Table Of ContentEurope in Transition:TTThe NYUEuropeanStudiesSeries
Series Editor:Martin A. Schain
THE MARSHALL PLAN
Fifty Years After
Martin Schain (editor)
EUROPE AT THE POLLS
The European Elections of 1999
Pascal Perrineau, Gérard Grunberg, and Colette Ysmal (editors)
UNIONS, IMMIGRATION, AND INTERNATIONALIZATION
New Challenges and Changing Coalitions in the United States and France
Leah Haus
SHADOWS OVER EUROPE
The Development and Impact of the Extreme Right in Western Europe
Martin Schain, Aristide Zolberg, and Patrick Hossay (editors)
GERMAN IDEOLOGIES SINCE 1945
Studies in the Political Thought and Culture of the Bonn Republic
Jan-Werner Müller (editor)
THE LEGA NORD AND CONTEMPORARY POLITICS IN ITALY
Thomas W. Gold
DEFENDING EUROPE
The EU, NATO, and the Quest for European Autonomy
Jolyon Howorth and John T.S. Keeler (editors)
GERMANS OR FOREIGNERS? ATTITUDES TOWARD ETHNIC MINORITIES IN
POST-REUNIFICATION GERMANY
Richard Alba, Peter Schmidt, and Martina Wasmer (editors)
GERMANY ON THE ROAD TO NORMALCY
Policies and Politics of the Red-Green Federal Government (1998–2002)
Werner Reutter (editor)
REALIGNING INTERESTS
Crisis and Credibility in European Monetary Integration
Michele Chang
LANGUAGE, NATION, AND STATE
Identity Politics in a Multilingual Age
Tony Judt and Denis Lacorne (editors)
THE IMPACT OF RADICAL RIGHT-WING PARTIES IN WEST EUROPEAN
DEMOCRACIES
Michelle Hale Williams
EUROPEAN FOREIGN POLICY MAKING TOWARD THE MEDITERRANEAN
Federica Bicchi
SEXUAL EQUALITY IN AN INTEGRATED EUROPE
Virtual Equality
R. Amy Elman
MIGRATION AND ACTIVISM IN EUROPE SINCE 1945
Wendy Pojmann (editor)
DOI: 10.1057/9781137540911.0001
POLITICS IN FRANCE AND EUROPE
Pascal Perrineau and Luc Rouban (editors)
GERMANY AFTER THE GRAND COALITION
Governance and Politics in a Turbulent Environment
Silvia Bolgherini and Florian Grotz (editors)
THE NEW VOTER IN WESTERN EUROPE
France and Beyond
Bruno Cautrès and Anne Muxel (editors)
THE MOBILIZATION OF THE UNEMPLOYED IN EUROPE
From Acquiescence to Protest?
Didier Chabanet and Jean Faniel (editors)
GERMANY, POLAND, AND POSTMEMORIAL RELATIONS
In Search of a Livable Past
Kristin Kopp and Joanna Nizynska (editors)
LIBERALIZATION CHALLENGES IN HUNGARY
Elitism, Progressivism, and Populism
Umut Korkut
PARLIAMENT AND DIASPORA IN EUROPE
Michel S. Laguerre
THE EUROPEANIZATION OF EUROPEAN POLITICS
Charlotte Bretherton and Michael L. Mannin (editors)
LESSONS FROM THE ECONOMIC CRISIS IN SPAIN
Sebastian Royo
POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN CONTEMPORARY SPAIN
From Zapatero to Rajoy
Bonnie N. Field and Alfonso Botti (editors)
THE DISCOURSES AND POLITICS OF MIGRATION IN EUROPE
Umut Korkut, Gregg Bucken-Knapp, Aidan McGarry, Jonas Hinnfors, and Helen Drake
(editors)
NEGOTIATING EUROPE
EU Promotion of Europeanness since the 1950s
Oriane Calligaro
POLITICS IN PRIVATE
Love and Convictions in the French Political Consciousness
Anne Muxel; Translated by Chantal Barry
POLAND AND EU ENLARGEMENT
Foreign Policy in Transformation
Joanna Kaminska
MIGRANT MOBILIZATION AND SECURITIZATION IN THE US AND EUROPE
How Does It Feel to Be a Threat?
Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia
WHY MINORITY GOVERNMENTS WORK
Multilevel Territorial Politics in Spain
Bonnie N. Field
DEMOCRATIZING EUROPE
Antoine Vauchez
DOI: 10.1057/9781137540911.0001
Democratizing Europe
Antoine Vauchez
CCCNNNRS Research Professor, UUUniversité Paris 1-Sorbonne,
France
DOI: 10.1057/9781137540911.0001
democratizing europe
Copyright © Antoine Vauchez, 2016.
Series Editor’s Foreword© Martin A. Schain, 2016
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-54090-4
All rights reserved.
First published in 2016 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fift h Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978-1-137-54091-1 PDF
ISBN: 978-1-349-71237-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the
Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
First edition: 2016
www.palgrave.com/pivot
DOI: 10.1057/9781137540911
Contents
Series Editor’s Foreword vi
Martin A. Schain
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction 1
1 A Potemkin Democracy? 7
2 Europe’s Way of Government in
the Making 28
3 The Crisis of Europe’s
Independent Branch 50
4 Democratizing the Union 67
Conclusion 81
Bibliography 83
DOI: 10.1057/9781137540911.0001 v
Series Editor’s Foreword
Antoine Vauchez has written a brilliant new approach
and understanding of the democratic deficit in Europe,
a term coined the same year as the first popular election
of the European Parliament. He examines the European
institutions with a truly Europe-wide perspective, and
argues that they have comprised and established “the very
terrain of EU politics—one that takes place on the ground
of legal and economic expertise”. The real powers of the
“independent powers” of Europe—the European Court of
Justice, the European Commission, the European Central
Bank and the multiple executive agencies of the European
Union—have grown over time, and, with each successive
crisis, grow even more. More important, he argues that
they have established a real European leadership whose
legitimacy is based on their claims of expertise, objectivity
and law.
Vauchez deals with two interrelated problems. The first
is democracy, and the movement towards parliamentary
responsibility that peaked with the Lisbon Treaty in 2009.
The second is legitimacy, and how the legitimacy of the EU
can be enhanced among the populations of the Member
States. As he makes clear, these issues have been debated
for many years. The strong presumption has always been
that what he calls “parliamentarization” would be the key
to enhanced legitimacy, but participation in European
Parliament elections has dropped in each successive elec-
tion, more than 30% since 1979. Although parliamentary
power has grown, it has become even more peripheral to
both agenda-setting and decision-making as independent
vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137540911.0002
Series Editor’s Foreword vii
instruments have multiplied during the crises since 2009. Moreover,
despite its greater formal role, the elected parliament has not improved
the broad-based legitimacy of the EU. “It all occurs,” Vauchez argues,
“as if the problem was not so much that the electorate had turned away
from the European parliamentary elections, but rather that the EU polity
recurrently turned its back on the European Parliament.”
What is needed, Vauchez argues, is the development of democratic
connections with the independent instruments of the EU, the source
of growing power. He examines ways (some of which have been previ-
ously advocated) to make the operations of the European Court, the
Commission, the European Central Bank and the growing network of
executive agencies more transparent and responsible to criticism. He also
calls for a more critical perspective from the scholarly community, many
of whom have been funded by European institutions. “The academic field
of ‘European Studies’ continues to this day to bear the marks of these
origins, in the propensity to adopt the bureaucratic jargon and legalese
of Eurospeak, and a special relationship to public funding, commissions
and assignments.”
More broadly, Vauchez encourages the independent institutions to
be more and less independent, more independent of diverse member
state interests, and more dependent on a wider spectrum of interests
among the European peoples. There are broader ways of representing
the interests of the European people, he argues, by incorporating both
greater consultation into their operations and greater diversity into their
appointments.
This is an ambitious and important book. It redefines the democratic
deficit in a way that relates to how Europe is developing. It also takes a
very different view of how democracy and, by implication, legitimacy
can be improved and enhanced in Europe.
Martin A. Schain,
New York University.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137540911.0002
Acknowledgments
There is a diffuse sense that the European Union isà bout
de souffle and has reached historical limits. In the context
of the Eurozone crisis, the tensions on which the European
project has been based have turned into open contradic-
tions. Faced with this critical moment, “exit” strategies
of all sorts have been put forward as resolutive moves
(“Brexit” and “Grexit”), however failing to account for the
level of economic and social interdependences that make
up “Europe” today. Symmetrically, a new generation of
institutional engineering is now trying to bring some tech-
nical corrections to the perceived flaws of the European
Union, without however questioning the broader reasons
for which two decades of treaty reform have not managed
to reorient the trajectory of Europe. In between these
two opposite lines, “exit” strategies on the one hand and
“flawed loyalty” on the other, this book takes pause and
invites readers to think about the conditions under which
we can realistically produce a powerful “voice” able to
shake the current political and intellectual stalemate of
Europe.
Democratizing Europe starts from the premises that
an essential part of the current crisis lies in our collec-
tive incapacity to define Europe as it is as much as in the
rather limited intellectual equipment that we have built
over the years to address its reform. While social sciences
may not provide with the best toolbox when it comes
to drafting institutions and treaties, they are however
well equipped when it comes to critically think about
the present and unravel the implicit and the unthought.
viii DOI: 10.1057/9781137540911.0003
Acknowledgments ix
In a polity of experts in which EU institutions have been the prime
producers of the categories and theories that are routinely used today to
think about Europe, this critical capacity is particularly welcome. As it
unearths long-lasting and socially embedded processes, social scientific
scholarship is a good antidote against the short-termism and built-in
bureaucratic viewpoint of think tanks’ expertise that turns Europe
into a sort of a-historical laboratory. Instead, social sciences suspend
taken-for-granted alternatives, question naturalized categories and force
us to grasp the overall power structure in which institutions as well as
their reform projects are positioned. By unearthing past futures of the
“European project” and structural proclivities of the one route histori-
cally taken by the EU, this book hopes to shed a new light on present
deadlocks and deadends. The sociological and historical eye may have a
sobering effect as it points at path dependencies and deep-rooted imbal-
ances that are now built into the “European project”; yet, it also provides
a realistic platform for thinking Europe’s reform while considering its
social, political and institutional conditions of felicity.
There are many possible pitfalls and difficulties in writing an interven-
tion book: they initially prevented me from writing such a small piece
on such a big issue. What eventually convinced me is that a generation of
historically and sociologically inspired scholarship has now reached both
critical mass and maturity. The specific format of the book series has
prevented me from fully doing justice to this collective endeavor. Yet, to
a large extent, this book for what it is worth is the outcome of a collective
and cumulative process of research. The intellectual camaraderie built
along the years with a number of friends and colleagues (Antonin Cohen,
Didier Georgakakis, Mikael Madsen, Stephanie Mudge, Cécile Robert,
Guillaume Sacriste and Bruno de Witte, just to name my co-authors) has
been the realpalestra where the hypotheses and arguments presented in
this book have first been discussed and crafted.
This book was written in New York in the fall of 2013 while I was an
Alliance Programme Visiting professor at the University of Columbia, and
published in 2014 in France by le Seuill under the title Démocratiser l’Europe. I
am grateful to Ivan Jablonka who helped me bring this book to completion,
Meg Morley for translating it into English, the “Laboratoire d’excellence”
Tepsis (http://tepsis.hypotheses.org) for financially supporting this project,
and Martin Schain for welcoming it in Palgrave Macmillan’s “Europe in
Transition” Pivot series.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137540911.0003
