to each other. Where Walzer (1997) only needs an aspiration to
peaceful coexistence for his normative core of tolerance, a demoicracy is preoccupied
with a much more demanding engagement of the demoi. Some would say that this is the
true meaning of ‘reconciliations’ at the heart of the European project – and not only
between France and Germany.
At the outset, this logic needs no singularly European public space asking only that
citizens have an informed curiosity about the opinions and political lives of their neighbours.
In time, transnational deliberative processes and citizenship will emerge from the
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confrontation, accommodation and inclusiveness of Europe’s varied political cultures
(Risse, 2010). An enlarged mentality may even emerge, as Kant would have it, of thinking
from the point of view of everyone else. To paraphrase Weiler, the EU needs a principle
of democratic tolerance. The political fallout of the financial crisis, whereby many –
including the Germans and the Greeks – have sought to reassert their own sense of self
against other Europeans demonstrates how removed we still are from such a normative
benchmark.
Demoicracy cannot be reduced to the assertion of the ‘s’ of peoples, the continued
existence and desirability of diversity in an interdependent world threatened by powerful
homogenizing forces. This is why this second cluster includes a host of variants that can
be adapted to a demoicratic lens, from binding trust to ideals of community, friendship,
mutuality, inclusiveness, solidarity and loyalty or fidelity. Here again tensions arise.
Can we sustain mutuality under profound inequality? Under what conditions is mutual
recognition insufficient to provide the ‘ties that bind’? Can recognition between states’
laws and regulations create resistance to recognition between peoples? How can recognition
among many be non-discriminatory when it is in part conditional on the features of
the other side? Can mutual recognition simultaneously serve liberal ends when lifting
obstacles to free movement, and illiberal ends in states’ exercise of the coercive powers
against individuals?
IV. Genealogy: Transformations, Resilience, Pathologies
A research agenda around the idea of demoicracy needs to turn from the ‘what’ to the
‘why’ question not only to demonstrate how EU historical dynamics can be read through
demoicratic lenses, but because such reading is part of a normative-inductive methodology.
How was a demoicratic system created and developed in Europe, albeit painfully and
imperfectly? Can we have demoicracy without demoicrats or grand design, simply as the
product of balancing forces? Could demoicracy be the result not only of ‘rhetoric entrapment’,
but also ‘normative entrapment’? Is the ethos of demoicracy pervasive enough in
the EU that a critical mass of actors ‘do it’ without labelling it? I suggest, inter alia, three
lines of inquiry leading to our contemporary crisis.
Transformations
As we discussed, political theorists who see EU demoicracy as ‘transformative’ focus on
the state unit and its radical transformation. But if we adopt an international relations
viewpoint, we come to view this transformation itself as the delayed product of post-war
attempts to change the European state system as an incremental, not a radical, choice.
Supranationality in its various incarnations was meant to transform this system, not to
transcend it. Even while including elements of ‘solidarism’ between peoples, such a
transformative logic is bound to the anarchical nature of international society. It is this
(conservative) transformative logic that anchors European demoicracy in international
law. The EU appears sui generis for it resulted from a unique historical context – for at no
other time and place have such deeply entrenched if relatively recent constructs of
‘nation-states’ been so collectively bent on taming the nationalist beast, and been shielded
in doing so, moreover, by a hegemon’s security umbrella.
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If Dahl’s transformative logic operates today it is because what followed after the
foundational bargain is another type of incremental transformation – that of the EU itself.
Joseph Weiler (1991) captured this in his article ‘The Transformation of Europe’, bringing
into focus the fundamental pattern of European politics as a dance between law and power,
judges and politicians, respectively and reflexively engaged in trading off a gradual
foreclosing of exit (the hardening of EU law) with the retention of voice through their
insistence on unanimous consent (among demoi as states). Thus, a constitutionalized
arrangement between states emerged in the EU with increasing legal bite. Various logics
have combined (a cautiously bold court, a political process bent on compromise, the
‘wisdom of the crowds’) which have led from the initial institutional-legal foundation of
demoicracy as interlinked constitutional orders of democracies to its gradual transformation
into a political object in its own right. In sum, the EU is a demoicracy – both as
institutional design and emerging social reality – because it stands at the intersection of at
least three types of transformative logics – each apparent from a different standpoint and
analyzed in different disciplines. Its unique kind of democratic interdependence stems
from this unlikely combination.
Resilience
How resilient is this process of dynamic equilibrium? Has EU demoicracy become an
unstable equilibrium? The basic structure of a demoicratic polity of peoples-as-states put
in place through the community method in the foundational period only came to be tested
against the mettle of peoples-as-citizens after the cold war. If the demoicratic bargain was
unhinged at Maastricht and the years that followed – through extended legal disciplines
combined with loss of voice – the perception of ‘democratic deficit’ stems in part from
the quasi-exclusionary focus on the European Parliament as a remedy. The resilience of
the system has been demonstrated repeatedly, from flexible opt-outs to the evolution of
Council–Commission division of labour on fiscal union. But these developments have left
the matter of popular democratic legitimacy unresolved, thus hollowing out the kind of
loyalty which activates commitment to voice in the first place. We still need to understand
why the dramatic amplification of national voice through popular referendums came to
threaten the resilience of the EU-as-demoicracy.
Pathologies
Increased democratic interdependence raises questions of vulnerabilities as much as
synergies: what happens to national pathologies of democracies as they open up to each
other? Consider, for instance, how the EU is plagued by an institutionalized culture of
credentialism – the Weberian phenomenon of social capture through the capacity to close
access to certain goods, professions or markets on the basis of (imperfect) credentials
acquired once and for all (Keene, 2012). Credentialism pervades the sense of legitimate
closure in the governance of Europe and is mirrored in the dynamics of entry into the
Union or the eurozone, whereby all is done for preservation of the relatively privileged
material and symbolic position of members who – once in – will not be re-assessed. As a
result, the EU as a polity has not managed to sustain the kind of domestic change away
from clientelism or corruption towards respect for the rule of law which would make
membership of the club sustainable. We are far from the idea of states-as-laboratory, dear
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to Jeffersonian federalists, or calls for letting individual states go bankrupt, as in the
United States. In short, if a demoicracy calls for the ongoing refinement of one’s own
democracy under the shadow of shared government, credentialism has served to blunt the
main channel for such refinement.
Moreover, and in Weiler’s formulation, the EU suffers greatly from the pathology of
messianism, grounded in the belief in the cause of deeper integration in and of itself, such
that legitimacy is derived from the destiny pursued rather than the peoples (Weiler, 2012).
Ironically, broadly liberal elite networks of co-operation have long been impervious to
the yearning for control over their lives by disillusioned citizens. That they may help
balance such forces of fusion and contempt for ‘the wisdom of the crowds’ can lead us to
the paradoxical judgement that many Eurosceptics (or simply advocates of ‘localism’)
who echo this malaise contribute to the quality of EU demoicracy.
Under what conditions (endogenous or exogenous) are these pathologies likely to
combine into more acute crisis as in the years 2009–12? Can the demoicratic logic still
accommodate more centralization of functions, loss of voice and foreclosure of exit at
one and the same time? What are the demoicratic safeguards against the unholy alliance
between the logic of messianism and the determinism of ‘market pressure’? The euro
crisis suggests that the (demoicratic) equilibrium reached by the EU is vulnerable to
strong forces of fusion and fission, centralization and disintegration, wherein pressures for
a federated core Europe coexist with pressures for exit at the periphery. Some may argue
that the creation of economic and monetary union (EMU) was already a step too far for a
demoicracy, given its inherent dynamic of (messianic) fusion. We can understand the
German resistance to what they refer to as a ‘transfer union’ between states, but if their
conditions include asymmetric external governance within the EU are we still faithful to
non-domination? Instead, a demoicratic lens suggests that solidarity between European
peoples ought to remain a choice, but constrained by deep mutual recognition (Nicolaïdis
and Viehoff, 2012). It remains to be seen whether the vagaries of financial markets will
allow its pathologies to overwhelm Europe’s demoicratic character.
V. Praxis: Ten Tentative Guiding Principles for a Demoicratic Ethics
Ultimately, peaceful inter-state relations call for regulatory principles of interaction
setting the bounds of acceptable political behaviour within shared norms and purposes.
Existing EU praxis is constrained by political-legal principles enshrined in the treaties that
serve as imperfect translations of its normative core. But they are themselves subject
to possible non-demoicratic interpretations. Demoicratic guiding principles should be
broad enough to be relevant across issue-areas, flexible enough to enable transformative
dynamics and operationalizable enough to guide concrete interactions among peoples.
As a basis for further debate and amendment, I suggest ten tentative guiding principles
for European demoicracy.
Guiding Principle 1 (Autonomy): In a Demoicracy, Relations between Member States
are Ultimately Constrained by the Collective Autonomy of Its Peoples
Peoples as states must have the de jure right, but also de facto capacity, to choose to enter
or exit the Union, or parts of the Union, as well as a corollary right of return under agreed
conditions with proactive support from the Union to do so. Member states must remain
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masters of the treaties, however difficult mutual accommodation for ‘reasonable vetoes’
this may imply, including to agree on conditions for opt-outs and differentiated integration.
The ad hoc bypassing of the unanimity rule for treaty revision in 2012 seems to
contradict this simple principle.
Guiding Principle 2 (Safeguards): In a Demoicracy, all Peoples-as-States Must Benefit
from Institutional and Legal Safeguards at the Centre
In a demoicracy, decisions at the centre must entrench the equality of peoples as states
enough to guard against soft domination. In particular, mechanisms for the mitigation
of power asymmetries enshrined in the Community method should be cross-cutting, from
regulatory agencies to the European Council. Conversely, decision-making in the EU
needs to accommodate political ownership by big states. Arguably, Angela Merkel’s
‘Union method’, privileging intergovernmental decision, can only avoid betraying the
Community method if the Commission and the European Court of Justice remain the
ultimate arbiters on responsible exercise of power.
Guiding Principle 3 (Pluralities): In a Demoicracy, Governance Institutions and
Decision-Making should Eschew Majoritarian Logics and Privilege Pluralities,
Horizontal Co-operation and Shared Leadership
A demoicracy seeks to counter the drift to majoritarianism inherent in modern democratic
logic, be it as majorities of states or majorities of EU-wide population. Instead, it should
privilege non-aggregative, non-majoritarian logics at the Union level. The one-person-one
vote principle must be mitigated to compensate for population asymmetries so that no
national majorities (from big or small states) may be systematically overridden. Shared
leadership must be entrenched through practices like rotation, comity and consensus.
Decision-rules based on pluralities should be favoured, which require joint action among
agencies of the state, national parliaments or citizens.
Guiding Principle 4 (Transnationalism): A Demoicracy should Give Priority to
Transnational Rights and Obligations while Guarding against Coercive Assimilation
A demoicracy focuses on Union constraints on the treatment of non-nationals. The
obligations of free movement and non-discrimination should be genuinely applied and
citizens receptive to the idea that people moving across borders bring with them the laws
and social contracts of their home country, just as migrants must progressively internalize
the externalities that these create for others. The transnational political rights of those who
move should be taken seriously, so that, for instance, loss of home country voting rights
should be compensated with voting rights in the host country. Transnational lists in the
European Parliament could serve these kinds of transnational interests.
Guiding Principle 5 (Equivalence): In a Demoicracy, Shared Projects (for Example,
Single Market, Single Space, Single Money) do not Require Harmonized Standards, but
Minimal Compatibility and Maximal Recognition
Integration without unity calls for engineering policy compatibility while accommodating
non-convergence. The principle of proportionality must pervade the EU political culture
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and single policy standards shunned to the extent compatible with the pursuit of common
projects. Instead, European policies and laws should deal with tensions between home and
host country jurisdiction through conflict-of-laws approaches and managed mutual recognition.
The motto of a demoicracy when it comes to fiscal union could be: as much fiscal
harmonization as necessary, as little as possible.
Guiding Principle 6 (Mediation): In a Demoicracy, the Enforcement of Common
Disciplines Requires Strong, Legitimate Domestic Mediation
The thickness of mediation by national state and non-state institutions is both a constraint
and a principle, which needs to be actively nurtured to ensure democratically sustainable
integration. National leaders, courts, ministries, parliaments, agencies, civil servants and
non-governmental organizations must use their margin of manoeuvre to translate, transform
and own collective EU disciplines. As the travails of EMU illustrate, it helps when
political agents for change are Janus-faced insiders in Brussels and at home able to
nationalize EU disciplines in the long run.
Guiding Principle 7 (Empowerment): In a Demoicracy, Common Disciplines and
Resources should Primarily Empower Lower Loci of Governance
If centralized authority ought to serve primarily for top-down empowerment, we need
to identify jointly and democratically the privileged target for such empowerment.
Subsidiarity under democratic interdependence calls for cities, regions and other sub-state
entities to govern in horizontal consideration of each other. It may sometimes necessitate
devolving back competences from the EU level.
Principle 8 (Complementarity): Direct Accountability in a Demoicracy must Appeal to
a Range of Alternatives to Traditional Political Representation and thus Strengthen
rather than Compete with Indirect Accountability
Europe’s demoicracy operates in the shadow of national representative democracy,
with indirect accountability as its primary focus, but only insofar as modes of domestic
majoritarian aggregation do not systematically bypass the interests of groups most
affected by integration. Concurrently, pluralities across countries are preferred to aggregative
methods when it comes to direct links between citizens and union. In this spirit,
national parliaments should be more directly involved in EU politics. If a demoicratic lens
applauds the current albeit precarious entrenchment of an EU participatory norm, capture
needs to be avoided. Power-scrutinizing mechanisms at EU level can be multiplied,
including through the Internet, and made to trickle down to the domestic level. Horizontal
accountability mechanisms must be refined to reflect negative political externalities.
Guiding Principle 9 (Co-citizenship): In a Demoicratic Light, European Citizenship
can Serve as a Political, Legal and Cultural Referent to Enmesh rather than Replace
Existing Citizenships in the Union
In the spirit of demoicracy, Europeans need to radically rethink the tenets of citizenship in
a polity of multiple demoi where patterns of empowerment and disempowerment concern
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politics tout court and not just the politics of movement across borders. EU citizenship
should expand the rights, opportunities and obligations of all its citizens via Europeanized
national citizenships, without superimposing an autonomous new ‘citizenship granting
and monitoring’ authority.
Guiding Principle 10 (Diversity): Advocates for a Demoicratic Union must Counter the
Messianic Discourse Calling for ‘Oneness’ and Advocate a Shared Ethics of
Transnational Mutual Recognition
The commitment to diversity in a demoicracy should serve as a mental beacon to resist the
pull to oneness – be it one people, one state, one voice on the world stage or one story for
the EU. Instead, radical democratic openness calls for drawing strength from legitimate
differences, be they between European accents on the international stage or between
national consumption and supply patterns to create a Euro-wide energy grid. To be sure,
the balance between convergence and autonomy can change over time since in a consistent
demoicratic polity, diversity is what the peoples make of it.
Conclusions: On the Rubicon?
In this article, I have sought to lay out some broad parameters for discussion for an
eventual ‘demoicratic theory’ for the EU and to highlight some of the meeting points,
misunderstandings and semantic games between various traditions or fields relevant to
the endeavour. Indeed, the concept of ‘demoicracy’ can accommodate many contending
conceptions of how this can be achieved. At the heart of such an agenda is the need to
reconcile normative arguments with the positive methods which prevail in the social
sciences of the EU. There is still ample room for disagreement on the relationship
Figure 2: On the Rubicon
Source: Author.
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between making the case for understanding the EU as it is today as a demoicracy-inthe-making,
deploying the concept as an autonomous normative benchmark by which to
assess its evolving legal, political and economic order, and explaining the evolution of the
enterprise.
If metaphors can be of help, the challenge of demoicracy story is to stay on the Rubicon
(see Figure 2). European peoples have progressively left the shores of state sovereignty
under anarchy to enter the Rubicon of ‘neither-nor’, the realm of ambiguity where
state-bound demoi can no longer do their thing separately, nor organize their co-operation
by borrowing from traditional notions of domestic law and democracy, that is, democracy
of the kind we are familiar with and whose vocabulary has become second nature to most
Europeans – predicated on the constructed existence of a ‘people’. They are bound instead
by the basic injunction of demoicracy: thou shalt not cross the Rubicon which separates
a Union ruled by and for multiple demoi from a Union ruled by and for one single demos.
On this ship, many yearn to land on one shore or the other rather than stay on the Rubicon.
Changing tides make the determination of the shorelines unclear anyway. Some insist on
a destination while others remain content with a normative compass. All know that
whatever happens, whether it is on a moment’s crossing or for a long journey, life on the
Rubicon is never clear of a tempest when all the might of a thousand splendid battle calls
is cried out into the night air.
Correspondence:
Kalypso Nicolaïdis
Department of Politics and International Relations
University of Oxford
Manor Road
Oxford OX1 3UQ
United Kingdom
email: kalypso.nicolaidis@sant.ox.ac.uk
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