The European Council on Foreign Relations

Reinventing Europe: Chris J. Bickerton

Date: 6th February 2012  |  Author: Chris J. Bickerton,

Categories: Reinventing Europe,
Tags: , europe, populism, technocracy, eurocrisis

As part of ECFR's 'Reinvention of Europe' project, we are running a series of responses from leading thinkers and academics to Mark Leonard's recent paper, 'Four scenarios for the reinvention of Europe'. The paper outlined four possible routes towards solving Europe's current crisis, and argued that Europe's main challenge was to solve the acute euro crisis without exacerbating the chronic crisis of declining European power. In the sixth in this series of responses, we hear from Chris J. Bickerton who is Associate Professor of International Relations at Sciences Po, Paris.

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Mark Leonard’s essay on the present crisis and future development of the European Union is a well-argued and insightful view of the EU’s ills. He is right to focus on the rise of technocracy and populism as the dominant political forms in contemporary Europe. Once upon a time the burning political question was where one stood in the struggle between labour and capital. Today, the left/right political spectrum is giving way to one where national populist figures stand at one end and grey European technocrats at the other. National populations are asked to make their choice. Closer European integration is justified as an antidote to national atavism. As Leonard remarks, today technocracy is also re-entering at the national level: populist figures like Silvio Berlusconi are replaced by technocrats like Mario Monti.

We should be careful not to take this argument too far, however. This author remembers a debate at Oxford University a few years ago where national referenda on EU treaties were seen as tantamount to opening the door to Europe’s populist far right movements. Here we see in its clearest form the outlook of the contemporary European elite: democracy is equated only with populist mobilisation. Far from reflecting actual political dynamics, this just tells us how little faith our leaders have in their ability to win voters over to their own views. Their national publics appear to them as an unmoveable mass of prejudices. Giving democracy up to populists is a bit like the News of the World journalist, Paul McMullan, who argued in front of the Levenson inquiry in the UK that privacy laws serve only to protect paedophiles.

The rise of populism and technocracy may be important features of contemporary European politics but this is not, as Leonard suggests, a story restricted to – or even originating with – the European Union. Rather, it is the result of shifts at the national level. The EU has followed a technocratic path since its founding in the 1950s but the current malaise is cut of a more recent cloth.

As a way out of the economic and social crises of the 1970s and 1980s, and in line with a powerful rejection of mainstream political parties by students and other new social movements, responsibility for many policies was given over to unelected bodies. Visible from the expansion in UK government “quangos” to the rise of independent central banks across Western Europe, the drift since the governability crises of the 1970s has been towards the insulation of policymaking from the supposed partisanship of career politicians. Far from being challenged by politicians themselves, this drift has been encouraged in the name of a necessary “tying of hands”: when the elected have control over the purse strings the result can only be inflation and economic turbulence.

This view has become a dogma amongst national political elites and has become the basis for today’s EU. Only when able to tie themselves collectively through pan-European pacts and agreements do national representatives feel that they are doing their job. The development of the European Union as a vehicle for the collective limitation of national sovereigns thus reflects a fundamental shift in national political life.

The rise of populism in Europe – from Wilders’ Freedom Party in the Netherlands to Orban’s national crusade in Hungary – is a rejection not simply of the EU but more broadly of those national political classes who have made a virtue of their own emasculation. Contemporary populists, however, are no radical alternative to the status quo. Rather, they complement a managerial political class that has lost faith in any real societal transformation. Populism, after all, is politics without policies; technocracy is policy without politics.

On this reading, we can make sense of Leonard’s four scenarios for the EU’s future. The most likely is the third: the development of stronger and more constraining rules regarding government spending that are steadily incorporated into the EU’s legal framework. No great leap into a federalist future; rather an extension of the existing system whereby national executives willingly reduce the room the discretionary macro-economic policy-making in the name of responsible government. In so far as national populations continue to voice their disgust and disappointment with their own national representatives, it is likely that the EU will continue to move forward as a vehicle expressing this disavowal of national parties and national political figures. Greece has become a ward of the EU in part because Greeks have more faith in European officials than in their own leaders and civil servants.

Is there anything that can take us beyond populist technocracy? The first step is to reclaim democracy from both populists and technocrats at the national level. In doing so, however, we must accept the radical indeterminacy of any properly democratic movement. The EU may or may not be part of Europe’s future. Having the confidence to embrace this uncertainty should be the first step towards the reinvention of Europe.

Also in this series:

Harold James - 'The more Europe suffers, the more its people will see that a reform agenda that is just an exercise in incrementalism is also nothing more than an exercise in futility'.

Richard Rosecrance - 'if Greece or Spain did not exist, they would have to be invented. Their participation in the euro keeps the value of the currency down from $1.80 to $1.20 or $1.30 or so, thereby ensuring the success of German exports to the rest of the world.'

Brigid Laffan - 'as the Union intrudes more and more into domestic budgetary and public finance choices, can party politics in Europe adapt to a very different governance regime?'

Charles S. Maier - 'The British can imagine that their banks will suffice, the Germans their autos, but such comparative advantage can dissipate quickly. I’d as soon wager on Greek beaches.'

Georg Sørensen - 'a substantial part of the present euro crisis has less to do with European cooperation and more to do with member states that are fragile, ineffective, have serious corruption problems...'

Carlos Gaspar - "In an enlarged “Euroland”, Germany’s pre-eminence could be balanced by a Catholic coalition led by France, Italy and Poland."

Dimitri A. Sotiropoulos – 'we still live in an era in which the nationalist project is more seductive than any project of integration among nations'

Pawel Swieboda - 'no-one dares to ask the question if the euro is still a political project, as its founders tended to believe, or if it is today about nothing else than damage control'.

Claus Offe - 'Europe is not just needed as a defensive mechanism to prevent the weak being overpowered by the strong, who first administer an austerity cure without then providing the requisite support for recovery.'

Mario Teló - 'what is abusively decried by populist voices as a “German Europe” might in fact look a lot like the broadly endorsed “EU2020 strategy”. Input legitimacy may complement output legitimacy.'

Josep M. Colomer - 'For democracy to survive and retrieve in Europe, responsiveness and accountability of rulers should be moving from the state level to the EU level, where so many crucial decisions are already being made'

Marco de Andreis - 'a critical mass has been already assembled to make of Europe’s integration a possibility rather than an impossibility. And to at least consider the United States of Europe a fifth scenario for the reinvention of Europe.'

Miguel Maduro - 'the creation of European politics must go hand in hand with a change in the character of politics. For that, changes in policies may be even more important than changes in institutions.'

Narcís Serra - “If we wish to favour economic growth in European countries we must address income redistribution. This must not be done through fiscal measures alone but also by dealing with the heart of the productive structure itself.”

Brendan Simms: 'In 2020, President Radek Sikorski of the Democratic Union could long back at a turbulent, but successful first term in office...'

Christine Ockrent: 'In all the countries where people struggle with the economic crisis and fear for their children’s future, Europe has more than ever become the scapegoat'

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