Abstract
The chapter reconstructs the understanding of democracy held by Alexis de Tocqueville, who, in addition to Charles Montesquieu and Max Weber, is considered one of the three theorists who explicitly examined the relation between the centralization of political power and democracy. However, in his different meaning of democracy as a social structure and way of life, only Tocqueville placed civil society and political freedom at the center of his democratic model.
The chapter outlines the key reasons why, for Tocqueville, the true achievement of the French Revolution lay in the centralization of political power. It further shows, using the example of European gender politics, to what extent this centralization of power is an understanding of democracy directly linked to the Enlightenment, which is still to be detected in the current European multilevel system.
It is, indeed, difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people. (Tocqueville; Autorität und Freiheit. Schriften, Reden und Briefe. Ausgewählt und eingeleitet von Albert Salomon, 1965, p. 583)
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Notes
- 1.
The fundamental differentiation between “a central government” and “a central administration” (Tocqueville 1965, p. 69 f.) is key for Tocqueville’s understanding of democracy and is viewed as the essential element of his sociology of the state.
- 2.
The COR is a consultative body (Art. 4(2) TEC) which is made up of members of the local and regional authorities who are under no power of direction and through which the Länder can participate in political decision making at the EU level in the form of “own-initiative opinions.”
- 3.
In its decision on 30 June 2009, the Second Senate of the German Federal Constitutional Court stated that the reform treaty, which was signed on 19 October 2008 by the 27 EU heads of state and government in the Portuguese capital city Lisbon, went against Art. 38(1) of the German constitution in connection with Art. 23(1) of the Basic Law because it did not give the Bundestag and Bundesrat sufficient participatory rights in the framework of European lawmaking and treaty amending procedures. As a consequence, on 8 September 2009, the Bundestag passed the necessary changes to the law on the expansion and strengthening of the rights of the Bundestag and Bundesrat in matters of the EU with 446 of 494 submitted votes.
- 4.
“But I contend that in order to combat the evils which equality may produce there is only one effectual remedy–namely, political freedom.” (Tocqueville 1965)
- 5.
The open method of coordination (OMC) is an instrument of indirect political coordination in which goals are formulated at the council level. Achieving these goals at the national level is then reciprocally monitored via usual indicator-based transnational monitoring and thus represents a possibility for participation in supranational policies for the Länder and regions. The OMC was developed in the context of the initiatives for the European employment strategy in the late 1990s and upheld in the Lisbon strategy. The starting point can be seen as the White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness, Employment by the European Commission in 1953.
- 6.
What is meant in particular are the decisions on the unequal treatment in the area of social security (Defrenne I), wage discrimination (Defrenne II), and the financial consequences of differing retirement ages for men and women (Defrenne III). What was actually successful was only the Defrenne Decision II which spoke directly to the wage components. In the other two decisions, a legal foundation was lacking, which was why guidelines first had to be created and these then had to be implemented into national law.
- 7.
In contrast to the term “iron triangle” with which Theodore Lowi (1979) described bureaucratic politics between Congress administration and lobbyists, Alison Woodward (2004) uses the term “velvet triangle” as a metaphor for the three most important groups of actors in European gender politics: Femocrats in the sense of feminist bureaucrats in European institutions, groups of experts, and nongovernmental organizations.
- 8.
Hannah Arendt (1970, p. 42) also many years later disputed the inherent value of institutions when she wrote, “all political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they freeze and decline as soon as the living power of the people is no longer behind them to give support.”
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Wilde, G. (2014). Alexis de Tocqueville Revisited: Between the Centralization of Political Power, Civil Associations, and Gender Politics in the European Union. In: Freise, M., Hallmann, T. (eds) Modernizing Democracy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0485-3_3
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