The results of the UK referendum in favour of leaving the European Union (EU) clearly put into question the European economic and political project as well as its institutional structure. This article argues that the Brexit may be a momentum to reform the institutional structure and procedural rules through which tax policy is made at the EU level. The UK referendum is indeed unlikely to further slow down the EU harmonization process in tax matters, which has always followed a tortuous path. Instead, the Brexit may give momentum to reform major weaknesses of the EU institutional and decision-making process in tax matters, in particular the unanimity rule and the role of the European Parliament. Finally, with regard to taxation specifically, the establishment of an EU tax, providing the EU with sufficient genuine own resource, could also reinforce EU's legitimacy by countering the criticisms related to Member States' contribution to the European budget.
The Red Devils, chocolate or beer and the King, such is the typical answers given to the oft-asked question of what is still holding Belgium together. To these three symbols, two extra elements are often added: the debt and Brussels, the capital of the country and of the Flemish Region/Community, the French Community (politically but not constitutionally the Wallonia-Brussels Federation), the European Union (to be more specific, one of the three capitals, along with Strasbourg and Luxemburg), while being as well the seat of the Brussels Capital Region. Generally, the list of factors of unity in Belgium ends with this short list. Is it already too long, or on the contrary, is it really too short? This is the main question of this chapter. Paradoxically, although this question often arises, there are very few scientific writings analyzing it. To do so, this chapter will discuss six sets of factors: historical, identity, socio-economic, political, international and symbolic. Nonetheless, it is important to take into account that such enterprise seeks to be informative and not prescriptive. This chapter does not assume that Belgium should be united. There are several points of view about what Belgium should be, and this contribution merely wishes to nurture the political debate by conveying an original approach on six types of factors.
This article investigates what happens when governmental actors foster the participation of non-state actors (NSAs) in treaty ratification and implementation decisions. NSAs, being non-governmental organisations, business groups, citizens, or research institutions among others represent interests that will be ultimately impacted by policy choices. While governments have long consulted them on an ad hoc basis, a "deliberative turn" happened in the 2000s to encourage their involvement, for greater legitimacy and transparency, through among others, the use of public consultations. This proactive turn raises questions about public consultations: are such instruments effective? Do they encourage new thinking? Do they matter for final decisions? This article answers these questions by investigating, using among others lexicometry tools, the public consultation organised by the European Commission in 2011 prior to the ratification of the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit sharing (ABS) by the European Union in 2014. The results are mixed. While the studied public consultation favoured the expression of small national NSAs the process is still poorly inclusive. NSAs did not propose any fresh ideas on the ABS issue and their final influence on European decision-makers is blurred by the diversity of interests expressed.
The EUROSUR system is supposed to further the surveillance of external borders of European Union Member States. From this point of view, it can be considered an important step in the construction of a controlled space. Drawing inspiration from the Foucauldian attention to programs and technologies, and mobilizing the Actor- Network-Theory concepts of setting and actant, the paper investigates EUROSUR main methodological operations. It highlights how the making of a controlled space is, first and foremost, a mise-en-discours going well beyond surveillance and pro- hibition: a continuous effort to make sense of a disparate multiplicity, encompassing both human and nonhuman elements, both controlled and controlling ones. From a theoretical perspective, the chapter contributes to on-going endeavors to reinvigor- ate the post-structuralist studies of International Relations with approaches inspired by Actor-Network-Theory.
In recent years, public authorities and civil-society organisations, driven by increasing public disengagement and a growing sense of distrust between the public and their representatives, have been instituting exercises in public deliberation, often using 'mini-publics', that is relatively small groups of citizens, selected according to various criteria and representing different viewpoints, brought together to deliberate on a particular issue. From small-scale experiments, mini- publics have recently taken a constitutional turn, at least in Europe. Iceland and Ireland have turned to deliberative democracy to reform their constitutions. Estonia, Luxembourg and Romania have also experienced constitutional processes in a deliberative mode. In Belgium, the G1000, a citizen-led initiative of deliberative democracy, has fostered a wider public debate about the place and role of citizens in the country's democracy. At the same time, the European Union institutions have introduced different forms of deliberative democracy as a way to reconnect with citizens. These empirical cases are indicative of a possible 'constitutional turn' in deliberative democracy in Europe. These examples of constitution-making happened in a particular time and place but they may also serve as models for other events.
Abstention is a key issue for any representative democracy. Turnout has a direct impact on the input legitimacy of the democratic system, but also eventually on the output legitimacy, that is on the policies that are designed and implemented. This issue has long sparked debate about the determinants of abstention in elections and its consequences both for politics and for policies. Yet, a multi-level approach is often missing. While the second-order elections theory has shown that different levels of elections mean different levels of turnout, it has been criticized theoretically for its so-called nationalist – i.e. in favor of national elections – bias and methodologically because it typically assesses elections not held on the same day. The last elections held in Belgium offer a fertile ground of investigation for multi-level abstention as the regional, federal and European elections were organized the very same day, under the rule of compulsory voting. This paper aims at presenting and discussing the real abstention rates at the three levels of elections, as well as for the local elections. The 2014 PartiRep voter survey offers an original way to explore the potential abstention – that is electoral participation in the absence of compulsory voting – as the respondents were not asked the typical single question about their potential electoral participation if compulsory voting was to be abolished, but a fourfold question asking them whether they would always, often, sometimes or never vote at the local, regional, federal and European elections. The results will show that there is a significant amount of the voters who would vote differently: 437 of them (22%) would always vote at one – level of – election, but not always at the other ones. The paper seeks to assess this potential multi-level abstention in light of socio-demographic and political (namely party) variables. This contribution will thus shed new light on the issue of abstention – both real and potential – in its multi-level dimension.
In May 2014 and for the second time in her political history, regional, federal and European elections were organized simultaneously in Belgium. In the direct follow-up of the sixth state reform that increased the powers and the autonomy of the Belgian Regions and Communities, these elections were crucial for the future of the country and for the multi-level coalition formation at the regional and federal levels. The political campaign was dominated by socio-economic issues and demands for further autonomy, particularly in the Flemish region. Regional electoral results confirmed the success of the regionalist parties in Flanders, but also in Brussels and in the German-speaking community. These successes allowed regionalist parties to enter all regional and federal governments – often as the dominant party – with the exception of the Walloon and the French-speaking Community cabinets.
The name of a party is an important dimension of its political position. Often, the label used by a political party in its name tells much about its ideology. But, since in most cases, only a few parties compete for each election it is difficult to undertake large qualitative and quantitative analyses of party names. Local elections can provide an interesting option, however. Indeed, in several cases, we find lots of different names, and not only the usual national party labels. In the last local elections in Wallonia, one of the three Belgian Regions, 1012 lists were in competition. Such data provide a fertile ground for analysis. To study the name of the lists, we proceed in two steps. First, we build a typology of the names. We classify the lists in different categories: lists with national party name, lists with a clear reference to a national party, lists with an ideological label, lists with a clear reference to the commune's name, lists with a reference to the communal level but also lists with a reference to democracy, to a union or alliance, to change and an alternative way of doing politics, to the future, with puns, and with a reference to a person. In the second step, using multinomial regressions, we show where the different types of lists can be found and above all we look at their electoral performances and thus test the hypothesis whether the party name matters or not.
Different models of democracy have been thought to make collective decisions: representative, participatory, deliberative or elitist, to give a few but the main ones. These models are justified, criticized, transformed by political theorists. But what do citizens expect from democracy? Since the beginning of the 2000s, an increasing number of studies are interested by citizens' attitudes towards democratic models. What do they think about the mechanism of election and delegation, the idea of a more participatory democracy, the role of political parties and the ideal place of experts in the democracy of tomorrow? However empirical studies provide contradictory results. Some considers that citizens don't want to participate more (Hibbing & Theiss-Morse, 2002), while others argue that they are looking for new opportunities of involvement (Neblo, Esterling, Kennedy, Lazer, & Sokhey, 2010). Researchers begin to analyze this element in the European context and the objective of this paper is to present the case of Belgium. Relying on the PARTIREP voter survey of 2014 we analyze three dimensions of this issue. First, we map the attitudes towards different kinds of democratic models in Belgium. Second, we seek to explain why people develop these different preferences. Third, we compare the result in the North and in South to look if the different political dynamics in Walloon and Flanders are related to different public attitudes towards democracy.
From the beginning of the 1990's onwards, political analysts in all Western European countries discovered the contours of what they thought to be a widespread crisis of democracy. The alleged decline of political trust and public participation, and the rise of electoral volatility pointed out that the gap between politicians and citizens had never been wider. This political climate characterized by a deep-rooted crisis of democratic legitimacy offered an excellent breeding ground for critical reflection on the role, shape and function of democracy in modern societies. It gave rise to a fruitful quest for new and innovative ways of governing a democracy. It is in this turbulent period that the ideal of a deliberative democracy was coined (Dryzek 2000). A community of international scholars and philosophers, inspired by the work of Jürgen Habermas, became more and more convinced that a vibrant democracy is more than the aggregate of its individual citizens, and that democratic politics should be about more than merely voting. The quality of a democracy and the quality of democratic decisions, according to them, did not depend on the correct aggregation of individual preferences, but rather on the quality of the public debate that preceded the voting stage. Democratic decisions were thus no longer considered a function of mere compliance with aggregation rules. Instead, they were determined by extensive argumentation about political choices before voting on them. Because of its strong focus of public involvement in politics, this deliberative model of democracy started out in life as a theory of legitimacy (Benhabib 1996; Cohen 1997; Dryzek 2001; Parkinson 2006). By including everyone who is affected by a decision in the process leading to that decision, deliberation has important political merits: it is capable of generating political decisions that receive broad public support, even when there is strong disagreement on the aims and values a polity should promote (Geenens & Tinnevelt 2007, p. 47). After all, talking about political issues allows citizens to hear other perspectives to a problem and to see their own perspectives represented in the final decision. However, deliberation's beneficial effects do not come about easily. If deliberative democracy wants to contribute to increasing the legitimacy of the political system as a whole, it has to be legitimate in itself. In other words, deliberative events have to reflect the principles of legitimacy in their own functioning before their outcomes can generate legitimate political decisions. It is therefore crucial to assess the internal legitimacy of deliberative mini-publics before making claims about their contribution to the legitimacy of the political system as a whole. Our research question is therefore: to what extent can deliberative mini-publics live up to the criteria of democratic and political legitimacy? In this paper, we set out to assess the internal legitimacy of one specific deliberative event, namely the G1000 project in Belgium (Caluwaerts & Reuchamps, 2012). The G1000 project takes a particular place in the world of deliberative practice because it was not only grassroots in its process and its results, but also in its organization. Most deliberative events are introduced and funded by either public administrations or scientific institutions. The G1000 was rather considered a genuine citizens' initiative from its very inception. All of the organizers of the event were volunteers, and all of the funds were gathered using crowd funding. So instead of a scientific experiment, the G1000 was more of a democratic experiment by, through, and for citizens. This grass-root structure makes it a very interesting case for students of legitimacy, because as we will see later on it situated at the heart of the democratic trade-off between input and output legitimacy.
From the beginning of the 1990's onwards, political analysts in all Western European countries discovered the contours of what they thought to be a widespread crisis of democracy. The alleged decline of political trust and public participation, and the rise of electoral volatility pointed out that the gap between politicians and citizens had never been wider. This political climate characterized by a deep-rooted crisis of democratic legitimacy offered an excellent breeding ground for critical reflection on the role, shape and function of democracy in modern societies. It gave rise to a fruitful quest for new and innovative ways of governing a democracy. It is in this turbulent period that the ideal of a deliberative democracy was coined (Dryzek 2000). A community of international scholars and philosophers, inspired by the work of Jürgen Habermas, became more and more convinced that a vibrant democracy is more than the aggregate of its individual citizens, and that democratic politics should be about more than merely voting. The quality of a democracy and the quality of democratic decisions, according to them, did not depend on the correct aggregation of individual preferences, but rather on the quality of the public debate that preceded the voting stage. Democratic decisions were thus no longer considered a function of mere compliance with aggregation rules. Instead, they are determined by extensive argumentation about political choices before voting on them. Because of its strong focus of public involvement in politics, this deliberative model of democracy started out in life as a theory of legitimacy (Benhabib 1996; Cohen 2002; Dryzek 2001; Parkinson 2006). By including everyone who is affected by a decision in the process leading to that decision, deliberation has important political merits: it is capable of generating political decisions that receive broad public support, even when there is strong disagreement on the aims and values a polity should promote (Geenens & Tinnevelt 2007, p. 47). After all, talking about political issues allows citizens to hear other perspectives to a problem and to see their own perspectives represented in the final decision. As such, deliberative democracy seeks to score high on input, throughput and output legitimacy. However, deliberation's beneficial effects do not come about easily. If deliberative democracy wants to contribute to increasing the legitimacy of the political system as a whole, it has to be legitimate in itself. In other words, deliberative events have to reflect the principles of legitimacy in their own functioning before their outcomes can generate legitimate political decisions. It is therefore crucial to assess the internal legitimacy of deliberative mini-publics before making claims about their contribution to the legitimacy of the political system as a whole. In this paper, we set out to assess the internal legitimacy of one specific deliberative event, namely the G1000 project in Belgium (Caluwaerts & Reuchamps, 2012a). Our research question is therefore: to what extent does the G1000 live up to the criteria of input, throughput and output legitimacy? The G1000 project takes a particular place in the world of deliberative practice because it was not only grass roots in its process and its results, but also in its organization. Most deliberative events are introduced and funded by either public administrations or scientific institutions. The G1000 was rather considered a citizens' initiative from its very inception. All of the organizers of the event were volunteers, and all of the funds were gathered using crowd funding. So instead of a scientific experiment, the G1000 was more of a democratic experiment by, through, and for citizens. This grass-root structure makes it a very interesting case for students of legitimacy, because as we will see later on it situated at the heart of the democratic trade-off between input and output legitimacy.
