A more democratic European Union
Perspectives of democracy
All democratic theories presume a boundary between those who are excluded and those who are included. All these theories analyze International organizations and how the decision-making process takes place, and they all presume rights in some way or another.
This makes it clear that even though the many disagreements and differences between these theories, they all aim to have a better understanding on all the new problems and challenges that democracy is facing. They offer options on what could be the ultimate answer; they have made research, political analysis and even continuous comparisons with their contemporary political scientists as with former and old political thinkers.
There is the palpable interest to investigate the “why’s”, why is it the world as it is right now, why democracy, why globalization, the “how’s”, how to improve it, how to come up with answers, how to offer a different perspective.
The European Union is now exactly going through a process of evaluation and criticism after their so-called democratic deficit, a fact that has definitely made them realise they need to make the people feel that they are taking part of the decisions being made in the union.
There are certainly political perspectives and in this case political scientists, for instance Robert Dahl, who are quite pessimistic about the European Union in terms of democracy.
He points out, “The famous democratic deficit that has been so much discussed with respect to the European union is not likely to be greatly reduced in the EU; elsewhere the deficit is likely to be far greater”(1). He supports this argument by giving the examples of delegation. He explains that in modern representative democracies the extent of delegation is enormous, from the demos to representatives, to higher executives and so forth; rising the question on to what extend the demos have effective control in an important final decision. Dahl underlies: “I think, that, in practice delegation might be so extensive as to move a political system beyond the democratic threshold” (2). Making with his point that this is very likely to be true in International Organizations as the EU.
Taking into account Dahl’s perspective, is hard to introduce ways for the European Union to be more democratic and empower the citizens , which is one of the aims from Margot Wallström the vice president of the European Commission responsible for Institutional relations and communication strategy. Dahl argues that “In democratic countries where democratic institutions and practices have been long and well established and where, as best we can tell, a fairly strong democratic political culture exists, it is notoriously difficult for citizens to exercise effective control over many key decisions on foreign affairs. What grounds have we for thinking that citizens in different countries engaged in international systems can ever attain the degree of influence and control over decisions that they now exercise within their own countries”(3)
There is also the question about the people’s interest in getting involved in the democratic and decision-making process. Here the own Margot Wallstöm in her speech of “A citizens agenda for the EU” acknowledges that not enough of the EU´s half a million citizens are willing and able to get actively involved in the democratic process. And as Dahl also points out, great many citizens lack knowledge of foreign affairs. Then what can be done to increase the people’s interest in the foreign affairs?
One of the answers from Dahl would be an implementation of a policy that threatens to cause severe harm in the interests or well being of a big minority or even a majority, but at the same time as he also says that foreign policy decisions like this are uncommon.
Before talking from a more idealistic perspective of democracy, I would like to summarize Dahl’s perspective by saying that he is not actually against International Organizations like the EU, but he believes that we should not fool ourselves saying that they are democratic and assume that they are by all means supposed to be democratic. They can perhaps be justified from another perspective, for instance a moralist view, since they protect the rights and can help other states to be more democratic.
There are also some more idealist thinkers like Archibugi and Held who claim that International Institutions not only should be democratic, but actually can be.
David Held, (key figure together with Daniele Archibugi in the development of cosmopolitanism), says that “the locus of political power can no longer be assumed to be national-governments, effective power is shared ,bartered and struggled over by diverse forces and agencies at national, regional and international levels” (4).
Now, for Held, there is not only the actual system, consisting of the nation-states and supranational organizations, his cosmopolitan theory is in search of a new mode of transnational power, a cosmopolitan democracy whereas each citizen of a state should learn to be a cosmopolitan citizen, “a person capable of mediating between national traditions, communities and alternative forms of life”. (5)
The cosmopolitan model argues that also that since external forms of power will be accountable and affects us all locally, regionally and globally, the people must have access in diverse political communities, as he puts it “democracy for the new millennium should describe a world where citizens enjoy multiple citizenships” (6)
Making a comparison between the cosmopolitan model and the actual way the EU works, there is an important point to make: one important element of the cosmopolitan model is the existence of a multiple citizenship, and in the EU, there is no such validate term as “European citizenship”. So even though the EU is a “supranational institution” (which is another basic part of the cosmopolitan model, the creation of a supranational form of power) all of its members still conserve their autonomies and are sovereign states.
Some other critics about the cosmopolitan model is the fact that people actually need the feeling of belonging to a particular state and share traditions, the necessity of nation and to feel part of it.
For the cosmopolitans, the existence of globalization is unavoidable, Held accepts that even when there are clearly dangers, globalization also presents opportunities for a more effective form of democracy. He talks about the “all-affected principle” which specifies that everyone who is affected by a decision should take part in it. But in a globalized world, where decisions made even in just one country can affect the whole world, how can this principle be taken seriously? There are many critics about it, saying that is a bit too idealistic, and there is no way to legitimize “who” is the people affected, and what actually is considered or accepted to be “being affected”. Who should constitute the demos in an organization like the European Union, which is composed by many different countries, with different perspectives, cultures, ideologies, etc. This surely is one of the answers on why there is a great lack of participation from normal citizens in the EU decision-making. What may be of highest priority for some, may no be as important for others. For instance we have the example that Margot Wallström mentions in her speech of a citizens agenda of the EU, that while Austrians are concerned about foreign vehicles using Austrian roads to cross the roads, in Germany subsidiary is a big issue, in Denmark is the possible abolition of the Danish opt.-outs provided for in the Maastricht Treaty and there are certainly more of this concerns in other countries and on other grounds.
Political thinkers as Danilo Zolo, makes a critic of Cosmopolitanism by saying that it is a western idea, influenced by the Kantz belief of a moral unity of mankind and in the long run it leads to a hierarquical system.
Zolo is a realist, who does not just rely in a human kind morality as his starting point. He believes that there is the possibility for an International law but which does not necessarily require to be part of a globalized world. He claims “the rationalist and normative concept of law, to which globalists refer, should be criticized. This philosophy of law puts aside the close connection between international law, political conflict and military power in the name of an ideal vision of international justice”(7). He does not erase the concept of an International organization as the EU or the UN, but he proposes a decentralization in this organization with the creation of strong local roots “coordinated within homogeneous regional or continental areas and linked together through a weak “subsidiary” centralization of federal type”(8).
Taking into account Zolo´s perspective, one option to make the people conforming the EU more involved, would be precisely this creation of more offices-EU oriented, established in each member state. Which could work to give more information to the people, perhaps with small forums for debate (one of the policies that Margot Wallström would like to implement ),more open vacancies for normal people to conform these local offices, an open referenda where the own people could suggest new policies or/and minimize or eliminate other policies that may not be the best.This way perhaps the most relevant issues could be handed out to the EU and then they would get to really hear and know the real people’s concerns, opinions and suggestions.
Media and the public sphere
In his article “Changing Spaces of Political Communication: the case of the European Union”, Philip Schlesinger focuses primary on the question of “whether new public communicative spaces emerging in the European Union as a result of the process of political and economic integration“(9) arguing that supranational developments have induced an important theoretical shift in which the public sphere can not longer be account in the boundaries of the nation-state.
The growing of media (newspapers, magazines, and television) goes beyond the national level, taking information to a supranational level, where almost everybody can be informed of what is happening in other parts of the world.
This problematizes the assumption that we only have a single sphere, which has been the model so far, but with the growing of globalization and creation of not only more supranational organizations but also new forms of media, we have to think of not only one but a sphere of publics.
Only one public sphere and a media where the predominant language is English is not a viable form to cope with the necessities and differences of the variety of states in the EU. This is why Habermas proposes not the classical factor as common ethnicity o language, but on the other hand he proposes a “political culture that for serve as the common denominator for a constitutional patriotism which simultaneously sharpens an awareness of the multiplicity and integrity of the different forms of life which exists in a multicultural society”(10).And which better example of this than the EU, Haberman mentions that to be able to achieve this political culture, decision-making bodies within the EU should be more open to scrutinity.
There has also been several attempts from the media´s side to try to promote a general European image, examples of this is newspapers as The European with its short 8-year life, from the television, The Euronews, but these examples never actually evolved to a major-well known and accepted phenomena .The reasons are many, starting from the diversity of cultures in Europe which may not have considered them of their interest, separation between the elites engaged in the policy process or economic decision-making and the mass publics, the lack of facility to access them in certain countries and so forth.
But all these obstacles does not foreclose the question towards a common “European” frame of reference, but for this to occur, Schlesinger claims that “for this to evolve, it needs to find a mass, transnational audience that recognizes it as offering something distinct from national forms of reporting, with a different institutional focus and agenda from that of the individual member states” (11).
It is clear that for all the different discussions and debates, we need a media that allows people and groups to reach and influence national and regional governments. One as an ordinary citizen can’t possibly do this just trough the normal means. We need a space for intercommunication and information flow.
The problem comes as Tony Shirato explains, when it is “much of what audiences are fed
as news comes from a small number of corporations (NewsCorp, Disney/
Bloomberg), which invariably universalize Western interests, even in the non-Western world.”(12). This creates two problems, the first is, to what extent the media is being actually impartial and objective and the second problem is this privatization of media which creates a problem the freedom of speech and the maximization of profit.
Some would say that this privatization is good for the people since it creates competence, making the people benefit from it, getting more and more perspectives and different sources of information. But some others would argue they trust more the government to give and manage the information and give a good output.
As for the case of the EU, as mentioned before, the media can play an important role since it could actually help more citizens feeling involved by offering them with information and resources, most of the citizens in the member states have a considered access to Internet, is not like China whose citizens have a restriction over the information and government intervenes. In that way citizens in
Politics and Economy
There is no doubt the global economy is being affected by political and social contexts, where citizens are not having control over the state and the decisions that are being made over them. In this globalized world it is said that the states are also loosing their own control, but this is a very relative assumption, when there is no credibility that the core countries are loosing such control. On the other hand they even have control over the periphery countries, which are also actually the ones suffering from the globalization consequences. They have to cope with other countries that will not stop and wait for them, they try to develop in a world that has almost no space for it, unless you are already a “first-world”, “core” country. It is in the convenience of the major states that these periphery countries don’t grow into the category of core countries; otherwise they lose the opportunities that these countries offer: low wages for their work, low prices for the creation of companies, more opportunities for investment (benefiting the external market not the internal) and so forth.
This is a part of the new globalized world economy, the production is also in a sense global, since the companies do not have to be territorial, the finances crosses national boundaries, which makes the capital more flexible than production, for instance currency exchange. The down side is that it also makes it more vulnerable, examples of this, the stocks market, devaluation, etc.
Christopher Pierson says that “as it’s simplest, it is argued that the limits of states’ capacities are now increasingly set by an international or, more properly, a global social and political environment. Generally, it is argued further that this changing context has seen a shift in power away from states and towards international social forces (above all, to various global markets or simply ‘the global economy’)” (13)
This clearly shows that there is a shift in the understanding of politics, its scope has changed, changing also the nature of it, and this certainly challenges the traditional idea of democracy.
We also have other perspectives which do not focus only on the changes that are occurring to the nation-state as a consequence of a globalized world economy, and that is the feminist perspective. The purpose as Saskia Sassen points out is “to contribute to a feminist analytics that allows us to re-read and reconceptualise major features of today’s global economy in manner that captures strategic instantiations of gendering as well as formal and operational openings that make women visible and lead to greater presence and participation” (14)
In other words, Sassen does not want to fall into the long time discussion of gender-inequalities she simply goes for the instantiation of gendering and news forms of women’s presence.
One of the biggest problems to achieve this is a devalorization of certain types of workers and sectors, in this case women, when the own devaluating of female-type works could be facilitating this process of devalorization.
In addition, to this there is another differentiation between women, some are actually gaining greater personal autonomy, gaining control over budgeting, access to public services and other resources, while others are being left behind. Sassen says “we need more research to establish the impact of class, education, and income on these gendered outcomes”(15)
But this need is still out there, it hasn’t been fulfilled, the own Saskia Sassen does not even give a response. Her main aim is to open the analytical field to the question of gendering, and this way perhaps in this field, have the space for discussion where we may not find the ultimate answer, but we nonetheless will find forms to improve the situation in global economy for working women, household women, immigrant women, local women, just simple women in general with no distinctions.
References:
1. Dahl, Robert (1999). “Can International Organizations be democratic”? A sceptic’s view”, in Shapiro, C.Hacker-Cordon (eds), Democracy Edges.
2. Dahl, Robert (1999). “Can International Organizations be democratic”? A sceptic’s view”, in Shapiro, C.Hacker-Cordon (eds), Democracy Edges.
3. Dahl, Robert (1999). “Can International Organizations be democratic”? A sceptic’s view”, in Shapiro, C.Hacker-Cordon (eds), Democracy Edges.
4. Holden, Barry (2000). “Global democracy” key debates,
5. Holden, Barry (2000). “Global democracy” key debates,
6. Holden, Barry (2000). “Global democracy” key debates,
7. Holden, Barry (2000). “Global democracy” key debates,
8. Holden, Barry (2000). “Global democracy” key debates,
9. Schelinger, Philip (1999) “Changing spaces of political communication: the case of the European Union”, Political Communication p.263
10. Schelinger, Philip (1999) “Changing spaces of political communication: the case of the European Union”, Political Communication. paragraph by Habermans (1994,pp.21-23) p.266
11. Schelinger, Philip (1999) “Changing spaces of political communication: the case of the European Union”,Political Communication p.277
12. Schirato, Tony (2003) “Understanding Globalization”
13. Pierson, Christopher (2004) “The modern state”.
14. Sassen,Saskia(1996) “Toward a feminist analytics of the global economy”,
15. Sassen,Saskia(1996) “Toward a feminist analytics of the global economy”,
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