Authors: Peter. Mair
Part of the problem here is that it is increasingly difficult to separate out what is European and what is national. In other words, as European integration proceeds, it becomes more and more difficult to conceive of the member states as being on one side of some putative divide, with a distinct supranational Union sitting on the other. Instead, we usually see both together and at the same time. Thus, for example, we have one approach in the literature on the EU which emphasizes how Europe ‘hits home’, while we have another and more recent approach that emphasizes how home – or the nation-states – ‘hits Europe’.
22
In reality, each ‘hits’ and hence intermingles with the other;
23
the EU is also
the member states. But it in practice, it becomes difficult to separate out what is European and what is domestic; and if, in practice, the two become ever more closely bound up with one another, it then follows that dissatisfaction with Europe must also entail a more generalized ‘polity-scepticism’. In other words, when we talk about Euroscepticism, and about opposition to Europe, we are also sometimes talking about scepticism and opposition towards our own national institutions and modes of governance. This is a scepticism about how we are governed, and it is, in my view, a scepticism that is at least partly fostered by the increasingly limited scope for opposition within the system – whether that system be European or national, or both at the same time.
This is also one of the reasons why our polities have now become such fertile breeding grounds for populism.
24
To a degree, this was foreseen by Robert Dahl
a half-century ago, when he talked about the decline of opposition and the ‘surplus of consensus’, and about the type of opposition that might develop in the western democracies of the future. Speculating about that future, he pointed towards the possible emergence of an opposition of principle, one that would be directed at the mode of governing itself. Not just the policies, and not only the personnel, but also the polity itself might be called into question:
Among the possible sources of alienation in western democracies that may generate new forms of structural opposition is the new democratic Leviathan itself. By the democratic Leviathan I mean the kind of political system which is a product of long evolution and hard struggle, welfare-oriented, centralized, bureaucratic, tamed and controlled by competition among highly organized elites, and, in the perspective of the ordinary citizen, somewhat remote, distant and impersonal … The politics of this new democratic Leviathan are above all the politics of compromise, adjustment, negotiation, bargaining; a politics carried on among professional and quasi-professional leaders who constitute only a small part of the total citizen body; a politics that reflects a commitment to the virtues of pragmatism, moderation and incremental change; a politics that is un-ideological
and even anti-ideological … This new Leviathan [is seen by many citizens] as too remote and bureaucratized, too addicted to bargaining and compromise, [and] too much an instrument of political elites and technicians. (Dahl, 1965: 21–22)
Political opposition gives voice. By losing opposition, we lose voice, and by losing voice we lose control of our own political systems. It is not at all clear how that control might be regained, either in Europe or at home, or how we might eventually restore meaning to that great milestone on the road to building democratic institutions.
1.
The term, and the figures, come from the Freedom House report ‘Democracy’s Century: A Survey of Global Political Change in the 20th Century’, published on 7 December 1999. The full report can be found at
http://www.freedomhouse.org/reports/century.html
.
2.
See Mair (2004: 340–43), from which the following paragraphs are drawn.
3.
For a wide-ranging application of Rokkan’s framework to the process of European integration, see Bartolini (1999; 2006).
4.
Although this is generally true for the mainstream parties in particular, the most extreme example of such displacement comes from the fringe, where the Danish June Movement and People’s Movement Against the EU choose to fight their anti-European battle in the electoral arena of the European Parliament rather than in that of the Folketing. The two parties win a lot of support – they achieved almost 25 per cent in the 1999 round of European Parliament elections – but they are also clearly choosing, deliberately, to fight in the wrong arena.
5.
This seems also to be the reading of Pascal Lamy, EU trade commissioner: ‘Cooperation on coal and steel was the first thing the founding fathers of the European project agreed upon. It was a trick they played: they wanted a political union and the easiest place to begin was a common market in these two basic products’; see Joe Klein, ‘Who’s in charge here?’,
Guardian
, 26 June 2002.
6.
Note the typically acerbic observation by the late Ken Tynan in his 1975 diary: ‘6 June: Roy Jenkins, interviewed on TV after the result [of the Common Market referendum] was announced, made an unguarded remark that summed up the tacit elitism of the pro-Marketeers. Asked to explain why the public had voted as it had … [he] smugly replied: “They took the advice of people they were used to following”.’ See Lahr (2001: 248).
7.
As early as 1981, just two years after the introduction of direct elections to the European Parliament, R.K. Carty (1981: 241) expressed concern about this very possibility, noting that ‘it would be a tragedy if the net result of electing the European Parliament were a less democratic Europe.’ It seems that the more powers the European Parliament has accumulated over the years, the less interest and support it has generated. See also Pijpers (1999).
8.
The reopening of the traditional centre-periphery cleavage in Norway in the context of the first EEC referendum is an obvious case in point (Valen, 1976), with more recent examples being found in Catalonia as well as in northern Italy.
9.
See, for example, the debate between James Caporaso et al.,
ECSA Review
10:3, 1997, available at
http://www.eustudies.org/Nldebate.htm
.
10.
See also Hix (2004: 2–5) and Kassim (2003: 140–42).
11.
This paraphrases the observation by Sartre (1963: 56) in a more extended discussion of method: ‘Valery is a petit bourgeois intellectual … But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valery.’ See also Przeworski and Teune (1970: 17–23).
12.
On this particular issue, see also the conclusions to a wider study drawn by Thomassen and Schmitt (1999: 255–67).
13.
And why talk about the need to tackle the democratic deficit while allowing it to worsen in practice?: ‘On the record all core decision-makers are devoted to improving democratic legitimacy but institutional reforms are instead contributing to further diluting the link between the citizens and the decision-makers in Europe’ (Kohler-Koch, 2000: 513 [abstract]).
14.
‘When the nobles had real power as well as privileges, when they governed and administered, their rights could be at once greater and less open to attack … True, the nobles enjoyed invidious privileges and rights that weighed heavily on the commoner, but in return for this they kept order, administered justice, saw to the execution of laws, came to the rescue of the oppressed, and watched over the interests of all. The more these functions passed out of the hands of the nobility, the more uncalled-for did their privileges appear – until at last their mere existence seemed a meaningless anachronism.’ See Tocqueville (1966: 60). For an earlier observation on this syndrome, see Mair (1995).
15.
Christopher Bertram, director of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, as cited in Joe Klein, ‘Who’s in charge here?’,
Guardian
, 26 June 2002.
16.
For a wide-ranging review of these issues, which is also more sceptical about the real capacity for depoliticization, see Flinders (2004).
17.
On this more general point, see also Katz (2001).
18.
For a similar argument see Moravcsik (2002), who suggests that since the EU is just another – albeit very powerful – non-majoritarian institution, it does not actually need to be democratized.
19.
It might be argued that the immediate problem here is that the constitutional architects of the European construct have not gone far enough in their abandonment of democratic legitimacy (see also Pijpers, 1999; Christiansen, 1998). By allowing a small opening for a fairly ineffective form of popular democracy at the European level – direct elections to the European Parliament – they have reminded at least some citizens of the limited role popular democracy plays in this whole enterprise. Had no such channel been created, popular acceptance of the non-majoritarian character of the EU might have proved easier to manage. To offer a touch of democratic legitimacy is to remind citizens of its limits; to offer none at all might well have facilitated the emergence of alternative sources of legitimacy.
20.
[From this point onwards, the text follows the closing passage of Mair’s ‘Political opposition and the European Union’, the
Government and Opposition/Leonard
Schapiro Lecture delivered at the Annual Conference of the Political Studies Association, Reading, April 2006 (Mair, 2007a). The original final paragraph and a half, making some twenty lines, of the 2005 version of ‘Popular democracy and the European Union polity’ has been excised, and the material now replacing it has been lightly modified for context.
Ed
.]
21.
[Mair is invoking Robert A. Dahl’s ‘Reflections on opposition’ (1965), which influentially distinguished three modes of opposition in western democracies: the ‘classical’ variety combining a challenge on grounds of policy with recognition of the government’s right to govern; ‘opposition of principle’, which rejects not only the government and its policies but also the system of governance itself; and ‘the elimination of opposition’ in a situation where there is no meaningful difference between the rival candidates for political office – or in his own terms, ‘government by cartel’ (Mair, 2007a: 5). Ed.]
22.
Tanja Börzel and Thomas Risse, ‘When Europe hits home: Europeanization and domestic change’,
European Integration Online Papers
4:15 (2000); Jan Beyers and Jade Trondal, ‘How nation-states “hit” Europe: ambiguity and representation in the European Union’,
West European Politics
27:5 (2004), 919–42. I also deal with this issue in
Polity-Scepticism, Party Failings and the Challenge to European Democracy
, Uhlenbeck Lecture 24, Wassenaar, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, 2006.
23.
Thus, we might entertain what the great Irish writer Flann O’Brien might have called ‘a molecular theory of Europe’. See O’Brien,
The Third Policeman
(London: McGibbon and Kee, 1967), where the molecular theory of bicycles is outlined in some detail. In brief, cyclists who ride their bikes often enough, especially on bumpy Irish roads, will transfer some of their molecules into the bike, while the bike will transfer some of its molecules into the cyclist. Eventually, the mix becomes so advanced that it becomes impossible to know which is the bike and which is the rider. On market days you might see old farmers who cycle a lot balancing themselves with one foot on the curb, or leaning with their shoulders against a gable wall, while late on cold evenings you might see their bikes edging closer to the fire.
24.
[In a paper written shortly before his death, Mair (2011) drew attention to the systemic character of the populist oppositions and to a shared limiting tendency in their practice:
‘… there are signs that the growing gap between responsiveness [to popular interests]and responsibility [to established norms of governance] and the declining capacity of parties to bridge or manage that gap is leading to the bifurcation of a number of party systems and to a new form of opposition (Katz and Mair, 2008). In these systems, governing capacity and vocation become the property of one more or less closely bounded groups of political parties. These are parties which are clearly within the mainstream, or “core” (Smith, 1989) of the party system, and it is these which may be able to offer voters a choice of government. Representation or expression, on the other hand, or the provision of voice to the people, when it doesn’t move wholly outside the arena of electoral politics, becomes the property of a second group of parties, and it is these parties that constitute the new opposition. These latter parties are often characterized by a strong populist rhetoric. They rarely govern, and also downplay office-seeking motives. On the rare occasions when they do govern, they sometimes have severe problems in squaring their original emphasis on representation and their original role as voice of the people with the constraints imposed by governing and by compromising with coalition partners. Moreover, though not the same as the anti-system parties identified by Sartori (1976: 138–40), they share with those parties a form of “semi-responsible” or “irresponsible” opposition as well as a “politics of outbidding”. In other words, it is possible to speak of a growing divide in European party systems between parties which claim to represent, but don’t deliver, and those which deliver, but are no longer seen to represent.’
Ed
.]
Tables 5
(a) and (b), in
Chapter 4
, are an editorial addition computing the vote share of a number of populist parties, for national general and European Parliament elections – from 1980 to 2010 for the former and from 1979 to 2009 for the latter. The parties featuring in the tables are mainly populist formations of the radical right, as defined by Cas Mudde (2007) in his seminal work on the subject, already cited in the draft text of
Ruling the Void
. They are accompanied by a number of instances that in one way or another deviate from the general pattern. The countries included are those of the European Union as it stood on the eve of the major enlargement of 2004, plus a number of long-established west European democracies outside the EU – a selection made to facilitate comparison with the tables in
Chapter 1
. Here, by country, are the parties included in the calculations.