Suchergebnisse

The outcome of the recent referendum in the UK was straightforwardly affected by the policies followed by the EU. The main factors in which eurosceptics-populists had used in order to collect votes were both the immigration crisis (and the consequent EU policies) and the European political reactions to the economic crisis which increases EU powers, under the German supervision, and decreases national sovereignty. Although these two factors may seem different, they are directly linked as long as they comprise an outcome of the social and democratic deficit of the EU which increased concerns about the future effects in the UK and offered the opportunity for the cultivation of populist ideas. This article aims at indicating the main parameters of the European social and democratic deficit which affected Britons' decision in the referendum while drawing the attention on the restructure of the European policy directions.

Because they have failed to address the fundamental economic imbalances within Europe obscured by the single currency, each effort by European leaders so far to resolve the euro crisis has only deepened it. Without a decisive move toward fiscal and political union, accompanied by policies that push productivity and competitiveness toward convergence while closing the democratic deficit, the Eurozone will disintegrate.To discuss the way forward, the Nicolas Berggruen Institute's Council on the Future of Europe met in Rome on May 28 with Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti. In this section we publish the contributions from that meeting by the former European leaders, scholars and Nobel laureates who are members of the Council.

"It is widely acknowledged that accountability is a key to making democracy work, and luckily a consensus definition of accountability has emerged: According to Bovens (2007a: 450) 'Accountability is a relationship between an actor and a forum, in which the actor has an
obligation to explain and to justify his or her conduct, the forum can pose questions and pass judgement, and the actor has to face consequences.' Unfortunately, when applied to the European Union (EU) we face a reality that is far more complex than this straightforward relationship
suggests. The EU is noted for its policy-making by negotiations in networks that take in a multitude of actors and span over different territorial levels of jurisdiction. Yannis Papadopoulos (2007) has drawn our attention to the many accountability problems of network governance. The multi-level feature of EU governance and the composition of policy networks work to the detriment of accountability: The lack of visibility of the responsible actors
impedes accountability, but what makes matters worse is that many actors share responsibility and only some of them are at least in principle politically accountable while in practice they are more often difficult to reach due to a long chain of delegation from the level of citizens up." (excerpt)

IN THE EUROPEAN UNION (EU), POWER HAS CLEARLY PASSED FROM NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS TO THE INSTITUTIONS OF THE EU. THIS IS A CONSEQUENCE OF MEMBERSHIP AND HAS BEEN EXACERBATED BY THE PROVISIONS OF THE SINGLE EUROPEAN ACT AND THE MAASTRICHT TREATY. AS POLICY-MAKING POWER HAS PASSED TO BRUSSELS, SO THOSE SEEKING TO INFLUENCE POLICY HAVE SHIFTED THEIR ATTENTION THERE AS WELL. NATIONAL PARLIAMENTS HAVE BEEN LEFT BEHIND BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO FORMAL ROLE IN EU POLICY MAKING, EXCEPT INDIRECTLY THROUGH NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS OR IN A SPORADIC, ADVISORY FORM THROUGH THE CONFERENCE OF PARLIAMENTS. ATTEMPTS TO DEVELOP THE MEANS OF EXERTING INFLUENCE HAVE BEEN LIMITED AND LARGELY UNPRODUCTIVE. MANY NATIONAL EUROPEAN COMMITTEES HAVE HAD DIFFICULTY COPING WITH THE BURDEN OF EU DOCUMENTS, AND SOME HAVE BEEN HAMPERED BY JURISDICTIONAL DISPUTES. THE SHIFT OF POLITICAL POWER UPWARDS TO THE INSTITUTIONS OF THE EU HAS NOT BEEN MATCHED BY A SHIFT IN DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY, EITHER THROUGH NATIONAL PARLIAMENTS OR AT THE LEVEL OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT (EP). THE EP HAS INCREASED ITS POWERS ENORMOUSLY BUT IS STILL ONLY ON THE EDGE OF CONSTITUTING A LEGISLATURE. UNTIL POPULAR PERCEPTIONS CHANGE AND THE EP ACQUIRES THE STATUS IT SEEKS, THE DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT NOT ONLY WILL REMAIN BUT MAY BECOME MORE, RATHER THAN LESS, PRONOUNCED.

Konstatiert wird eine anomische Tendenz in der amerikanischen Demokratie. Dafür werden "demokratische Defizite" verantwortlich gemacht und in ihren Ursachen und Folgen untersucht. Populistisch-plebiszitäre Ansprüche rühren an das Fundament der repräsentativen amerikanischen Demokratie und stürzen das System in eine Legitimationskrise. Am Beispiel der Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) und ihrer Definition von Gesundheits-, Sicherheits- und Umweltrisiken wird aufgezeigt, zu welch paradoxen Folgen das demokratische Defizit und die Spannungen zwischen Bürgern und Experten führen können. Ein Ausweg könnte im Konzept einer "tutelary democracy" zu finden sein. (SWP-Smr)

This article presents the argument that European Central Bank (ECB) policy-making from the start of the sovereign debt crisis in 2010 undermined the democratic legitimacy of the ECB. We start with the argument – defended by a number of scholars including Majone and Moravcsik – that where European Union (EU) policy-making is technocratic and does not have significant redistributive implications it can benefit from depoliticization that does not undermine the democratic legitimacy of this policy-making. This is notably the case where EU institutions have narrow mandates and are constrained by super-majoritarian decision-making. Prior to the international financial crisis, the ECB's monetary policies were shaped entirely by the interpretation that its mandate was primarily to ensure low inflation. From the outbreak of the sovereign debt crisis, the ECB adopted a range of policies which pushed its role well beyond that interpretation and engaged in a form of redistribution that directly undermined treaty provisions.

This paper provides a realist analysis of the European Union's (EU) legitimacy. We propose a modification of Bernard Williams' theory of legitimacy, which we term critical responsiveness. For Williams, 'Basic Legitimation Demand + Modernity = Liberalism'. Drawing on that model, we make three claims. (i) The right side of the equation is insufficiently sensitive to popular sovereignty; (ii) The left side of the equation is best thought of as a 'legitimation story': a non-moralised normative account of how to shore up belief in legitimacy while steering clear of both raw domination and ideological distortions. (iii) The EU's current legitimation story draws on a tradition of popular sovereignty that sits badly with the supranational delegation and pooling of sovereign powers. We conclude by suggesting that the EU's legitimation deficit may be best addressed demoicratically, by recovering the value of popular sovereignty at the expense of a degree of state sovereignty.