Democratic Legitimacy and European Union
| Author | Juliet Lodge |
| DOI | 10.1177/095207679100600104 |
| Date | 01 March 1991 |
| Published date | 01 March 1991 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Democratic Legitimacy and European Union
Juliet Lodge
The Intergovernmental Conferences on Economic and Monetary Union in
December 1990 revived the question of the nature of the EC’s democratic
legitimacy. In particular, the IGC on European Political Union was entrusted with
a review of the EC’s institutions and functioning. Its guiding principles were that
the institutions and decisionmaking should meet the ideals of accountability,
efficiency and democracy. An underlying but often tacit assumption was that
political action should comply with the rule of law. A principal concern rested
with the notion that the nature of the EC’s democratic legitimacy required
redefinition. Accordingly, this paper will address firstly, democratic legitimacy;
and secondly, efficiency and accountability.
DEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY
.
A large degree of conceptual confusion persists over the term ’democracy’ applied
in the EC context. On the one hand and arguably up to the first Euro-elections in
1979, democracy was seen as synonymous with the holding of elections to the
European Parliament (EP). The democratic gap was expected to be filled simply
by the fact of the European Parliament having been directly elected by universal
suffrage as opposed to having been appointed, as was the practice until then,
from among the members of national parliaments.
Elections were expected to increase the element of democracy at the
supranational level by the mere fact of their having been held. However,
confusion inhered first in the failure to disaggregate the concept of democracy
and secondly, in an inclination to confuse one aspect of the conduct of democratic
politics (the periodic holding of elections in which citizens elect candidates from
various parties to represent them in a parliament) with democratic legitimacy.
This confusion was compounded by the fact that the notions of representativeness
and accountability are also associated with the conduct of democratic politics in
the member states and have been implicitly subsumed in the ways in which the
terms democracy, democratic deficit and democratic practice have been applied in
the EC context.
Leo Tindemans was right up to a point when he claimed in 1975 that: ’Direct
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elections to the European Parliament will give this Assembly a new political
authority [and] reinforce the democratic legitimacy of the whole European
institutional apparatus’. Euro-elections were expected to perform a dual function:
first to alter the basis of the EC’s legitimacy so that it changed from being
derivative to being direct and secondly to augment the democratic nature of the
EC by providing for public participation in decisionmaking. It was assumed that
by participating in Euro-elections, citizens would assent to the EC’s authority
structure and so confer ’direct’ legitimacy on it. The acquisition of direct
legitimacy was seen as important in justifying the manner in which political
power was exercised.
There certainly was consensus that Euro-elections per se would increase the
EP’s and EC’s democratic legitimacy. However, the past decade has lent credence
to the view that the Euro-elections might exacerbate rather than mitigate
legitimacy problems. While they augmented elements associated with democratic
practices in the EC and European Parliament, they did not necessarily lead to
concomitant increases in legitimacy. (Herman & Lodge; 1977) If anything, the
contrary occurred.
Yet, MEPs could lay claim to a source of authority beyond the EP itself - the
EC voters - in justifying their argument for a reappraisal of the exercise of
political power in the EC, that is, in short, for changing the inter-institutional
balance in Parliament’s favour. But, given widespread ignorance about the EP
and EC and its goals, it cannot be assumed that voters acquiesce or consent to
what MEPs envisage. Nor can it be readily assumed that socialisation and
education processes are at work to instil in them a belief in the EC’s democratic
legitimacy.
Nevertheless, Euro-elections are often seen as a legitimating rationale and the
EP has been seen as potentially the one institution that could engender popular
belief in its own and the EC’s democratic legitimacy. This is important since on
the one hand, ’democratic consent’ is supposed to afford authority legitimacy and
since, on the other hand, legitimacy can generally be understood as the capacity to
engender and maintain belief in the appropriateness of existing political
institutions. (Friedrich, 1963). The implication here is that psychological
variables have to be taken into account because the assumption is that the given
set of institutions is visible, tangible and intelligible to the voters : something that,
in the EC’s case, is not yet the case.
Until the early 1980s, democratic legitimacy was applied almost exclusively
to the idea of Euro-level elections. The ideas of ’direct’ and ’derivative’
democratic legitimacy were predicated on assumptions concerning the way in
which the EC’s key institutions’ members came to assume posts in those
institutions, in particular in EP and the Council of Ministers. The EC’s ’derived’
legitimacy was expected to be changed rather than supplemented through the EP’s
direct election. It was then to be seen as the embodiment of popular sovereignty.
Such ’direct’ legitimacy resting on the people’s sovereignty rather than on member
governments’ consent was seen as preferable and superior: superior because it
conferred independence on the EC as a political authority.
Since then, the idea that democratic legitimacy inheres in one institution - the
one that can lay claim to having a superior legitimacy to the others by virtue of it
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having been directly elected by and being directly accountable to the people of
the EC - has given way to the idea of a dual legitimacy : that expressed through
the...
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