kaya'08
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Excerpts from "In Defence of the 'Democratic Deficit': Reassessing Legitimacy in the European Union" by Andrew Moravcsik
Concern about the EU's 'democratic deficit' is misplaced. Judged against existing advanced industrial democracies, rather than an ideal plebiscitary or parliamentary democracy, the EU is legitimate. Its institutions are tightly constrained by constitu- tional checks and balances: narrow mandates, fiscal limits, super-majoritarian and concurrent voting requirements and separation of powers. The EU's appearance of exceptional insulation reflects the subset of functions it performs - central banking, constitutional adjudication, civil prosecution, economic diplomacy and technical administration. These are matters of low electoral salience commonly delegated in national systems, for normatively justifiable reasons. On balance, the EU redresses rather than creates biases in political representation, deliberation and output.
Both political negotiations and intellectual debates have focused, perhaps above all, on the question of whether the EU is democratically legitimate. Most politicians, scholarly commentators and members of the European pub- lic appear to agree that the EU suffers from a severe 'democratic deficit'. There are many reasons why this perception is so widespread. An organization of continental scope will, of course, appear rather distant from the individual European citizen. As a multinational body, moreover, it lacks the ground- ing in a common history, culture, discourse and symbolism on which most individual polities can draw. Neither of these reasons, however, need necessarily disqualify the EU from being treated as a democratically legitimate body.
Rather, when analysts criticize the lack of democratic legitimacy in the EU, they generally point to the mode of political representation and the nature of policy outputs. Only one branch of the EU is directly elected: the European Parliament (EP). Though stronger than it once was, the EP remains only one of four major actors in the EU policy-making process. Its elections are decentralized, apathetic affairs, in which a relatively small number of voters select among national parties on the basis of national issues. Little discussion of European issues, let alone ideal transnational deliberation, takes place. For its part, the European Commission, which enjoys a powerful role as an agenda setter and regulatory cordinator, is widely perceived as a technocracy. The European Court of Justice, comprising 15 appointed judges, is unusually powerful. Most powerful of all, the Council of Ministers brings together national ministers, diplomatic representatives and administrative officials from the Member States, who often deliberate in secret. While indirectly accountable to voters, the link is too tenuous and the mode of interaction too diplomatic or technocratic to satisfy many observers.
For these reasons, many believe it is self-evident that the EU is not democratically legitimate. Yet my central contention here is that, if we adopt reasonable criteria for judging democratic governance, then the widespread criticism of the EU as democratically illegitimate is unsupported by the existing empirical evidence. At the very least, this critique must be heavily qualified. Constitutional checks and balances, indirect democratic control via national governments, and the increasing powers of the European Parliament are sufficient to ensure that EU policy-making is, in nearly all cases, clean, trans- parent, effective and politically responsive to the demands of European citizens.
Mostly critics overlook the relatively optimistic conclusion to be drawn from the evidence because they analyse the EU in ideal and isolated terms. Comparisons are drawn between the EU and an ancient, Westminster-style, or frankly utopian form of deliberative democracy. While perhaps useful for philosophical purposes, the use of idealistic standards no modern govern- ment can meet obscures the social context of contemporary European policy making - the real-world practices of existing governments and the multi- level political system in which they act. This leads many analysts to overlook the extent to which delegation and insulation are widespread trends in modern democracies, which must be acknowledged on their own terms. The fact that governments delegate to bodies such as constitutional courts, central banks, regulatory agencies, criminal prosecutors, and insulated executive negotia- tors is a fact of life, one with a great deal of normative and pragmatic justifi- cation. In this regard, moreover, most analysts view the EU in isolation, and thus fail to appreciate fully the symbiotic relationship between national and EU policy-making - a division of labour in which commonly delegated func- tions tend to be carried out by the EU, while those functions that inspire and induce popular participation remain largely national. This gives observers the impression that the EU is undemocratic, whereas it is simply specializing in those functions of modern democratic governance that tend to involve less direct political participation. We might, of course, choose to criticize the broader trend toward professional administration, judicial enforcement of rights and strong executive leadership, but it is unrealistic to expect the EU to bear
the brunt of such a critique - a point to which I return in the conclusion.