Intergovernmentalism and the crisis of representative democracy: The case for creating a system of horizontally expanded and overlapping national democracies
| Author | Joachim Blatter,Johannes Schulz |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13540661221106909 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
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JR
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https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661221106909
European Journal of
International Relations
2022, Vol. 28(3) 722 –747
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661221106909
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Intergovernmentalism and
the crisis of representative
democracy: The case
for creating a system of
horizontally expanded
and overlapping national
democracies
Joachim Blatter and Johannes Schulz
University of Lucerne, Switzerland
Abstract
Technocratic intergovernmentalism has undermined the preconditions for its own
success as a democratic project of transnational cooperation. It has triggered
populist reactions within nation states and helped to discredit the intermediary
institutions (parties and parliaments) that connect democratic will-formation and
joint decision-making. This rise of populism and its alignment with nationalism,
in consequence, hampers joint decision-making in the international realm. We
argue that representative democracies can overcome the negative spiral between
technocratic intergovernmentalism and nationalist populism by mutually granting
their citizens the right to elect representatives not only in their domestic
parliament, but also in the parliaments of ‘consociated democracies’. Such a system
of horizontally expanded and overlapping national democracies can serve three
functions: it re-empowers citizens in a world of cross-border flows, it curbs the
self-destructive polarization of party systems and it facilitates cooperation among
democracies within the European Union (EU) and beyond. Finally, we discuss three
competing approaches: Liberal Multilateralism, Deliberative Transnationalism and
Republican Intergovernmentalism. We point to common ground, but also show
how our approach avoids their main pitfalls.
Corresponding author:
Joachim Blatter, University of Lucerne, Frohburgstrasse 3, Postfach 4466, 6002 Luzern, Switzerland.
Email: joachim.blatter@unilu.ch
1106909EJT0010.1177/13540661221106909European Journal of International RelationsBlatter and Schulz
research-article2022
Article
Blatter and Schulz 723
Keywords
European Union, democratic deficit, transnational democracy, populism, technocracy,
multiple citizenship
Introduction
Liberal, representative democracies have spearheaded the creation of a system of inter-
national governance that stimulates and/or regulates cross-border flows of information,
financial and human capital, goods and ‘bads’ (e.g. pollution, crime, viruses). The domi-
nant operative mode in this system is an intergovernmentalist one, epitomized by major
political decisions made at international summits among national executives. While such
decisions are made behind closed doors, they are performed and presented as dramas,
with national executives playing the lead roles of warriors for the national interest.
Furthermore, important competences are delegated to experts and technocratic institu-
tions like the International Monetary Fund or the European Central Bank, which are
neither accountable to individual citizens nor to their representatives.
The feeling of disempowerment and alienation that this has caused, especially among
‘globalization losers’, has, arguably, played an important role in preparing the ground for
the success of populist demagogues, who pit themselves as the leaders of a heroic effort
to help the ‘ordinary (sedentary/native) people’ throw of the shackles of ‘oppression’ by
‘transnational elites’ (e.g. Bickerton and Accetti, 2017). It is unsurprising then, that inter-
national agreements and supranational institutions like the European Union (EU) have
increasingly come under attack by nationalist populist forces. Not only Brexit but the
growing arduousness of finding common ground within the EU indicates that techno-
cratic intergovernmentalism has undermined its own precondition for success: an inter-
democratic order can only function if national constituencies acknowledge that their
representatives have to respect the perspectives and interests of other people(s), not only
when they are involved in joint decision-making on the international level, but also when
they decide autonomously about policies with strong external effects.
Importantly, technocratic intergovernmentalism has not only undermined its precon-
dition for successful international cooperation and regional integration. It has also caused
significant collateral damage to the democratic process within member states.
Representative democracy is increasingly caught between the Scylla of technocratic
intergovernmentalism and the Charybdis of populist politics in the national realm: both
are ‘disfigurations’ (Urbinati, 2014) of the process of democratic opinion and will-for-
mation that weaken the influence of important intermediary organizations like parties
and parliaments and contribute to the undermining of democracies’ commitment to polit-
ical and cultural pluralism (Caramani, 2017).
In this paper, we propose that democracies jointly re-constitutionalize what Mark
Warren calls the first function of democracy (‘empowered inclusion’) in order to avoid
the further disfiguration of democratic will-formation and deterioration of the precondi-
tions for positive and negative forms of integration. We propose that they give citizens of
participating states the right to elect a (limited) number of ‘consociated representatives’
into the parliaments of consociated states. The main idea is to channel popular
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