Abstract
This chapter discusses the challenges that the war against Ukraine has brought for the EU, putting particular emphasis on the question as to what extent these are linked to a conflict between liberal democracy and autocracy. The EU and its Member States are having to reposition themselves in a changing world order that is no longer liberal, but at least multipolar. There are new political realities, not only in political and economic, but also in ideational terms. Adjusting to this new setting is difficult for manifold good reasons: China is trying to gain (geo)political and economic power and influence; several big states abstained from voting on condemnation of the Russian invasion in the UN General Assembly; and a presidential election is coming up in the USA in 2024. With regard to the EU itself, Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova want to become EU members, while the EU already faces rule-of-law issues with Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. In all this, the war is often discussed as a conflict between an autocratic regime on the one hand and the liberal democracies of Europe and the EU, to which Ukraine wants to belong, on the other. However, liberal democracy is also under threat in the EU itself and not only from outside the EU. Authoritarian tendencies and right-wing populist parties are on the rise in several EU states; there is visible democratic deconsolidation, i.e. citizens losing trust in representative democracy, and democratic backsliding. Consequently, for the EU to defend its values and liberal democracy is a challenge not only externally, but also internally. The war only amplifies these multiple tensions.
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Introduction
On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Although the Russian government spoke only of a ‘special military operation’, the invasion was, and is, not only an attack in violation of international law, but a war. Russia’s war against Ukraine has not only challenged some European convictions and habits, it has also meant that the European Union (EU) and its Member States must reposition themselves in a world order that has changed in several respects (see also Wiesner 2022a; Knodt and Wiesner 2023b, 2023c). The war illustrates and perpetuates the development of recent years and decades towards a multipolar world order—even a world in which several political orders confront each other, i.e. a multi-order world (Flockhart 2018). A world structured around a maximum of two hegemonic great powers has been successively replaced by a world order in which several poles of larger and smaller states confront and compete with each other—politically, territorially, economically, militarily and ideologically. For the EU, this means that its previous global political strategy, which focused strongly on ‘change through trade’ and its role as a ‘normative power Europe’ (Manners 2002), no longer looks promising. The EU and its Member States thus face new political realities, not only in political and economic, but also in ideational terms. The new setting means that they must position themselves within the increasingly tough confrontation between different blocs and adapt policies and strategies—also in (geo)political, economic, military and ideological terms.
In (geo)political, military and economic terms, the EU and its existing Member States face the need to reposition themselves with regard to all aspects of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Defence policy to date has been a national policy field, but now there is a necessity to coordinate appropriate investments and also to decide on participation in armed conflicts and arms supplies—both now and in the future. The EU must also reorient itself in its enlargement policy. All these decisions are connected to a range of internal challenges for the EU. These concern, on the one hand, a lack of capacity for action and control in policy fields such as the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). On the other hand, the EU is internally challenged by the controversies surrounding the rule-of-law, which in turn affect the collective decision-making capacity and structures of the EU.
The ideational component of the war is often framed as a conflict between autocracy/autocracies and (liberal) democracy/democracies, since the authoritarian state Russia attacked Ukraine, a would-be member of the liberal-democratic West. However, there are several signs that liberal democracy is under threat, not only from outside the EU, but from within the EU itself. First, the EU faces the internal challenge of the rule-of-law conflicts, i.e. it has to tackle authoritarian tendencies and attacks on democratic standards, above all by the Hungarian, but also the Polish government. Second, authoritarian tendencies and right-wing populist parties are also on the rise in several other EU states. Third, there is a visible democratic deconsolidation throughout the EU and its Member States, i.e. citizens are losing trust in representative democracy. Inflation and the energy crisis, which are also being felt in the EU as a result of the war, fuel this. These tendencies highlight the fact that liberal democracy is not unquestioned within the EU itself. Hence, the ideational component of the conflict around the new world order, the conflict of democracy versus autocracy, affects the EU and its Member States both externally and internally. In consequence, defending its values and its liberal democracy is a challenge for the EU not only externally, but also internally. The war only amplifies these multiple tensions.
This chapter will discuss the EU’s challenges in detail, starting with an account of the shake-up of certainties, the Zeitenwende, and the EU’s reaction. This will be followed by a section that discusses the challenges for the EU in enhancing its democratic values externally. In the third section, I line out how democracy is challenged internally in the EU and its Member States.Footnote 1
The EU and the Zeitenwende
Zeitenwende, this term coined by German chancellor Scholz in his speech in the German Bundestag’s extraordinary plenary session after the Russian Attack on Ukraine on 27 February 2022 (Deutscher Bundestag 2022), has become widely used. The concept describes a decisive shake-up of German and European certainties. For the first time since the wars in Yugoslavia (1991–2001), a war is currently taking place in Ukraine that directly affects the EU, the European states and their citizens. Now the EU and also Germany are confronted with the fact that in and with the war in Ukraine, fundamental values of the EU are being called into question: freedom, democracy, the rule-of-law and modern international law. This shakes up long-held ideas, as well as patterns of order and security throughout Europe—both among political actors and citizens.
The Zeitenwende as a Shake-Up of Certainties
For more than 70 years after the end of the Second World War, and more than 30 years after the end of the Cold War, there was no real awareness that there could be serious military threats in Europe, until February 2022. During the Cold War, a threat from nuclear weapons had been present and quite commonplace in Western Europe, but it was rather abstract, as there were never any acts of war. War had therefore been unthinkable for most Europeans for a long time; it was at most a theoretical option for decision-makers in politics and business as well as for citizens and civil society. The idea of creating peace without weapons had become common sense. Hardly anyone could imagine that Russia or any other authoritarian state would do outwardly what it does inwardly, namely openly and actively disregard the principles of freedom, the rule-of-law and the liberal international order—not only through statements or declarations, but also through acts of war. With the war, these European certainties, established for at least 30, if not almost 70 years, are now being overturned. There is uncertainty instead of the familiar and everyday peace that has existed since 1990, and in place of the idea that bloc confrontations are history, a concrete military threat has emerged.
The new political situation in the world and the Zeitenwende thus come with painful realities. Firstly, the EU Member States (and especially Germany as a NATO member) must realise that they benefited for decades from the nuclear umbrella of the USA. Secondly, it becomes clear that this protection made it possible to spend comparatively small sums on defence and to concentrate primarily on economic relations in foreign policy. Thirdly, the idea of ‘change through trade’ has obviously failed. Fourthly, all this means that a specifically European rationality towards Russia did not bear fruit, namely the orientation towards democracy, peace and global economic relations. This strategy only worked if, and only as long as, there was no aggression that ignored international law or European perspectives and rationalities.
These considerations underline how challenging it is from the perspective of the EU and its Member States to respond to the new situation. The situation’s explosive nature is particularly well illustrated in Germany, which undertook a paradigm shift in defence policy within days of the start of the war. In the last decades, German defence spending was kept as low as possible and the funds that the German army, the Bundeswehr, received, were sometimes even insufficient to keep existing weapon systems operational. On 27 February 2022, the German government not only stressed that Germany must be able to defend itself—the Bundestag also decided in its special session, the occasion of the famous ‘Zeitenwende’ speech, to create a special fund of 100 million euros for defence (Deutscher Bundestag 2022). This special fund marks a painful break with the peace-oriented German tradition of the past decades. Germany—like the EU—has defined itself as a peace power since the Second World War and must now find its role anew.
The European Union and the Changing World Order
The war, as has been said above, underlines the development towards a multipolar world order. In sum, there are many new political challenges that the EU has to deal with—whether it wants to or not. Above all, it must position itself within the multipolar world order and with regard to the geopolitical expansion strategies of the other poles. In addition to Russia and its search for support among the emerging countries, which has already been described, this concerns above all China, whose geopolitical and economic activities in the EU also recognisably serve to expand (geo)political spheres of influence and should not be underestimated. Since 2013, China has been visibly pursuing an economic expansion strategy that aims at critical infrastructure with the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, the so-called new Silk Road. Chinese investors were able to buy the port of Piraeus—a strategically important, central port in southern Europe for thousands of years—in the course of privatisation after the financial crisis in 2016 (tagesschau 2016). The next critical infrastructure that was sold to Chinese buyers is located in Germany itself: a share in the huge and strategically important port of Hamburg was sold to Chinese investor COSCO. While German authorities first granted the deal, in spring 2023, after the deal had been concluded, they later had doubts about it (NDR 2023).
The need for the EU and its Member States to reorient is further highlighted by the voting results in the UN General Assembly on the resolution that condemned the war against Ukraine on 2 March 2022. It is true that 141 states voted in favour of the resolution, and with Russia, Syria, North Korea, Belarus and Eritrea, only five voted against. However, it is decisively important to note which states abstained in the UN General Assembly vote on the resolution condemning the war and Russia. A total of 35 states did so—among them the usual suspects such as China and Cuba, but also numerous important emerging powers such as India, Pakistan, South Africa and Bangladesh, as well as most of the Central Asian states, i.e. Russia’s immediate neighbours (tagesschau 2022d). Although in the end a clear majority of states condemned the Russian attack and only a few openly sided with Russia, this outcome means that a significant number of large, populous, economically influential states refused to clearly criticise the war, and hence to take sides with the EU and the Northern and Western powers.
This once again highlights a questioning of the liberal international order and the shift towards a multipolar world order. For the EU, this means that the states that abstained are not direct or natural allies of the EU and its Member States, but, at best, are undecided which their camp should be. These states are currently courted as allies by various poles of the new world order, as the trips to Africa by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the one hand and French President Macron on the other in the summer of 2022 showed (tagesschau 2022a; Bröll and Wiegel, July 27, 2022). It is unclear which side they will end up taking.
In the new world’s political and geopolitical constellation, another decisive question is thus which states will align and why. Russia is clearly orienting itself towards the East. Only a few days before the Russian attack, Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping had signed a joint declaration (President of Russia 2022). China’s reaction to the war was noticeably reserved, however, and it gave signs of distancing itself from Russia to some extent. If, however, the alliance between Russia and China were to hold, and if it were to be strengthened by India or Pakistan, for example, this would put the ‘West’ under strong pressure.
In addition, there is uncertainty about how the USA will continue to behave in global politics. Under the administration of Joe Biden, an Atlantic alliance policy will certainly be continued—so from a European perspective, it is a fortunate circumstance that it is Biden (and no longer Donald Trump) who is currently the president of the USA. However, the danger that Trump will be elected again is real. Whether the Atlantic alliance policy will continue in its current form after the next presidential elections is uncertain.
Tackling the New Order: The EU’s Reaction
Judging from the reactions and actions the EU has taken since the beginning of the war, the EU is indeed on its way to becoming a serious geopolitical and also military actor. This means a strategic reorientation is taking place against the background of the new (geo)political challenges posed by war. The EU is clearly trying to change from being a ‘normative power Europe’ to a power that is also capable of acting militarily when in doubt.
The institutions of the EU, above all the Commission, the Foreign Affairs Commissioner and the Council, initially reacted quickly and unitedly to the Russian attack (on the following see in detail Knodt and Wiesner 2023b): the Council adopted several sanctions packages within a few days, which have since been followed by various others (European Council 2023; see also Knodt and Ringel, in this volume). In addition, there was an absolute novelty: it took only three days for the Council of the EU to decide to make 450 million euros available for arms deliveries to Ukraine (tagesschau 2022c; Knodt and Wiesner 2023a). This was the first time ever that the EU supplied arms to a country in a state of war—the EU, whose treaties contain clauses on the mutual defence of its Member States (Art. 42 Treaty on European Union), has so far however hardly taken an active military role. In order to formally and legally justify the arms deliveries, this turn was institutionally underpinned by the establishment of the ‘European Peace Facility’ (EFF), which is attached to the Council (European Council 2022b). Less than a month after the start of the invasion, the Council also adopted the EU’s first official defence strategy. The ‘Strategic Compass on Security and Defence’ sets out clear security and defence policy goals for the next five to ten years (Council of the European Union 2022).
At first, the war seemed to strengthen EU unity in other policy areas as well. All Member States took in large numbers of refugees. This was also the case for Poland and Hungary, which had previously been fiercely critical of the EU’s refugee and asylum policy and refused to accept refugees under the Dublin Agreement whenever possible.
After more than a year into the war, however, there is a danger that internal conflicts will intensify. Hungary is clearly going its own way when it comes to dealing with Russia (see below, see also Müller and Slominski in this volume). This constellation also complicates the necessary reorientation of the CFSP with the aim of strengthening the EU’s military clout. The EU needs institutional reforms in this policy area in order to improve its ability to act, but such major structural changes would require a treaty amendment that all Member States would have to agree to. Moreover, the policy field of CFSP is organised intergovernmentally and is thus subject to the unanimity requirement in the Council even in simple decisions, before a Treaty change is even seen. Blockades by single Member States could therefore severely limit the ability to act (see the discussion by Müller and Slominski, in this volume)—but unanimity seems difficult to achieve, especially in view of the right-wing populist-oriented governments and the conflicts of interest in the EU. So even for simple decisions in the area of CFSP, the need for unanimity is, and remains, a high hurdle.
Enhancing Liberal Democracy Externally
The concept of a multipolar world order, as said above, concerns not only political, geographic, economic and military, but also ideational factors. It should thus be taken into account that many of the states that abstained or voted against the UN resolution condemning the war against Ukraine are autocracies. This underlines the fact that the war also has an ideational component of conflict between liberal democracies and autocracies or hybrid systems. The joint declaration of the Russian and Chinese presidents in February 2022 mentioned above underlines this: about five printed pages of the declaration discuss the concept of democracy, underlining that both Russia and China are perfectly democratic, and that it is only Western liberal countries that do not accept their way of doing democracy (President of Russia 2022). This means that alongside the material war, there is a conceptual struggle (on this see in detail Wiesner 2019b) on and with the interpretation of words and ideas, and in particular the concept of democracy. The conflict that is carried out is one of dominant and rightful definitions of democracy, with both China and Russia claiming that their interpretation is right, rather than the ‘Western’ one.
The Russian attack on Ukraine can hardly be understood from a European perspective. It not only contradicts the orientation towards economic exchange and free trade that dominated in the EU and also in most states in Europe. It is also a blatant breach of International Law. Last but not least, it also contradicts the fundamental values of the European Union as defined in Article 2 TEU: “respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities, […] pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men” (European Union 2016).
However, the Russian war of aggression can very well be understood from a Russian geopolitical and ideological perspective—a perspective in which the values of the EU and most other European states are seen as decadent and a Greater Russian Empire is aspired to. The writings of the Russian publicist Alexander Dugin formulate the related body of thought (Dugin 2021, 2022). This is the ideational component of the conflict that has already been raised.
From a global ideational perspective, especially with regard to the core values of liberal democracy, namely freedom, democracy and the rule-of-law, the consequences of the War are currently as open as the question of political alliances. In the ‘West’ and among those who want to belong to the West, there was strong majority support for Ukraine and the defence of Western values, at least in the first six months after the war began (European Commission 2022). As outlined by Chaban and Zhabotynska (in this volume) this is not the case in several other parts of the world. Moreover, as said above, a considerable number of states do not subscribe to either the Western alliance against the war, nor these liberal values.
In this conflict around democracy and liberal values, the EU is clearly within the liberal Western camp that defends liberal democracy and the values that come with it. This entails a number of concrete policies and activities, among them enlargement policy. In order to do justice to the new world political constellation, the EU must also position its enlargement policy (see the contribution by Gawrich and Wydra, in this volume). In doing so, it must reconcile outwardly directed geopolitical and geostrategic goals with various internal challenges—including the different positions of the Member States in enlargement policy, especially vis-à-vis the states of the Western Balkans.
The war has brought new movement in the field of enlargement: after Ukraine’s application, Georgia and the Republic of Moldova also applied for EU membership. In June 2022, Ukraine and Moldova were granted candidate status; Georgia was not. Among the states in the Western Balkans, this quick action led to resentment: Kosovo is still seeking official candidate status, and Bosnia-Herzegovina applied for accession in 2016. Northern Macedonia (2004) and Albania (2009) applied for membership earlier. However, the EU is not yet officially negotiating accession with these four states. Only Serbia (application for membership in 2009) and Montenegro (application for membership in 2008) have been negotiating with the EU to date (for detailed overviews of the status see European Union 2023). Why exactly the Western Balkan states have not been given a clear membership perspective so far is difficult to understand in detail—but there are obvious differences of opinion on this in the Council, which have prevented them from doing so to date (Tekin 2022).
One reason for this reservedness may be that the EU has too often admitted states that are weak in terms of the rule-of-law, and accessions could lead to further problems in this respect. The experience with the rule-of-law conflicts with Hungary and Poland thus should counteract the tendency to make hasty decisions. Moreover, with regard to the new enlargements, the EU will also have to ask itself whether it wants to be involved in wars in the future. Since the EU is also a defence community—as discussed above, Article 42 TEU states explicitly that—, more members would mean an increased commitment to defence in case of attack.
The war therefore requires the optimisation of the accession procedure and the making of offers to states that cannot become members currently. More flexible accession models are being discussed. Against this backdrop, French President Emmanuel Macron’s idea of a ‘European Political Community’ (EPC) with EU neighbouring states was implemented very quickly. On 6 October 2022, the founding meeting took place in Prague, attended by representatives of 44 states. These included the 27 EU Member States and 17 neighbouring states, namely the EU accession candidates (Albania, Montenegro, Northern Macedonia, Moldova, Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine), the potential EU accession candidates (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kosovo) as well as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom (tagesschau 2022f). However, the idea is still rather vague; it is initially a discussion format. The German government’s website states the following:
“The purpose of the European Political Community (EPC) is to promote political dialogue and collaboration in the interest of Europe as a whole, with a view to enhancing security, stability, and prosperity on the European continent”. It is further described as “a forum for policy coordination”, and it is particularly emphasised that “[…] the EPC does not replace existing organisations, structures, or processes, nor does it aim to function as a new one and in no way does it serve as a substitute for the EU accession process” (Die Bundesregierung 2022). This means that the EPC is simply a forum for dialogue in the moment, no more and no less.
Changing Patterns of Liberal Democracy
After several waves of democratisation, for a couple of years liberal representative democracy had seemed to be history’s winner, alongside the liberal international order. Currently, however, a growing number of states are on a track towards illiberalism and authoritarianism, and the existing representative democracies are also being challenged all over the world by democratic erosion and manifold changes. The challenges to liberal democracy, accordingly, do not only manifest within the ideational conflicts in the world order. They also manifest in the liberal Western countries and concretely in the EU, as various indicators show.
In recent years, crisis diagnoses for representative democracy have been abundant. Democratic theorists were the first to mark the signs of the time: J. Rancière in 1996 (Rancière 1996), and later Colin Crouch spoke of ‘post-democracy’ (Crouch 2004), Peter Mair described a ‘hollowing out’ of Western democracy (Mair 2013) and Nadia Urbinati discussed ‘democracy disfigured’ (Urbinati 2014)—to name only a few. Indeed, there are several empirical indicators that underline decisive changes affecting both the institutions and rights in representative democracy and its actors—citizens, politicians, civil society, parties and government representatives. Some changes are ambivalent in their effect on representative democracy, others openly put it in danger.
Democracy currently is challenged by nine fields of change (on the following see in detail Wiesner 2022b, 2023). Six of them describe changes to democracy and the way it works and manifests as such, namely: democratic deconsolidation, populism, democratic backsliding, technocracy, new movements and democratic innovations. Three other fields describe decisive changes of the societal context of democracy: the tendency towards a two-thirds society, digitalisation, and the globalisation trilemma. The challenges to modern liberal democracies result from an interaction of these nine problem fields which have been pertinent in the European Union since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008. The following six fields describe changes in how democracy works and manifests as such:
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Democratic Deconsolidation: There are sound empirical indicators for democratic deconsolidation, as pro-democratic attitudes are currently declining at least in a number of countries, including many EU Member States. Some authors conclude that support for democracy is declining in general (Foa and Mounk 2017b, 2018), while others highlight that researchers must not overstate this trend (Alexander and Welzel 2017; Norris 2017). However, several findings are unquietening. In the USA, less than one-third of millennials believe that it is important to live in a democracy (Mounk 2018). In the EU, citizen support of the EU and trust in its institutions have been declining, at least temporarily, during the financial crisis. The debtor countries Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Italy, Slovenia and Ireland have seen the largest growth in ‘detached’ citizens. This decrease can be linked to dissatisfaction with austerity (Armingeon and Guthmann 2014; Arpino and Obydenkova 2020).
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Populism: Populist parties and politicians have been on the rise worldwide. Election results and support for populist parties have been increasing over recent years in most established democracies. Again, in the EU Member States, since 2008 populist election results have increased decisively (Essletzbichler et al. 2018). The electoral success of Giorgia Meloni in the EU founding Member State of Italy is the latest example. This rise of populism indicates a problem for representative democracy: the populist claim to incarnate the people in reality means replacing the whole of the people with a part of the people (populist supporters), so excluding minorities and eliminating pluralism (Urbinati 2019).
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Democratic Backsliding: In some representative democratic states, right-wing populist politicians have accessed government. In most of these states, institutions and principles of representative democracy have been hollowed out. Comparative research underlines that this does not happen immediately after an election, but gradually, by governmental and political actors slowly, but decidedly, eroding democratic principles (Bermeo 2016; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). Furthermore, democratic backsliding is enabled by permissive or even supportive attitudes of decisive parts of the population (Hochschild 2018, see classically Adorno et al. 1969). Once again, the post-financial-crisis EU, after 2008, has seen democratic backsliding in a number of cases. Hungary is the most prominent example, but Poland has to be mentioned as well (Nyyssönen 2018).
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Technocracy: A number of current studies claim technocracy, i.e. decisions being shifted from democratically legitimised bodies to (more) intransparent expert bodies, undermines representative democracy (Urbinati 2014; Mounk 2018). The institutional handling of the EU’s financial crisis gives strong empirical support to such criticism, as it led to huge democratic deficits, such as parliaments being bypassed, their competencies being cut down, decision-making in intransparent expert circles and an overall lack of legitimacy and accountability of the crisis governance structures (see in detail Wiesner 2021). Austerity governance, in short, has led to a hollowing out of national democratic institutions and to shrinking EU support, as described above—even if one might judge it as being effective. This critical diagnosis holds despite the frequent statement that, in the Greek case especially, there was no alternative to austerity governance. First, there was an alternative: Greece leaving the Euro area. Second, even if this alternative is judged unattractive, austerity governance is not necessarily required to bypass representative institutions—it would have been possible, for instance, to set budget limits without intervening into national competencies or to follow the path described by national constitutions, that is, a temporary emergency regime in accordance with constitutional rules.
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Democratic Innovations: A number of new tools and participatory mechanisms such as roundtables or citizen budgets are aimed at enhancing participation and stakeholder involvement, and hence triggering democratic activity. Many authorities and governments, especially on the local level, rely on such instruments (Geissel and Joas 2013). It is however questionable to which degree they do indeed enhance democracy, especially democratic equality, as mostly well-educated and well-situated social groups participate. This means so far they have only enhanced the participation of a limited group of citizens, instead of strengthening democracy overall (Wiesner 2017).
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New Movements: Since the beginning of the EU’s financial crisis, we also see a number of new social movements on both left and right, such as the Indignados in Spain, Pegida in Germany or the protest movements against climate change. These new movements are not necessarily supporting representative democracy. Some even act openly against it, and not only the right-wing ones (Volk 2013).
These changes of the actors and processes of representative democracy are accompanied by decisive changes within the societal context of democracy that can be summed up in three fields:
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Two-thirds Society: The tendency towards a two-thirds society is visible in a number of developed countries and, as recent studies underline, has crucial effects on democratic participation. Lower social strata participate considerably less in elections, which means that policy output is legitimised to a much higher degree by higher social strata. On the other hand, citizens from lower social strata also tend to see themselves as decoupled from the majority of society and from representative institutions (Hochschild 2018; Wiesner 2017). Once again, this tendency has been strengthened during the EU’s financial crisis. Austerity policies have hit the lower social strata in the debtor countries far more seriously—which explains the feeling of lost trust in both the EU and democracy.
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Digitalisation: Understood as the process of using digitalised information or data for business interests, digitalisation brings about a number of challenges to core democratic principles (Morozov 2013; Zuboff 2019). The new currency of the digital age is no longer workforce or capital, but data. Conceptions and practices of what an individual is and what an individual’s unalienable democratic and human rights are have thus been hit by the effects of digitalisation, that is, by digital tools, for instance, preventive police raids against innocent citizens deemed susceptible by algorithms. In addition, due to digital social media, what was formerly a national public space has become split into partial publics. Direct communication via the Internet comes along with a promise of freedom, as everyone can participate in discussions. However, the Internet in general tends to reproduce and radicalise prejudicial and factional loyalties (Sunstein 2006). Internet communication hence reduces social mediation and the protection of minority positions. Not only have social media frequently been shown to be a battlefield for opinion wars, they also allow populist politicians to directly communicate with their followers, as the notorious Twitter feeds of Donald Trump underline, and thus are an enabling factor, if not a driver, of populism (Flew and Iosifidis 2019; Jungherr et al. 2019).
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Globalisation Trilemma: Formulated by Dani Rodrik (Rodrik 2011), the globalisation trilemma states that out of three goals—namely democracy, high social standards and unlimited free trade—nation-states can only achieve two. If a state opts for participating in unrestricted free trade, this comes at the expense of either national democratic standards, or social standards. The trilemma explains both the increase in technocracy and social inequality in the EU in the crisis: the EU and its Member States have largely opted for participation in both worldwide and EU-wide free trade, which has limited their margin of manoeuvrability for keeping up democratic and social standards in times of the financial crisis (Wiesner 2019a).
These challenges to liberal democracy constitute both an external and an internal context of the manifold challenges the EU faces in times of war.
Liberal Democracy Challenged Internally
These nine fields describe interrelated processes of democratic change that are found in all established liberal democracies, and hence in the EU as well. This underlines the claim that democracy is challenged inside the EU, and not only from outside. Hence, the conflict between autocracy and democracy does not simply and not only take place between the EU, or ‘the West’, and Russia. There are also tensions between autocratic and democratic actors within the EU.
Financial Crisis EU
The EU during and after the financial crisis is a paradigmatic example of the interrelations of changes in democracy. Democracy and politics in the European Union’s multilevel system have been subject to public and academic disputes since the early days of integration. However, since the financial crisis, they have been especially challenged. The year 2008 represents the beginning of change, as it marks the start of the financial crisis: Eurosceptic and populist parties have been on the rise in several of the Member States since then, even in the notorious pro-European Federal Republic of Germany. The institutional handling of the financial crisis has given rise to criticism of the related democratic deficits (see e.g. Crum 2013; Matthijs 2017; Menéndez 2015; White 2015).
The crisis has shown tensions between the different levels of political decision-making and different types of actors involved (legislatives, executives, judiciary, experts and agencies) in the EU multilevel system that closely relates to the discussion on technocracy and democracy sketched above. Governance of the crisis challenged established patterns of governance and checks and balances. At the EU level, decisive parts of the governance mechanisms in the financial crisis, i.e. the European Stability Mechanism ESM, are not subject to the EU Treaties and hence are organised outside the checks and balances of the Lisbon Treaty. This excludes, in particular, the European Parliament as the democratic locus of debate and decision-making. In the Member States, the role of national parliaments and governments has been weakened especially in debtor states, as the Eurogroup and the Troika, as its agent took on decisive competencies (Lütz and Hilgers 2018; Maatsch 2017). Regarding the domestic systems and their balances of powers, in some Member States, such as Germany, the checks and balances were stabilised throughout the crisis, while in others this was not the case. Finally, the vertical balance of powers between the Member States has been under pressure, as donor state governments and parliaments intervened into the budgetary competencies of debtor state governments and parliaments via their decisions on the lending conditions. While such side-effects may be regarded as necessarily linked to the power divide between debtors and donors, they nevertheless were not intended by the Treaties and represent a decisive challenge to democracy in the multilevel system, as well as to the classical mechanisms of legitimacy in the Member States.
The fact that the financial crisis brought about numerous challenges for representative democracy within the EU multilevel system has been discussed in a number of books and articles in the last few years (Laffan 2016; Crum 2013). Some authors have strongly warned of increasing legitimacy deficits (Majone 2014), an intensification of technocracy (Sanchez-Cuenca 2017), a more or less permanent state of emergency (White 2015) or even an upcoming ‘authoritarian liberalism’ in the EU (Menéndez 2015). In particular, the EU’s crisis reaction in fiscal policy—especially measures such as the European Stability Mechanism ESM, the Troika and the austerity conditions to debtor states—has been criticised as weakening representative democracy (Laffan 2016; Wiesner 2021) and being related to a general tension between democracy and market capitalism (Streeck 2015).
These damages to democracy seem to have been well noticed by the citizens. Citizen support of the EU and trust in its institutions have been declining, at least temporarily, during the crisis (Armingeon and Guthmann 2014; Arpino and Obydenkova 2020). In Europe, the debtor countries Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Italy, Slovenia and Ireland have, at least temporarily, seen the largest growth of ‘detached’ citizens. Overall, satisfaction with democracy is lower in the Southern periphery than in the Northern core (Matthijs 2017). Unsurprisingly, populist parties have gathered strong support during the crisis (Macchiarelli et al. 2020).
It has been argued by some authors that this shrinking of support and trust in the EU is linked to a general crisis of representative democracy (Crouch 2004), or a ‘hollowing out’ of western democracy (Mair 2013). However, it is difficult to find a simple link between decreasing EU support and the other critical points discussed in the current academic debate regarding a possible crisis of representative democracy or democratic deconsolidation (Foa and Mounk 2017a, 2017b), such as an overall reduction of support of democratic systems and parties and notably an increase in populist votes. Moreover, as said above, while some studies indicate that support for democracy is declining in general and there are signs of democratic deconsolidation, others state that this is not the case (Norris 2017). This calls for more in-depth and qualitative and interpretative research on citizen’s motivations behind democratic deconsolidation.
In any case, the financial crisis period indicates how the fields of democratic change are linked. For instance, the Hungarian example shows how the hollowing out of democratic institutions was fixed via a change of constitution, which at the same time instituted financial austerity as required by the technocratic governance mechanisms of the EU (Witte et al. 2017). Austerity has increased social inequality, and is linked to the general tensions named in the globalisation trilemma model (Wiesner 2019a). EU institutions, populist actors and citizens use the means offered by digitalisation and social media (Flew and Iosifidis 2019; Jungherr et al. 2019).
The financial crisis was only the first in a series. It was followed by the pandemic, and then by the war against Ukraine (see the introduction by Knodt and Wiesner, in this volume). In short, since 2010 the EU never really exited its crisis mode of governance and the related democratic dilemmata.
Current Challenges to Democracy in the EU
As stated above, autocratic tendencies of some governments and activities of right-wing populist parties are challenging the EU’s values. This means that the ideological conflict between democracy and autocracy is also expressed within the EU. Up to the war, right-wing populists in almost all European states openly sympathised with Putin and the Russian regime. One might assume that the attack on Ukraine has delegitimised not only Putin and his regime, but also autocratic aspirations and right-wing populist parties in Europe. This, however, is not the case. It is merely the previous closeness to the Russian president that is no longer politically opportune, at least in some states, even among right-wing populist forces. The Alternative for Germany (AfD), for example, nowadays mostly expresses reservations about both Putin as a person and Russia and its war of aggression. Representatives within the party who show support are criticised—in September 2022, three AfD deputies returned prematurely from a trip to the Donbass after strong criticism from within the party (tagesschau 2022b). In France, both the right-wing extremists Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour and the left-wing populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon distanced themselves from Putin in the presidential election campaign in spring 2022. Le Pen even had to withdraw a campaign brochure in which she was pictured together with Putin (N-tv, March 1, 2022).
Nevertheless, the outcome of the elections in Hungary and in France in the first half of 2022 shows that far-right parties and positions continue to enjoy electoral success, and that their previous support for and by Putin, or even current criticism of EU sanctions against Russia, as in Hungary, do not detract from this. Le Pen reached the second round of the French presidential election in April 2022. The result was relatively clear, with 41.45% for Le Pen and 58.55% for Macron (Ministère de l’Intérieur 2022). This result also means that 41% of the votes cast, i.e. more than two-fifths, went to a far-right critic of the EU who had cooperated closely with Putin for many years up to the election (Knodt and Wiesner 2023b).
While Le Pen does not have a mandate to govern so far, Orban does. He won the Hungarian parliamentary election again with a two-thirds majority (tagesschau 2022g). This was achieved because before the election, he successfully spread the narrative that he and his party Fidesz alone could keep Hungary out of war— due to his relative closeness to Putin. Orban had repeatedly criticised the EU sanctions and worked towards their alleviation. After his election victory, Orban made it clear that he would maintain his political course (Enyedi 2022). Since then, he has behaved accordingly.
Orban’s right-wing populist and authoritarian government most notably drives democratic backsliding in Hungary. The EU has tried to counteract this with a number of rule-of-law measures and complaints. Concretely, this means that the conflict between democracy and autocracy takes shape within the EU in the existing conflicts over the rule-of-law. Viktor Orban also openly criticises the values of the EU. For example, on 22 July 2022, in a speech Orban gave in Romania to Hungarian ethnic groups, he criticised the West as being in decline (Oysmüller 2022). The EU’s values from Article 2 TFEU are being increasingly restricted in Hungary (Freedom House 2022).
Not only the Hungarian Orban government, but also the previous Polish PiS government challenged the rule-of-law in the EU. The reaction of the EU Commission to the continuous violations of the EU rule-of-law, especially by Hungary, was, however, hesitant. It was only after intense pressure from the European Parliament that legal proceedings were initiated against Hungary in April 2022 (tagesschau 2022e). As a result, the Commission threatened Hungary with the blocking of EU funds in September 2022—however, Hungary was again given a new deadline and the possibility of avoiding this blockade by making improvements. It took until December 2022 for a rule-of-law mechanism in the EU’s budget procedures to be established and applied against Hungary (European Council 2022a). As a report commissioned by MEPs shows, the EU could and should react much more harshly and clearly towards Hungary (Scheppele et al. 2022).
Threats to the rule-of-law and democracy are also present in other EU states. Besides Poland, the founding state Italy needs to be mentioned. In autumn 2022, parliamentary elections were held in Italy. The right-wing populist Giorgia Meloni won the election, as predicted by most polls. Subsequently, not only is a founding state of the EU governed by right-wing populists, it is also already visible that Meloni champions illiberal tendencies. This underlines once more that the conflict between democracy and autocracy has both an internal and an external dimension in the EU.
Conclusion
To conclude, the war has raised or intensified manifold political, economic and ideational challenges for the EU. In a changing world order, the EU faces the necessities of reorientating itself, adapting its previous political, economic and normative strategies, becoming a (geo)political actor and developing its military and defence capacities.
In addition, the EU is also challenged by the ideational component of the changing world order—the conflict between democracy and autocracy. However, as the discussion above has shown, it is too simple to frame the conflict between democracy and autocracy in terms of dichotomies. There is, in other words, no simple opposition of a democratic liberal Western or EU camp on the one hand and an autocratic or Eastern camp on the other. Not only is the emerging multipolar world order full of grey shades, the liberal camp also has to face internal autocratic threats. Threats and challenges to liberal democracy, first, are thus visible both outside of, and within, the EU. Moreover, there are also outside threats to the EU’s inner democratic condition, such as fake news or bot attacks. Second, challenges to democracy are at times directly enhanced by the EU institutions themselves, as was the case in the financial crisis and as is the case in the emergency legislation now (see the chapter by Knodt, Ringel and Bruch). Third, the continuum between full-fledged liberal democracies and full-fledged autocracies or even dictatorships is broad. An in-between type is deficient democracy, several of which can also to be found in the EU, as discussed above.
For the EU, this means that the challenge of defending democracy is not only an external, but also an internal one. The symptoms of democratic change, the nine fields discussed above, are manifest in the EU itself. Problems such as increasing inequality provide fertile ground for populism, and so the EU faces the task of tackling social inequalities rather than fuelling them. Accordingly, with the COVID-19 pandemic and the Next Generation EU rescue package, austerity politics have lost their impact. The EU, however, still shows democratic deficits in its politics and policies. There is an increasing usage of emergency legislation (see the chapter by Knodt, Ringel and Bruch, in this volume), and the processes of governing the Economic and Monetary Union have not become more democratic or more transparent. Moreover, the EU’s actions for defending the rule-of-law internally, as was said above, appear restrained when much more could be done.
Last but not least, enlargement policy, and in particular the question of the accession of Ukraine, highlights a strategic conflict brought about by the new world order. It would be both in the EU’s economic, geographic and military interests and in its ideational interest to bind as many candidate countries to the EU as possible (see also the introduction by Knodt and Wiesner). However, if the EU wants to safeguard its democratic standards internally, enlargement can only be possible with strictly kept democratic standards. Otherwise the EU risks thinning out internally that which it claims to defend externally—liberal democracy.
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Wiesner, C. (2024). The War Against Ukraine, the Changing World Order and the Conflict Between Democracy and Autocracy. In: Wiesner, C., Knodt, M. (eds) The War Against Ukraine and the EU. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35040-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35040-5_5
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