The shocking behaviour of the Eurozone leaders in punishing Greece for voting against austerity has alarming implications for the future. Is it too late to put democracy and Europe together again

Kaldor, Mary

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  Mary Kaldor Momentous times for democracy in Europe  Website (Opinion piece)     Original citation: Kaldor, Mary (2015) Momentous times for democracy in Europe. openDemocracy (13 Jul 2015) Opinion Piece.   Reuse of this item is permitted through licensing under the Creative Commons:  © 2015 The Author CC BY-NC-ND This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/64573/ Available in LSE Research Online: December 2015  LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website.     Momentous times for democracy in Europe www.opendemocracy.net /can-europe-make-it/mary-kaldor/momentous-times-for-democracy-in-europeMary KaldorThe shocking behaviour of the Eurozone leaders in punishing Greece for voting against austerity hasalarming implications for the future. Is it too late to put democracy and Europe together again?EU summit held in Brussels over Greek financial crisis. Demotix/ Sander de Wilde. All rights rserved.We are living through momentous times when both ideas – democracy and Europe – are at stake. I wantto argue that the future of Europe and the future of democracy are inextricably linked and that this mattersnot only for us in Europe, but for the world. What we will need in the rocky times ahead are critical thinkerswho can navigate the rocks.There are two stories I want to use to illustrate our troubled times. One, of course, is Greece. At this verymoment, European leaders are meeting (again!) to discuss Greece. It could be the end, in the sense that ifno deal is reached, there will be a Greek default and this could easily lead to the unravelling of theEurozone and, for the time being, the European project - with hugely dangerous consequences. Any morepositive outcome is likely to prolong the Greek agony. But the main point I want to make is that theoutcome is more important for the future of Europe than for the future of Greece. I do believe this is aturning point (perhaps like the invasion of Iraq) when what is decided now will have consequences that wewill have to live with for a long time to come.The other story is in Spain and what happened in the recent elections in towns across the country. Anyonein Barcelona at that time, whatever your reservations, had a ringside seat in a democratic experiment –what seems to be a new form of participatory politics linked to new forms of communication. Where does itgo from here? Is it the beginning of a new European spring? Or is it the beginning of clashes,fragmentation, and division?And there are many other stories. We just had national elections in Britain. On the face of it, this was aboring conservative victory. But actually it is the story of insurgent parties of both left and right (the Scottishnationalists, the Welsh nationalists, the Greens and the UK Independence Party) who drew the popularvote away from the mainstream left.Democracy todayIn order to make sense of these stories, I want to talk first about the meaning of democracy and, secondabout the European project. Let me start with democracy. What all these stories have in common is apervasive distrust of the traditional mainstream – La Casta as people say in Spain. A pervasive sense thatdemocracy as it is currently practiced is not working. ‘They call it democracy but it isn’t’ was one of theslogans of the Indignados.In thinking about this problem, I find it useful to make a distinction, often made in democratic theory,between formal and substantive democracy. Formal democracy refers to the procedures and rules ofdemocracy – elections, a rule of law, human rights, constitutionalism and so on. Substantive democracyrefers to political equality, the ability of citizens to influence the decisions that affect their lives – the ‘habitsof the heart’ as De Tocqueville called it. It parallels a distinction made by Joseph Schumpeter betweendemocracy as a method and democracy as an end in itself. For Schumpeter, democracy was a method ofselecting a government, which he likened to a steam engine. Nowadays, we observe the procedures ofdemocracy; it is a method of selecting a government. But it is no longer an end, a way of bringing aboutmeaningful participation.The last three decades have witnessed an astonishing spread of democracy – what Samuel Huntingtoncalled the ‘third wave’ of democracy. It has had something to do with globalisation. On the one hand,democracy as a method became a condition for participation in the global system. Along with marketreforms, donors and international financial institutions demanded democratic reforms – formal democracybecame part of the so-called Washington consensus. On the other hand, the growth of communications –Internet, videos, satellite TV, mobile phones, radio, air travel – has made it very difficult to maintain closedsocieties; these openings have facilitated new civic movements demanding substantive democracy.When I was young, most states were either under colonial rule or under dictatorships. Now the opposite isthe case – there are only a handful of illiberal regimes – Russia, China, North Korea, the middle eastern oilstates, Zimbabwe…But there are many countries, including the so-called mature democracies, that sufferfrom a democratic deficit – profound weaknesses of substantive democracy in our ability to influence thedecisions that affect our lives.   What are the reasons for this? They have partly to do with globalisation. Important decisions that affectyour life are no longer taken at national levels; they are taken in Brussels, Washington DC, Zurich, theheadquarters of multinational companies or by young men in front of computers playing the moneymarkets. However perfect the procedures of democracy, voting at a national level will not make it possibleto influence the decisions that affect your life if the decisions are taken elsewhere. Greece is a perfectexample; the Greek people have voted over and over again against austerity. But their creditors inFrankfurt and elsewhere refuse to agree.Globalisation has also changed the very nature of the state. The growth of global finance in relation to whatused to be called the ‘real economy’ – the economy of production involving people – has skewed incomes.We all know that you make much more money from owning property – a house for example – nowadaysthan from working. The same is true of governments. More and more governments are rentier stateswhose revenue depends on external aid, borrowing, oil revenues or finance. You may be familiar with theoil curse – the way in which reliance on oil tends to produce a system of corruption upheld through controlof the media and the security services. I believe this applies to many states nowadays. My own countryBritain, for example, is now heavily dependent on the City of London.But globalisation is not the only reason. The erosion of substantive democracy also has to do with what Icall the sclerosis of the nation-state. There was a huge growth of states during and after the Second WorldWar. We tend to think of globalisation as an abstract phenomenon that determines our lives. But of course,it is a social construction. Globalisation was a way of getting around the concentration of powerrepresented by the state; it was the consequence of human action, of people trying to escape the oftenrigid and paternalistic hold of the state. This included the multinational companies who wanted freermarkets and civil society who wanted more peace and human rights.The nation state constrains democracy for many reasons. One is the legacy of the Cold War – the deepstate of intelligence services, police and military forces, revived in the framework of counter-terror. Anotheris the entrenchment of bureaucracy, the way rules and routines narrow the space for choice. Yet a third isthe technology of elections, the way the mainstream parties use polling and focus groups in order toconcentrate on winning the votes of a narrow band of swing voters and how this means the loss of anygrand narrative. The leaders’ debate in Britain was a striking illustration of this. It involved three brilliantwomen from the insurgent left parties (the Scottish nationalists, the Welsh nationalists and the Greens)with big ideas about the future, three very wooden over-rehearsed men from the three mainstream parties(Conservative, Labour and a Liberal) and a supposedly down to earth man expressing the worst populistprejudices (the United Kingdom Independence Party).So I am saying the problems of democracy have to do both with globalisation and the nation-state. Theanswer is not to turn back globalisation – after all, the state gave us war and fascism. But nor is theanswer untamed globalisation. This is where Europe comes in. So let me turn to Europe.Where Europe comes inThe European project after World War Two was a peace project. In the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies, many great philosophers developed perpetual peace schemes – Jean-Jacques Rousseau,Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill.In many ways, the construction of the European Union bears resemblance to the Kantian scheme, whichinvolved a combination of a permanent peace treaty, republican (or formally democratic) constitutions, andcosmopolitan rights (e.g. human rights). This scheme is not the construction of a super-state like theUnited States, for example. Rather it is a new form of supra-national co-operation, which restrains theworst characteristics of the nation-state – war, imperialism and repression. The method of construction waseconomics. The founders of the European Union thought that through what was known as 'low politics','high politics' would follow – this was the so-called Monnet method named after the French politician JeanMonnet.For the first three decades, the Monnet method seemed to work; it involved co-operation on infrastructure,agriculture and regional assistance. But everything changed after 1989. This was the heyday of the post-1968 social movements – what we might call the cosmopolitans, who favoured peace and human rightsand who wanted to end the Cold War division of Europe. But it was also the heyday of a new generation ofneo-liberals, who made use of the left critique of the paternalism and rigidity of the nation-state. The 1991Maastricht Treaty, which established the single market and the common currency, was a compromisebetween the cosmopolitans and the neo-liberals, between the passionate Europeanism of Jacques Delors,then the President of the European Commission, and the neo-liberalism of Margaret Thatcher.Many argued that the single currency was a mistake. To establish a single currency without a large centralbudget, without a fiscal union (for taxation and spending) and without a political union was bound to lead todeep inequalities between creditor and debtor nations, to social exclusion, fragmentation and atomisation.But the late Ulrich Beck pointed out that it was not a mistake; it was a deliberate continuation of theMonnet method. Precisely because it was an impossible project, it created a vested interest in politicalunion. In other words those who agreed to the common currency knew that the project would propel furtherintegration. And this is where we are now.We have reached the point where low politics has to be translated into high politics. Europe has to goforward to survive. It has to integrate further. It has to reverse the rules about austerity. The alternative isdangerous disintegration. The extreme cases of the combination of the legacy of authoritarianism andglobalisation are exemplified in the Middle East – Syria, Libya, Egypt, the failed springs. We cannotinsulate Europe from the fall-out of these crises as we witness in the tragedies in the Mediterranean. Buteven more disturbingly, similar combinations of criminality and sectarianism are developing in Europe as aconsequence of the economic crisis.So what has to happen if the European project is to be saved? What does it mean for democracy and howcould it happen?A different EuropeThe aim of the European project should be to restore or build (perhaps we never had it) substantivedemocracy. The aim is to make it possible for individuals to influence the decisions that affect their lives.How can this be achieved? Yes we need more democracy and accountability at European levels. ButBrussels and Strasbourg will always be remote. European and global levels are unlikely to be the sites ofactive politics. What we need is the ability to take decisions at local levels so that the hopes invested innew experiments in democracy, in the Spanish towns, in Greece, or in the British periphery, are notconstantly thwarted. This used to be called subsidiarity.This cannot be achieved through building a European super-state and all that goes with it – surveillance,borders and a military-industrial complex. Rather Europe has to become a new model of globalgovernance – not an instrument of globalisation as it is now, but a mechanism for taming globalisation, forprotecting local levels from the storms of globalisation. Europe has to restrain global bads like financialspeculation or climate change, and promote global goods like solidarity, peace and human rights in ourneighbourhood and beyond. This might be expressed in a new sort of fiscal union, with a new set of taxesaimed at global bads, like a tax on financial speculation or on carbon, and spending on global goods likeresource-saving innovation, youth employment, peace-building or redistribution. Unless Europe is transformed in this way, local efforts at democracy will be thwarted and suppressed. Butbecause of globalisation, they are unlikely to be better off outside Europe. Moreover, the future of Europeis critical, not just for Europe but for how we deal with global challenges.So how might this come about? Through lurching from crisis to crisis? What is striking about the Greekcrisis is the way in which the creditors and the European Commission and many politicians especially inGermany are hardwired to equate reforms with austerity. The Greeks are saying yes we know we needreforms – we need to cut down on tax evasion, we need to end corruption, we need to democratise publicadministration. We know we need reforms – we need to end the sclerosis of the nation-state. But reformscannot mean cuts in pensions, increasing the precariousness of work, and declines in income that lead toeven more debt.Yet even though this is said over and over again, the creditors and their political associates don't seem toget it.Nevertheless, this debate about austerity and reforms is beginning to be reproduced in the media. Indeedthe solidarity shown by people all over Europe towards Greece perhaps marks the beginning of aEuropean public space. It is a debate we need to have – how to reduce inequality, how to reduceunemployment and homelessness, how to save the planet's resources, how to bring peace to the MiddleEast. How we get out of the current impasse depends on our contribution to that debate.We need to recapture the European project, to take it back from the global market, to reinstil the originalvalues and more. That’s how we can construct institutions that are different in kind – relevant for the worldwe live in. It is a huge responsibility.This piece was originally a speech made to the 2015 IBEI graduation ceremony on June 22, 2015.If you enjoyed this article then please consider liking Can Europe Make it? on Facebook and following uson Twitter @oD_Europe

Momentous times for democracy in Europe

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