Abstract
Taking inspiration from a distinction Kant drew between the way power is organised, and the manner in which it is exercised, this analysis directs attention to the consolidation of an autocratic style of politics in Europe. The co-existence between an autocratic style of rule and preserved democratic organisation of power, which prevents a legitimation crisis, is explained in terms of an altered legitimacy relationship (or social contract) between public authority and citizens. This ultimately allows a discrepancy to emerge between public authority’s increased capacity for policy action and reduced social responsibility for the consequences of that action.
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Notes
For a particularly judicious analysis of this type see Streeck (2011).
Kant (1795, Section II, Art. 1) builds a typology of states around two axes: (1) the form of sovereignty (forma imperii)—autocracy, aristocracy, democracy; and (2) the mode of rule (forma regiminis)—republican or despotic. Being the opposite of ‘despotic’, the term ‘republican’ here denotes a liberal (in our common usage of the term) style of rule. Thus, the correlation of forma imperii to forma regiminis yields two types of democracy: a despotic and a republican (liberal) one.
Thus, Montesquieu (1748) advocated the rule of law and the division between executive, legislative and judicial powers for their capacity to hold central authority accountable for its actions, thus ensuring that power is used responsibly. He considered the British constitutional monarchy as the perfect embodiment of such rule.
The Neue Slowenische Kunst art movement is a political art collective established in 1984 in Slovenia, then still part of communist Yugoslavia. Its signature visual device consists in re-appropriating totalitarian kitsch in order to provoke a clash among meanings brought to their logical extremes. Its most prominent exponent, the band Laibach, is an avant-garde music group known for their deconstruction of well-known pieces of music with the aim to subvert their original message.
Note that these appointments do not alter the constitutional set-up of power in Italy and Greece—the institutional structure of public authority retains the features of parliamentary democracies founded on the principle of popular sovereignty.
As quoted in Minder (2011).
Los Indignados (The Indignants) is a social movement of mostly young people, who staged protests in Spain close to the local and regional elections held on 22 May 2011. At the focus of their demands is a solution to endemic youth unemployment, while their creed centres on a rejection of the current political and economic system, including the institution of representative democracy; they appeal for grassroots participatory democracy.
Centre-right parties (parties for which economic liberalism is a key ideological tenet), which could be expected to be discredited by the economic crisis that neoliberal economic policy triggered, were elected to power in Spain, Finland and Denmark in 2011; in the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands in 2010; in Luxembourg and Germany in 2009—to limit examples to the ‘old’ European Democracies. Incumbent centre-left parties, despite avowed ideological sentiment, have been implementing austerity measures of a neoliberal nature for the sake of appeasing global financial markets. Although the tide appears to be turning with the French presidential elections in March 2012, the consensus between the centre-Left and the centre-Right on the inevitability of further neo-liberal structural reform remains intact—whether these reforms are to spur growth or to impose budgetary discipline.
I had observed this tendency to be emerging already at the time of my involvement with the student strikes at Sofia University in 1989–1990; see Azmanova (1992).
English translations of some of Havel’ and Klaus’s programmatic texts are available in O'Sullivan (2004).
The ‘Copenhagen criteria’ (the rules defining a country’s eligibility for membership in the EU) as adopted at the 1993 European Council stipulate: ‘Membership requires that the candidate country has achieved stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights, respect for and protection of minorities, the existence of a functioning market economy as well as the capacity to cope with competitive pressure and market forces within the Union. Membership presupposes the candidate’s ability to take on the obligations of membership including adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union’ (European Council 1993, point 7/A/iii).
The Single European Act, signed by EU leaders in 1986, aimed to integrate member-states economies into a ‘single market’ by 1992, thus engendering a space of free movement of goods, services, capital and persons (known as ‘the four freedoms’). The treaty came into effect in 1987, and the single market was effectively established in 1993.
The Lisbon Strategy (also known as the Lisbon Agenda) was a 10-year action plan for economic development adopted by EU-member states’ leaders at the European Council in Lisbon in March 2000. It was updated and re-launched in 2006. Upon its expiration, the European Council in June 2010 adopted a new European competition and development strategy for the period until 2020, known as ‘Europe 2020’.
For a detailed outline of this process see Leibfried (2010).
The former concerns export policy, the latter—the state of domestic product- and labour-markets. Thus, one can imagine an integrated market to emerge among EU member-states as a shared economic space with strong public sector and protected labour markets.
I owe the analogy between raison d’état and raison d’économie to my student Cécile Maitre-Ferri.
Directive 2006/123/EC was adopted by the European Parliament and Council on 12 December 2006.
The image of the Polish plumber as a symbol of cheap labour coming in from Eastern Europe appeared in the press during the EU Constitutional referendum in 2005 in France.
Official Journal of the European Union, 23.2.2008, p. 10. In the Viking (EU06050291) and the Laval (SE07060291) cases, the European Court of Justice was asked to clarify the relationship between the rules on free movement, as protected in the European Community Treaty, and the fundamental rights of workers to take collective action, including strike action.
As evidenced, for instance, in the comprehensive analysis of elections in 75 countries in Hellwig and Samuels (2007).
Council of Europe. Draft recommendation of the Committee of the Ministers to member states on the Council of Europe’s Charter on Shared Social Responsibilities, DGII/DCS (2011) 09, p. 3.
For a more detailed account of the way the legitimacy relationship between public authority and citizens has been reconfigured in Western democracies since the nineteenth century see Azmanova (2013).
I introduce the notion economic xenophobia in Azmanova (2011).
Recent surveys corroborate this new, economic rather than cultural, foundation of xenophobia, as a significant percentage of Europeans declare that the current level of immigration is spoiling the quality of life by combining the (perceived) threat of jobs loss with pressures on the social security system and the state education and health systems (according to a Harris poll published in the Financial Times, 6 September, 2010).
Thus, analysis has noted that the populist upsurge, which propelled to victory the xenophobic True Finns Party in the 17 April 2011 national elections, had been brewing for years in Finland as decline in traditional Finnish industries such as forestry and paper brought economic insecurity.
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Azmanova, A. The Crisis of Europe: Democratic Deficit and Eroding Sovereignty—Not Guilty. Law Critique 24, 23–38 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-012-9112-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-012-9112-y